Online Travel News

It will take couple of quarters before the deal closes, so Kayak will still have couple of opportunities to report separate earnings.

With 3.1 million downloads of its mobile apps in the third quarter (bringing total to over 20 million overall), and increasing prowess in monetizing queries from smartphones, Kayak is certainly a leader in mobile within the travel industry.

This ends the short life of Kayak as a public company -- it just finished its first post-IPO quarter. Priceline will gain a great online and mobile team to build its portfolio and will put muscle behind the Kayak brand.

Airlines have been among the most progressive of industries when it comes to embracing social media, mainly because that's the biggest venue for passengers to gripe about them. Lot more needs to be done beyond informational and reactive ways of working in social.

It can be difficult enough for airlines to manage their brand internally, but even more perplexing when faced with outside spammers whose fraud promotions serve no apparent purpose.

There was so much hype about Groupon and Zynga, and perhaps their stars are getting clouded over. But, Foursquare, if it handles its commercial strategy with a little more acumen than it has shown so far, could really turn into a viable business.

Kudos to Hilton for recognizing that recycling is not only the right thing to do, but also in its economic interests.

Controversial and fee-happy, Allegiant undoubtedly does things differently, is nimble and successful.

Airlines have been more progressive on use of social media, airports have been the ignored cousin, sort of. But passengers are already heavily using social media inside the airport ecosystem, so the management of airports has to reflect that sooner or later.

It’s customary for travel companies to donate during natural disasters, but many of the companies’ own employees and headquarters were affected by this storm.