Dennis Schaal

It is a war zone in tours and activities this week as all of the platform players are scrambling to pick up the pieces of Zerve.

Don't miss the forest for the trees: TripAdvisor is evolving into a well-rounded travel planning AND booking site. If hotel bookings on TripAdvisor eventually fall short of expectations it would be a big blow, but then tours and activities, restaurant reservations, vacation rentals, hotel metasearch and reviews can all play a role in taking up some of the slack.

Stayful is counting on boutique and independent hotels giving up some control in exchange for free mobile services and incremental revenue. Free has a track record of working although properties will have to consider the tradeoffs.

Does a dramatic reduction in outbound traffic from online travel agency sites mean they are getting stickier or are they perhaps consciously retaliating against hotel-chain websites for direct-booking campaigns? Or is something else up?

Buying TripAdvisor would be a very large -- albeit relatively cheap -- acquisition given its current stock price. One very significant impediment, especially for Priceline, is the fact that Liberty TripAdvisor Holdings, which has historic ties to Barry Diller's Expedia, controls TripAdvisor. Still, for the right price, Liberty would have to consider a sale of its prized asset as TripAdvisor goes through a very challenging and prolonged transition.

Not everyone who drafted business plans, wrote the code, made sales calls or forged partnerships in the early days of online travel garnered glitzy headlines or even made it to 2016 to see how their labors all worked out. They -- and countless others -- are still worth remembering for their contributions.

We don't know if it was really "a supermodel" and her tiny dog that William Shatner dispatched to Priceline.com headquarters in the late 1990s to do due dilgence on the company, but we do know that Shatner, who smashed a guitar during one shoot, was highly talented and broke new ground for an emerging brand.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Decolar approached local airlines to forge partnerships, the carriers just didn't appreciate what the site was trying to do. But Decolar, which has its struggles today, indeed outlasted many of those airlines.

Building up an affiliate network became a great marketing tool for Travelstart in South Africa a decade ago because print ads weren't effective. The incumbent competitors weren't particularly effective because they had no focus on e-commerce.

With Airbnb apparently adversely impacting hotels much more than online travel agencies, Hotwire is poised to make some gains as hotels try to fill rooms. But Hotwire also has to fend off Priceline.com, which is emphasizing Express Deals that basically use the same model as Hotwire.