Travel Technology

Airlines and travel agents are Sabre Corp.'s most important constituencies -- other than shareholders -- and now the company has former airline executives serving as CEO and executive chairman of the board. These airline connections aren't the only reasons the board selected these executives but their experience certainly can't hurt.

Is there a big enough market for travelers to track flights through push notifications and wait weeks or months to buy instead of going to a website and entering their itinerary details? Hopper, Hitlist, and others think Millennials and others will shop this way but there is skepticism about how large these businesses can become.

There are over 77.5 million family households in America, with an average size of 3.26 people, and an average annual vacation spend of $3,340. It's a sizeable market and most travel memories are made with life partners, family, friends, or children when taking into account trip composition, but also during the decision-making process on where to go and what to do once there. Travel and tourism professionals should have a keen sense of modern family dynamics.

Location-based marketing is the future of the travel industry. The companies (like Google, Apple and Baidu) that control access to location data via map applications will hold a huge competitive advantage over competitors.

While the world is transitioning to mobile, there are still issues to work on when it comes to monetizing mobile search.

Learn best practices for mobile messaging strategies with this video recap of our recent #SkiftWebinar hosted by LivePerson!

When it comes to booking travel online, every second matters for consumers. With the smart execution of speed, relevance and depth of content paving the way towards a better user experience, metasearch sites are looking increasingly viable to win consumer travel spend.

Smartphone users of travel apps don't have many apps downloaded at a time, but are willing to try an app based on recommendations from family and friends.

When it comes to new tech platforms and technologies such as voice-activated search with Amazon Alexa, the advantage, in the short term, goes to the big travel tech and marketing companies, including online travel agencies and metasearch companies, because they have the engineering staff and other resources to address these disruptions.

With Vista already owning Lanyon, the writing was on the wall for this merger.