Apps tips

You’d think the most successful online travel companies would push customers to book flights (or hotels) as fast as possible. Book the sale before the customer can get distracted or find a better deal.

On the back of its November acquisition of GamePlanner.AI, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said his company can create a new AI interface, and that it will help transform Airbnb into a “cross-vertical company” like Amazon or Apple.

Google on late Thursday outlined its highly anticipated updates to Google Maps, which it began rolling out to users in a select list of cities — mainly in North America and Europe to start.

Last week ended with some Hopper news, and this week was filled with it. Read below for the latest on one of the most-love consumer travel apps and its challenges and changes with partners, consumers, and more. 

Hilton on Thursday released its annual whitepaper on consumer travel trends. (Find it here.) The hotel giant is typically quite savvy about how it uses such reports to garner “earned media” coverage for its brands.

HotelTonight co-founder and CEO Sam Shank, who steered the hotel booking app even after it was acquired by Airbnb in 2019, recently announced he would be leaving the short-term rental giant. Shank wrote on his LinkedIn account that he would take some time before making plans for a future outside of the travel industry.

HotelTonight founder and CEO Sam Shank helped build the fastest and easiest to use hotel booking app in the world — initially focused on guests booking last-minute and same-day hotel rooms, sometimes from the local bar — but he hung around Airbnb for three years and eight months after the short-term rental site acquired the business, and Thursday was his last day there.

Tripadvisor is considering revamping its Tripadvisor Plus membership plan, turning it into a free service in its initial stages, and then figuring out a more meaningful path to monetize it at some point later.

There’s been well-deserved excitement in travel tech circles in recent years about everything from the New Distribution Capability to chatbots and the arrival of generative AI, but the reality is that much of what passes for travel technology is still backwards these days.

It’s another earnings season so online travel companies such as Airbnb, Expedia and Tripadvisor occasionally present facts in a misleading — or at least in an exceedingly positive-sounding — way.

Scandinavian airline SAS said it was hit by a cyber attack Tuesday evening and urged customers to refrain from using its app but later said it had fixed the problem.

Serial entrepreneur Paul English is back again with a new app called Deets, and he’s trying to disrupt the way people discover restaurants and hotels.

Expedia Group officials hope that its Hotels.com brand, which migrated its technology to the Expedia platform last year and saw 20 percent growth in gross bookings in the first quarter of 2023, is a model for good things to come for its Vrbo vacation rental brand this year and beyond.

A 2013 Skift Research report predicted that improving in-room entertainment would be a major point of emphasis for hotel industry executives, as digital devices were expected to become an even bigger part of the travel experience.

Expedia Group has been at the forefront of the travel industry in releasing two generative AI tools for trip planning. Chairman Barry Diller claimed the company had a head start because of its ties with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Booking.com is rolling out an AI Trip Planner to U.S. members of its Genius travel rewards program on its mobile app starting Wednesday, the company announced.

Airlines recently finished a wave of public meetings, during which some executives shared details about internal and consumer-facing tech investments. We’ve rounded up their comments on what they’re doing with internal tech systems, AI, biometrics, airline apps, in-flight entertainment, and more. 

There are heaps of travel apps that sound great in theory, but are not so great in practice. When you’re in a full-out sprint between gates on a tight connection, loading a couple of airport apps to find the pretzel stand nearest to your gate is not going to happen.

If you’ve ever traveled abroad without a data plan or a portable hotspot, you know how difficult it is to find free Wi-Fi. Many travelers plan their entire trips on their phones and computers, so it’s only natural that most people still rely on the Internet while traveling. Going online for directions and restaurant recommendations is second nature, but finding free Wi-Fi can take valuable time out of a vacation, and using unsecured connections can put your information in danger. For this reason, it’s important to keep an arsenal of travel apps on your phone that don’t need Wi-Fi.

The travel app with the highest customer satisfaction score is World of Hyatt. That’s according to the first-ever U.S Travel App Satisfaction Study from J.D. Power. And according to the report, there’s much room for travel apps in general to improve.

Unless you’re planning a digital detox, you’re likely going to use the internet, either on a desktop or via a mobile app, to plan part of your next trip. Here are 12 websites and apps you need to check out for your travel plans in 2016.