Articles tagged “online travel agencies”

Does a dramatic reduction in outbound traffic from online travel agency sites mean they are getting stickier or are they perhaps consciously retaliating against hotel-chain websites for direct-booking campaigns? Or is something else up?

Once millennials start making money, they're willing to spend to receive personalized treatment from a travel agent. They're also tired of the hassle of do-it-yourself online travel booking.

We don't know if it was really "a supermodel" and her tiny dog that William Shatner dispatched to Priceline.com headquarters in the late 1990s to do due dilgence on the company, but we do know that Shatner, who smashed a guitar during one shoot, was highly talented and broke new ground for an emerging brand.

Ctrip did its own thing and adapted to conditions in China when it was created but its founders were very much aware of what was going on in the rest of the world, including the development of search engines, as well as Travelocity, Expedia and Priceline. One of the things that differentiated Ctrip from the outset was it appreciated the outsized importance of technology.

The big question on everyone's mind is what will happen if and when the market takes another downturn. And if it does, who will have the upper hand? Airbnb? The online travel agencies? Or the hotels?

Digital has fundamentally changed the way we do business – and the travel industry is on a digital journey all of its own.

Booking.com rode the agency model, which is attractive for its lack of complexity in forging online travel agency-hotel relationships and consumer-friendliness, into the growth engine of a $68 billion business. Its executives did so by ignoring the trendiness of the crowds and sticking to their own beliefs and vision.

We're not giving away all the good stuff. You still need to read the entire thing.

We dig into Skift's new opus on online travel and get some behind-the-scenes insight from its author.

Two decades after the birth of online travel, more than two dozen founders and key players exclusively tell Skift how it all happened. This is a story of a history that changed the future of travel forever. Dig in, this will take a while.