From the Totally Useless Coincidences That Make For A Lame Excuse To Post A Blog Item category, here are a couple tidbits picked up this week that had to do with the number 28. I'm more of a 3, 13, 33 kind of guy myself, so in the interest of making no numerological sense at all ahead of this weekend when we Americans celebrate the birth of a nation, here are two on 28... [more]
[UPDATE: UA on July 18 confirmed the following is accurate...] I was told by a source, who said he had a source who would know, who said
United's infamous letter telling some travel agencies they would need get their own merchant credit card accounts to process United bookings as of July 20 went to
28 agencies. I checked around and some additional sources said that sounded right to them, but United continues to be tight-lipped. I was also told, and this too is not corroborated by anyone with official knowledge, that United told agencies who have corporate accounts with their own United discount agreements that those agencies would not be targeted. We hope to dig up more next week.
A completely unrelated nugget finds
Travel Weekly's Dennis Schaal noting that Sabre's stake in TripIt is
28 percent. News to me. Nice work Dennis. I asked co-founder Scott Hintz, who responded, "I don't know where they got that from. We certainly haven't provided that number and that's not something we've ever talked about publicly. I can't really confirm or deny it. Our ownership interests are subject to confidentiality requirements in our stock purchase agreements. All we have said about Sabre's interest is that they are our largest outside investor, but they hold a minority stake in the business. TripIt management controls the majority of voting interest in the company."
TripIt announced in April 2008 that a $5.1 million investment included Sabre Holdings, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and European Founders Fund.
Have a good Fourth.