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Passionate, endlessly curious, entrepreneurial, articulate, loyal and tough, Philip Wolf was a pioneer in online travel. The legions of people he impacted and influenced will no doubt agree.
The company was originally called PhoCusWright, with those three letters capitalized because they stood for Philip C. Wolf, and that was no accident.
Wolf, the founder of Phocuswright and a guy that top dealmakers and C-Suite travel executives looked to for advice and insights over the course of nearly four decades, died Tuesday at age 64 of leukemia, according to Travel Weekly.
It was Travel Weekly's parent, Northstar Travel Group, that acquired Wolf's Phocuswright in 2011. The new owners brought Wolf back year after year to moderate talks and give presentations long after he left the company. Later, they lower-cased the PCW in the Phocuswright name.
The Phocuswright conference became the signature conference in travel tech.
When I think about Wolf, the words that come to mind are passionate, curious, entrepreneurial, loyal and tough.
Wolf was always looking for the next big thing, and most of the time, whether it was mobile or the social graph, he found it. Occasionally, his calls were off target but these were hardly a footnote.
As a Phocuswright contractor for a short time, I can tell you that a week after one of
