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After years of speculation, today’s announcement of the merger between Travelport and Worldspan came as no great shock to anyone in the industry. The only surprising aspect of the deal is the lack of a competitive offer from Amadeus. As far as a fit, Amadeus and Worldspan would have been more complementary. Travelport has been suffering pre and post the […]

Amadeus introduced a new technology service this week called Meta Pricer. The service “allows airlines to optimise marketing and distribution reach by making cost-efficient use of travel search engines”. This is a clear effort to re-insert the GDS into the travel booking value chain in an era of increased fragmentation of content. There is no doubt that there is some […]

This week I met with Josh Steinitz, CEO of a new start-up called the Nile Project. The Nile Project uses personalization techniques enabling the consumer to create a more customized tour of a city. The consumer explicitly choosers an area of interest, then by using Ajax, the Nile project presents the consumer a limited number of preferences related to those […]

It has been my pleasure to be associated with PhoCusWright over the last 7 years. I met Philip Wolf in the late 1980s and I have always repected Philip’s ability to understand emerging trends and push the industry towards a more user centric approach to online and offline travel. I have been attending Philip’s conference since its inception. Each year […]

The VC panel this morning echoed a theme I have heard a lot over the last 8 months: VCs will only invest in online travel companies that have already established customers and revenue. The important thing to remember is that the true disruptors in the online travel market where not funded by VCs. Expedia was an incubator at Microsoft, Travelocity […]

Listening to the corporate travel panel, it is very clear that these executives don’t get it. Travel 2.0 means disruption. This panel is still sticking to the same themes they’ve used for years.