Dennis Schaal

Barry Diller, the senior executive at both IAC and Expedia, doesn't need any more plaques on his mansions' walls but he is one of the people who had oversized influence in making online travel what it is today. He had a great eye for how e-commerce would emerge and he pulled the trigger on his great acquisitions.

Hostelworld needed to automate the online booking of hostels because there just wasn't enough money in it if employees or call center agents had to handle bookings over the phone. The company gave away free software to attract owners and then came up with a business model that was midway between Expedia's prepay model and Booking.com's pay at the hotel formula.

JetBlue doesn't use influencers to promote its brand except in scattered countries where the airline isn't well-known. Who needs influencers when word-of-mouth and your own passengers spread the good vibes?

Ctrip did its own thing and adapted to conditions in China when it was created but its founders were very much aware of what was going on in the rest of the world, including the development of search engines, as well as Travelocity, Expedia and Priceline. One of the things that differentiated Ctrip from the outset was it appreciated the outsized importance of technology.

As when it acquired Travelocity in early 2015, the Expedia Inc. acquisition model for Orbitz and CheapTickets is to slash employee rolls, find other cost synergies, move the newly acquired companies to the Expedia technology platform and continue to market the slimmed-down brands. As Orbitz begins its 16th year, it wouldn't be surprising to see the brand get more aggressive in its advertising.

Brett Keller, Priceline.com's new interim CEO, knows his way around headquarters, having worked there for 17 years. He takes over at a critical time for the Priceline.com brand, although Booking.com is by far the Priceline Group's most important cog.

Booking.com rode the agency model, which is attractive for its lack of complexity in forging online travel agency-hotel relationships and consumer-friendliness, into the growth engine of a $68 billion business. Its executives did so by ignoring the trendiness of the crowds and sticking to their own beliefs and vision.

Momondo Group is still a relatively small fish in a big pond when measured against the larger, global metasearch players. Still, the Group, with its dual-brand approach and increased investment, is obtaining some scale -- 95 million visits during the first quarter of 2016 -- and is becoming part of the conversation.

On hotels' direct-booking rates, one of the major chains is already talking to traditional travel agencies about handing them over. In addition, Choice Hotels, for one, is signaling that better deals from online travel agencies could go a long way toward ending its boycott in distributing loyalty-member rates. If every person has a price, then so indeed do hotel chains.

Whether it's on hotel, online travel agency or metasearch sites, having attractive pricing is a very powerful thing. We think Kaufer is a smart guy. He knows he isn't going to get hotels' special rates for loyalty program members today, but he's trying to lay the groundwork for a deal later on.