Skift Originals

HotelMe's authenticated hotel review proposition is one of those things that may you wonder why no one has done it until now. The startup is very late to the hotel-review game, but it has a powerful marketing partner in USA Today.

Delta says it wants to improve the customer experience by participating in the Apple Passbook program, but it risks alienating these same customers already using TripIt Pro and AwardWallet.

American Airlines is taking a very flexible and sensible approach to Apple's Passbook feature in iOS 6. If it takes off, then American may use the feature to push marketing and service messages to passengers.

A lot of airline passengers have iPhones and some will undoubtedly use Passbook. Delta and American want to be where the customers are.

Apple will make several iOS apps obsolete if users decide that the iPhone 5's newest features like photo sharing and panoramic photos are more convenient to use and just as fun.

All Twitter users end up with some fake followers so the numbers don't really matter as long as customer service reps continue to interact with their real followers that actually want help.

Delta believes through such actions it is protecting its intellectual property, but its actions alienate loyal customers who don't want to be locked into Delta's clunky services to access their loyalty information.

VirtualTourist demonstrates that both it and the contributors it values the most still don't understand the difference between the legitimate press and those who write press releases.

It looks like Apple Passbook in iOS 6 will get some big traction from airlines for mobile boarding passes. If Apple goes ahead eventually with a full-fledged iTravel offering, then that could be a different story entirely.

The battle lines are clear now: Wikimedia is moving ahead with plans to create a new travel wiki, and Internet Brands is trying to protect its own commercial interests in its existing Wikitravel. This showdown will be a turning point in the wiki movement.