Booking Holdings

Priceline Group executives say their relationships with the major hotel chains are good and the impact of their direct-booking campaigns isn't acute. Then why is Jeffery Boyd, the Group's executive chairman, talking about taking remedial actions?

Corporate-booking technology vendors Serko and Concur plan to add natural language bots to their tools. Other players are likely to follow.

To a great extent, Ctrip is going to be preoccupied for years chasing Chinese travelers and servicing their every travel need, around the globe. Barring further consolidation, Ctrip isn't much of a threat to its partner, the Priceline Group, which is years ahead in its own hotel business and is executing superbly.

The Priceline Group continues to put up strong growth numbers despite its large size. Its massive advertising budget combined with improving conversion and growing inventory position the company to take further share of online and offline bookings.

TripAdvisor has been struggling but it is a testament to its continued power as a marketing vehicle that Expedia Inc. felt compelled to participate in TripAdvisor Instant Booking even though Expedia controls its own TripAdvisor wannabe. It's called Trivago. A newly anointed public company, Trivago's growth could one day be an Expedia hedge against TripAdvisor's clout, although Trivago isn't there yet.

The selection of Glenn Fogel as CEO is likely one that will please Wall Street as he represents stability and is highly regarded inside the travel industry and beyond it. Is it purely coincidence that the Group announces its CEO pick after eight months of looking, hours before Expedia's Trivago is slated to price its IPO? Probably not.

Tune in to hear Booking.com CEO Gillian Tans talk about how the company is trying to build products that meet higher consumer expectations.

HomeAway president John Kim, after a manner, is trying to turn HomeAway into the type of company that Airbnb is -- one that is focused on technology improvements and a great user experience. In many ways, Kim has the tougher job. He isn't starting from scratch, as Airbnb did, but is attempting to spur changes in a company that has been around since 2005 and grew through a flurry of acquisitions.

Booking.com, which does more than 1,000 A/B tests daily, is testing a rewards program for business travelers, but CEO Gillian Tans still believes that true loyalty is more about delivering its core product for customers than points and rewards schemes.

As Booking.com knows, if companies don't innovate quickly -- and learn from the experience -- they'll die.