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Booking.com says it isn’t harming hotel owners by putting canceled rooms up...
Booking.com has no reservations about its new re-sale practice for canceled rooms. Since the start of this year, Booking.com has implemented a function, market by market, that changes what happens when...
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French hoteliers voice concern about OTA business practices
Hoteliers are often frustrated by the significant fees charged for bookings via OTAs. The trend among many hotels is to do whatever it takes to encourage more direct bookings that circumvent the OTA...
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Bravofly’s purchase of Rumbo consolidates the European OTA landscape
On Friday, Bravofly, a Swiss search engine for low-cost air and hotel bookings, said that it would buy Spanish OTA Rumbo in a deal is worth approximately €74 million ($95 million). Axa Private Equity...
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Putting the supplier cart before the distributor horse in travel
Imagine yourself walking into a grocery store. The shelves are stocked full of brightly labelled cans and boxes of goods. You gaze in awe at the vast selection of product. Excited to purchase...
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Forget Street View: HeliView adds an aerial twist on hotel shopping and...
HeliView is an innovation that offers “interactive visual travel search.” Users of this service at a German OTA can take a virtual overhead tour of a destination by watching aerial videos that are...
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Turning tides: Travel agents losing steam as a cruise distribution channel
Travel technology has not always been kind to certain industry cohorts: travel agents being one of the endlessly highlighted losers of the accelerated pace towards the online sales. The narrative goes...
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OTAs outshine metasearch sites in sending traffic to air and hotel suppliers,...
New research out of PhoCusWright sheds interesting light on how well online travel agencies (OTAs) are performing in the US relative to metasearch sites, which aggregate fares and hotel offers from...
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US consumer travel spend booming, crossing major threshold in 2012
Economy fretting aside, the United States saw a historic uptick in consumer travel spending, reaching $100 billion for the first time in 2012. This is a significant milestone, as the industry has shown...
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Speed demons and slowpokes: These are the travel industry benchmarks
Technology performance company Compuware has released their latest data on site speed, both on mobile and desktop, for various verticals. The company has tested the speed of hotel/resort, airlines,...
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Russian OTA Oktogo nets $11 million round
Booming Russian online travel agency (OTA) Oktogo.ru has raised $11 million in its latest financing round, raising its total to $26 million. Not bad for a company that only earned $30 million in 2012....
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Booking.com dominates in Switzerland as OTAs steal share from direct channels
Some interesting stats from eTourism Monitor here on who is dominating the online hotel world in Switzerland. Just under a third (30%) of all hotel bookings are generated electronically through...
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A new problem for OTAs: Airline websites are outselling them in the US
For the first time, US fliers say they typically use airline websites to book airplane tickets more than they use online travel agencies (OTAs), according to PhoCusWright, a travel consultancy. The...
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Rising SEM costs may have killed this Aussie OTA
Say bye-bye to Check-in.com.au, a once popular Australian online travel agency (OTA), whose voluntary liquidation was announced on May 21. The agency claimed to have booked one million reservations...
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What hotels need to know as Google expands Knowledge Graph
NB: This is a viewpoint from Brandon M. Dennis, technical marketing manager of Buuteeq. For the past few days you might have noticed a new black bar appearing at the top of some Google search results....
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Is travel at a do or die moment in big data?
While there might already be fatigue at the overuse of the term ‘big data’ now is the time to act if a report from Amadeus is to be believed. The study, penned by Thomas Davenport, a visiting professor...
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QTravel is gaining on Travelplanet, Poland’s OTA giant
Operating since 2010, QTravel is an OTA that sells vacation packages from 50 Polish tour operators. It has been averaging year-on-year revenue growth of about 10%, and has about a third of the traffic...
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GDSs are still strong in the US hotel market
In the US hotel market, global distribution systems (GDSs) are as strong as ever, when the data is looked at in a certain light. About 55 million reservations were booked in the US through GDSs last...
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US rental car chains boost direct bookings by 17%
Until recently, US rental car chains were failing to persuade customers to book directly through their “brand.com” websites instead of through online travel agencies. But new research suggests that...
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Dark days for online travel agencies
The days are getting darker for the mass-market online travel agencies (OTAs). The fundamentals of their business are weakening amid intense pressure up and down the value chain, especially in the...
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OTAs remain the top research source for US vacation package buyers, says Expedia
Online travel agencies continue to be American consumers’ favorite source of information prior to booking vacation packages, despite all the buzz about review sites such as TripAdvisor and metasearch...
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