Dennis Schaal

This Travelport agreement with FlightCar is a shocker given the regulatory and reputational risks. It's a shocker because we didn't know Travelport had it in them to make such a brash move -- and it is a multi-year agreement, too.

JetBlue doesn't want to be JCPenney. The airline certainly wants to attract more business travelers, but it adamantly seeks to ensure that changes don't come at the expense of its leisure traveler customer base. The balancing act will gradually become more of a challenge as Mint service expands, but it isn't a huge issue for the moment.

Instagram Direct is a nice new feature, but hardly anything revolutionary. Travel marketers might make some use of it, but it doesn't look like anything that could provide any scale to such attempts.

Kudos to the house panel for the humor and savvy in leveraging BuzzFeed, but the chairman's opposition to in-flight voice calls is based on pandering and misinformation about a service that has worked without incident on international airlines for years.

HomeAway, which is way behind, but pushing hard to improve its e-commerce capabilities, is beginning to feel some heat from Booking.com on one side and Airbnb on the other. You could therefore look at this follow-on public offering as a defensive move. On the other hand, HomeAway's acquisition spree is an aggressive tack, and the public offering signals that HomeAway has no intention of slowing down.

Let's see: Now we have a powerful Congressman telling passengers to keep their personal lives to themselves as one of his arguments against in-flight voice calls. Passengers on European, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American Airlines have been making in-flight voice calls for years, and without major flareups.

The merger of US Airways and American Airlines is now a done deal. That was easy. Now comes the hard part.

In a turning point for Booking.com and the hospitality industry, the largest lodging site in the world now has so many vacation rental listings, dispersed across 193 destinations, that it is changing the nature of the online travel business.

Amadeus has long been involved in incubating startup-like ventures within the company, but will now do so with a more deliberate strategy to forge closer relationships with young companies that it feels are worth associating with.

Damn, if the UK's Advertising Standards Authority can't take a joke … Meanwhile, Kayak's Brain Surgery ad is obviously working and that's why the company brought it back.