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Posted Mar 11, 2010
Expedia Media Solutions (the media arm of Expedia Inc.) yesterday announced that the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau had named Expedia.com "Partner of the Year." According to the press release, the San Diego CVB was recognized as "a top advertising partner and major sales channel for San Diego hotels."
Posted Mar 10, 2010
Today, at Google's Campfire One "mega-do," TripIt's new Groups App was the only travel app included in the new Google Apps Marketplace. TripIt Groups brings transparency to business travel, allowing registered users (who choose to share their plans) to collaborate on their travel plans. The product provides business travelers within a company, division etc an easy way to see when, where and how fellow employees are traveling. In keeping with Google's mission to organize the world's information, TripIt is Google's choice for organizing travel.
Posted Mar 9, 2010
For a long time, the hospitality industry has managed to convince business travelers that they should pay extra for high speed internet access (or HSIA in industry parlance) in four and five star hotels even though the same companies offer it for free in their lower tier brands.
Posted Feb 19, 2010
The Associated Press is reporting that federal prosecutors have filed a motion in the ongoing Hilton/Starwood Hotels saga saying that the current civil litigation could harm a criminal investigation.
Posted Feb 19, 2010
Orbitz has launched a new platform for traditional travel agents which enables them to book stand-alone hotel rooms as well as vacation packages. This matches (for hotel only anyway) agentaccess, a program which hotels.com has offered to the agency community for some time.
Posted Jan 15, 2010
We've been watching this lawsuit go forward with interest for some time now. As you'll recall, Starwood sued Hilton over two senior executives (Ross Klein and Amar Lalvani) who departed and managed to show up at Hilton with seemingly truckloads of confidential documents relating to Starwood's luxury brands. Hilton fired Ross and Amar and sent the documents back to Starwood but claimed they didn't really appear to be confidential documents. Denizen, Hilton's new luxury brand, bit the dust soon after the first lawsuit was filed. The suit even contains a quote from this blog describing the similarity of Denizen to W at the brand launch - what foresight!
Posted Jan 14, 2010
A somber moment from our usual glib. The pictures and news reports coming from Haiti are shocking to say the least. North America's poorest country (indeed, one of the world's poorest countries) has been rocked by a brutal earthquake of epic proportions. I encourage all of our readers to take a brief moment to assess their position in life and consider donating to the Red Cross in order to help the relief efforts in Haiti.
American Airlines has announced a mileage bonus for all donations to the Red Cross at aa.com. If that makes the difference, go for it. I hope that all of us in the travel industry will take a moment to help. Haiti is hardly a glamorous destination of five-star hotels and private jets--far from it. But the people of Haiti are in their darkest hour and now is our time to shine.
Posted Jan 8, 2010
The AP is reporting (even before Virgin America has put out a press release themselves) that the DOT has ruled that VA is, in fact, controlled by U.S. interests. Per U.S. law, foreign entities are limited to 25 percent of the voting rights of any U.S. carrier. (Heaven forbid that Singapore Airlines bought a good chunk of United and actually tried to bring it up to SQ's level!)
Posted Dec 22, 2009
In what is being heralded as a "Christmas Miracle" by some air travel watchdog groups, the DOT announced new fines for airlines that keep passengers on board an aircraft for longer than 3 hours after departure from the gate. While we are not advocating that passengers should be kept on aircraft for long periods of time and deprived of basic necessities, we do worry that this arbitrary time limit will have a huge (and negative) effect on how airlines operate during periods of bad weather.
Posted Nov 18, 2009
Does the world really need another search aggregation website? Well, we are about to find out. FlightSearch.com has gone live (in beta) with an interesting approach to searching multiple travel sites.
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