The real 15 largest travel companies of 2013
Suppliers, namely airlines, hotels, a cruise line and a car rental company, clearly dominate the top 15. Priceline and Amadeus are the only middlemen represented.
Dennis Schaal
Dennis Schaal is Skift's Founding Editor and Executive Editor. Dennis has been a reporter focusing on online travel and short-term rentals for more than two decades at Skift, Tnooz, USA Today, and Travel Weekly. He is well-known for tough one-on-one interviews on stage at Skift events, including with the CEOs and top execs of Expedia, Uber, Booking Holdings, Priceline, Kayak, Hopper, and more.
Can Foursquare, Quora, and LinkedIn make users care about Bing?
Bing has reorganized its search results pages to incorporate the social element, but it really has a long way to go before the service evolves into something really useful for travelers.
Kayak downplays threat from Google Travel in IPO materials
Expect Kayak to increase its leave of absence from the classic metasearch approach and to expand into new travel verticals with its Kayak booking path. Others, including Room 77, already are following Kayak's lead.
Kayak hits the road with $100 million IPO try
Start your engines. Kayak is beginning its road show in a bid to raise more than $100 million in an IPO. The company will face tough questions about Google's acquisition of ITA Software and whether it can paint a big enough growth story to satisfy would-be investors.
Wyndham Vacation Rentals launches new site and starts to rebrand
The new Wyndham Vacation Rentals site offers some modern, e-commerce pizazz. The rebranding to a more widely known brand makes sense, too.
How Flipkey plans to get back in the game
Flipkey will continue to try to differntiate itself through reliable user reviews and inbound traffic from TripAdvisor, but it will need to overcome its parent company's propensity to under-invest in its non-TA properties.
Virgin America takes hit from its transition to Sabre
Welcome to the big time, Virgin America. All this growth "don't come easy." Meanwhile, it looks like it is straightening things out with its Sabre reservations system and things should be on track before long.
Room 77 to remain in the cloud after Amazon outage
Travel companies should fine-tune their cloud strategies after an Amazon Web Services outage took down Room 77, Pinterest, Instagram and Netflix. Given the cost-savings and efficiencies of cloud computing, travel companies won't be abandoning such services -- nor should they -- any time soon.
Portico Club and Inspirato face off for vacation club supremacy
Can Portico by Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato resort to marketing super-exclusive vacation clubs to the mega wealthy? What Greek debt crisis? There probably is a market for this, and Steve Case and a bunch of other venture capitalists are making a downpayment on these clubs' viability.
TripAdvisor's Facebook app surges through paid marketing and social growth
What's behind the surge of users of TripAdvisor's Cities I've Visited app on Facebook? It didn't happen by chance.