Travel Technology

June 29, 2006

ITA Software’s Focus

Tweet The travel press have been playing up ITA Software’s recent announcement with Air Canada as a sign that the GNEs have been unsuccessful in their quest to replace the GDS. Again I must reiterate a theme from my prior blog entries: this shift in distribution is not about us verses them (GNE verses GDS) but about the ever increasing […]
June 9, 2006

Reuters Interview

Tweet Last week I was again interviewed by Kyle Peterson of Reuters. The article entitled : “Internet Travel Agencies Losing Some Luster” talked about the drop in stock price of the leading OTAs (Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity). My comments were primarily directed at the underlying technology and UI of these large players and the fact that there has been little […]
June 5, 2006

JetBlue Wins Air-Ground Wireless License

Tweet JetBlue pioneered Direct satellite TV services and now seems poised to offer Internet and new phone services on board with the successful winning bid on Air-Ground wireless license announced on Saturday. For some time I and others have been talking about U-Commerce (ubiquitous connectivity). The idea of the always connected consumer is quickly becoming the reality and it is […]
June 2, 2006

Virtual Tours

Tweet I am very lucky to have part of my family (my cousin) Marc A. Smith who is a research sociologist with Microsoft. Now rather than going off on the implications of Microsoft employing a sociologist, I instead wanted to share with you part of our conversation we had last week. Marc has been very accurate with predictions over the […]
May 24, 2006

The Death of Travel Agents?

Tweet On April 17th, 2006 the American Society of Travel Agents released a summary of a new Technology and Marketing Report which showed that the traditional travel professional spends an average of 17 hours per week on the Web searching on behalf of their clients. As part of my effort with the Fetch collaborative travel planning tool, I’ve done presentations […]
May 23, 2006

Update on Fetch Technologies Spin-off

Tweet I wanted to provide my readers an update on my efforts with Fetch Technologies and the “Travelsmart” (actual name TBD) tool. As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, the Travelsmart tool allows consumers to collect, organize and share travel planning and booking content across all major travel Websites. Recently the last capability of sharing has been expanded to […]