Sean O'Neill

This week travel startups BookingPal, Instawork, Withlocals, Ayenda Rooms, and Questo together announced more than $30 million in funding. Of note, famous venture investor Bill Gurley took a stake in Instawork's hiring marketplace, and mammoth investor Softbank is betting on Ayenda Rooms as Colombia's version of budget hotel franchisor Oyo.

The Argentine economic crisis continues to drag on Despegar, but the online travel agency's continuous investment in mobile is setting it up for long-term growth across the continent.

Points.com is still too dependent on its mainstay business of loyalty currency swaps for just a few major travel suppliers that are primarily in the U.S. Hopefully, its new cross-marketing deal with Amadeus will help.

"Everything is converging in hospitality," according to one Skift 2019 Megatrend. Selina embodies this Megatrend perfectly in how it pushes the bounds of co-living and co-working. But the company needs to execute its plans on time or else business partners will lose faith.

As an airline, AirAsia has led its peers in many metrics, especially on cost control. But its new effort to nurture startups has the odds against it. Will this effort bring strategic gains for the company? We’ll know in a few years.

Hotels are hiring companies to clamp down on online travel sites displaying cheap rates against their wishes. One of those startups, Fornova, has just bought smaller rival HotelsBI to broaden its rate-detection service. The deal is partly justified by the increasing tech spending on a cat-and-mouse-game between hoteliers and providers of rogue rates.

It's not clear there's enough market demand for a mobile app that books only independent and boutique properties. But some hoteliers might welcome the new app One Night if it can bring down its distribution costs, even marginally.

Amadeus has long talked about diversifying its business, branching out from distribution into software services for hotels, airlines, and airports. But 2019 looks like it will finally be the year that the new businesses gain nearly equal importance to the old ones.

Caesars had under-invested in the tech needed to support the hotel side of its business. Recently it has been playing catch up. Some of its experiments are innovative, such as mobile ordering for food at the lobby or by the pool.

Travelport's latest earnings report is a chance to judge its performance since it went public in 2014. The answer is mixed: The company invested more than its rivals in its airline distribution business, which let it punch above its weight. But not everything on other matters panned out as well as it might have hoped.