Travel Industry Archive

It’s been a quiet morning at PhoCusWright so far, so I thought I’d go back to an interesting point from yesterday. Sabre showed up as one of the “innovators” and announced that it was finally going to be able to support a la carte pricing, or as they called it, “attribute-based shopping.” All I can say is . . . it’s about damn time. For how many...

More...

Only a few days after the announcement that DHL U.S. Express  will bow out of U.S. domestic shipping, analysts are dissecting its demise. In the last five years, since the company bought Airborne Express, DHL lost nearly $10 billion. Even closing down its U.S. domestic shipping branch will still mean a $4 billion loss for the year. It  seems that DHL and its parent...

More...

The first day is done, and I’ve amazingly sat through every single presentation today. Some of these “innovators” have more promise than others, without question, and many seem to blur together with their similar ideas. For example, there were a slew of travel planning tools that, while having differentiating factors, generally do the same basic thing. Sites like Cadabra...

More...

The morning sessions concluded with a slew of vacation rental companies. Why so many of these? Well, it’s a still mostly untapped market, but clearly several companies have decided its time to fix that problem. Escapia and LiveRez both offer back end solutions for properties to use which at the same time populate a front end booking site (along with partner sites). Meanwhile, the...

More...

Today figures to be a very long but very interesting day. The Travel Innovation Summit gives more than 30 companies 13 minutes each to pitch their wares. Many of these focus on cost reduction, making life easier, or connecting the world, and certainly some seem more promising than others. So as we roll into our first break, let’s talk about some which have started the day off....

More...

The chief executives of Delta Air Lines and Alaska Air both showed up at Sea-Tac Airport today to announce their new code-sharing agreement, an expansion of their more than 20 years of shared services. Code-sharing means allowing airlines to put its name on a flight operated by another without buying new planes or adding employees. Hence, you pay for Delta, but Seattle-based Alaska or its...

More...

Good morning from a very smoky Southern California. Though you wouldn’t know it from most of my posts, I’ve actually been on the road for more than two weeks. I finally returned home yesterday just in time to attend the PhoCusWright conference. For those who aren’t familiar, PhoCusWright is one of the largest travel industry events around, and it kicks off today with the...

More...

Amtrak CEO steps down —  Amtrak CEO Alex Kummant resigned Friday after differences with the railroad’s board. Despite an Amtrak spokesman saying the last two years under Kummant “were the best” in the company’s history, the board and Kummant had “differences” in both direction and management philosophy. Hunter Biden, son of vice president-elect...

More...

Just a quick followup to my post about Delta adding a fee to check the first bag. You may recall that I said, I imagine we’ll hear from AirTran on this fairly soon, or maybe AirTran will try to grab the competitive advantage and run with it. Apparently they’ve decided to go with the former. It surprisingly took the airline almost a full week before announcing that they too would add a...

More...

MGM Mirage CEO retires before degree inflation story breaks – Terrence Lanni, chief executive of MGM Mirage, announced his retirement Thursday amid rumors that he inflated his academic records. His retirement announcement came just hours before the Wall Street Journal published a report on inconsistencies in Lanni’s corporate biography, which claims he earned a master’s...

More...