Sean O'Neill

Kudos to TripAdvisor and Expedia for doing the right thing in helping encourage civil discourse. Whatever one thinks about the gun policy debate, picking on a teenager's personal musings about college applications unrelated to the topic at hand is out of bounds.

The last thing travel tech giant Travelport needs is to be sold to private equity. It's still digging out from all the debt Blackstone saddled it with. Our best guess is that it will be forced to partly sell eNett, a payments business.

Even consumers who embrace technology may worry that companies are exploiting them through so-called personalization. Hoteliers need to balance digital ingenuity with a human touch.

There used to be only two ways for railways to make money: luck and state handouts. But that's changing, as countries look at privatization and as railways look to technology to streamline operations. Sqills and SilverRail are two tech vendors that smell an opportunity.

The phrase "cash is king" is fast becoming outdated as Chinese travelers popularize mobile payment methods like Alipay and Weixin Pay.

We were skeptical of claims from Skyroam that travelers would pay a premium for seamless mobile Wi-Fi. After all, the internet has become cheap and easy to access in many destinations. But the startup has attracted millions of paying users. The lesson: There's always a premium version of an existing service waiting to be invented.

Booking.com keeps hinting that it intends to become a full-service travel agency. But these products are often less profitable than hotels. So it risks a bumpy ride. No wonder it is considering revamping its rewards program and building a chatbot to help with merchandising.

Booking.com now wants to sign up all types of alternative accommodations, even short-term rental apartments that face increased regulation in many cities. CEO Glenn Fogel seems to think that the ultimate winner of the online travel game will be whoever has the most beds in the end.

Does yet another big funding round signal that the vacation rental property market is over-heated? Nah. It's reasonable given the huge size of the opportunity and how much investment will be needed to digitize and automate the sector.

It has become harder to find the online travel agencies with the lowest prices in Google's metasearch. The apparent change this week implicitly favors travel giants, which can afford to dominate ad auctions for online search.