Dennis Schaal

It is rare to see a company such as the Priceline Group take an impairment charge so quickly after investing. Even Priceline, in the short-term, at least, can get things wrong. Hotel Urbano needs more cash as the Brazilian economy and political system exhibited further stress, and the Zika virus took hold.

TripAdvisor continues to labor to transform its business from a media/advertising model toward a booking site -- under the glare of all-too-often impatient pundits and investors. The big decline in its revenue per hotel shopper, meanwhile, is likely a temporary hurdle but TripAdvisor management still has a helluva lot to prove.

The Priceline Group is looking for a CEO who can handle disruption and big changes in technology and market conditions in coming years. Just look at the changes in the Group's accommodations mix as lodging alternatives are approaching half of the company's roster of properties.

As with anything Google does, you can expect Google Trips to be very much a work in progress that goes through numerous iterations before it becomes available to the public. But its beta release expands Google's footprint in the travel ecosystem especially since so many consumers begin their trip planning in the search engine and explore destinations with the Maps app.

Now-former Priceline Group CEO Darren Huston's decision to emphasize organic growth, his insistence that all properties sold on Booking.com be online bookable and instantly confirmable, and his strategy to keep Booking.com solely focused on the hotel business all set his tenure apart from those of his peers at Expedia. If you can set aside his apparently reckless behavior for a moment, it's a shame Huston won't be around to see his strategy through or to pivot, as required.

To some extent, Expedia is molding HomeAway to its liking. Unlike Booking.com (for now, at least), HomeAway is backing off its goal of making all vacation rentals online bookable. Expedia is also adding apartments in urban areas to better compete against Airbnb and Booking.com.

Expedia is telling hotels that if they "play well" with Expedia it will be very advantageous and the outcomes may not be as positive if hotels decide to rewrite the rules. Many big chains have not appreciated how Expedia has played over the years and they are voting with their proverbial feet.

This is a bombshell.

Google tends to favor digital products over human-facing services but it's possible that a new "travel assistant app" could blend the two. Then again, they've tried this before.

American Airlines is taking nothing for granted in wooing passengers with discounted fares and employees with profit-sharing. Both moves, it hopes, will generate revenue and profits.