Booking tips

Ace Hotel Chain Acquired for $85 Million by Hospitality Firm Sortis: Ace only has about a dozen properties, but it has punched above its weight in brand impact. Here’s our analysis of whether Sortis is a good home and if $85 million is a good price.

A U.S. hotel tech company with equity backing has acquired a booking engine based in Ireland. 

In Skift Research’s latest report check in on the current state of Expedia Group and Booking Holdings, the big two online travel agencies in the U.S. and Europe, as they recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Skift Research’s latest report looks at how online travel booking habits changed during the pandemic and how these behaviors will continue to evolve. Since February 2020, Skift has been regularly surveying 1,000-plus Americans about their travel behaviors first on a monthly, and then a bi-monthly basis. The topline results of these surveys are published as our U.S. Travel Tracker. However, we ask more granular travel questions that have not been published previously. 

With hotels seeing a big bounce in bookings, so too can they expect to see more so-called rogue rates creeping back. These are rates that they’ve not authorized, and are a common complaint. Now one of the major bedbank players has developed a platform to help hotels fix any rogue rates they spot.

Over the past decades, the booking pendulum has swung back and forth between online travel agents’ (OTAs) growing booking share, and hotels clawing back some direct bookings. Hoteliers have been complaining about high commissions paid to third-party travel websites, and increasingly invest in driving more direct bookings. The evolving hotel tech stack has website builders, booking engines, and direct-booking tools offering to aid this cause.

There are a number of innovative features that set Hopper apart from other online travel agencies. 

Expedia Group Media Solutions, Expedia’s travel advertising division, has released a new media platform that allows travelers to shop and book travel as they watch content. One of its first partners will be Brand USA, the U.S.’s national tourism marketing agency.

Ryanair has aggressively battled online travel agencies over the years, seeking to bar them from selling its flights, and recently was dealt setbacks in separate litigation against Lastminute.com in Switzerland and Booking.com in the U.S.

Hyatt is acquiring UK boutique hotel booking site Mr and Mrs Smith for £53 million — or about about $66 million in today’s exchange rates at the time of the announcement.

Booking Holdings intends to build on its decade-long experience of using artificial intelligence (AI) to make the most of recent advances in the field and apply them to online travel.

Thanks to record booking revenue ahead of this year’s summer travel, German vacation rental marketplace HomeToGo is looking at breaking even in 2023.

Two travel tech startups have raised nearly $28 million this week.

Getting its first overhaul in 14 years, online travel agency Cleartrip unveiled a revamped version of its booking tool for agents. With what Cleartrip describes as a user-friendly design and round-the-clock support center, AgentBox 2.0 enables travel agents to book over 100 airlines, more than 500,000 hotels, exclusive holiday packages, group bookings, and meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions. “While the earlier version, first introduced in 2009, was more about making agents familiar with online adoption, the upgraded tool focuses heavily on the backend stack, offering a suite of products including flights, hotels, packages, buses and trains,” said Sukesh Shetty, head of B2B at Cleartrip. One of the reasons why the tool was never upgraded after 2009, he said, was because the company was so extensively concentrated on business-to-consumer that business-to-business was just an ancillary product for Cleartrip. “We want to be a catalyst in agents’ growth and not just another platform provider,” Shetty added. Additionally, Cleartrip registered 70 percent growth in monthly agent transactions and onboarded over 5,000 agents in the financial year 2022. The company also reported a 200 percent surge in summer travel bookings compared to the same period last year.

Online travel agency Booking Holdings Inc is expected to receive an EU antitrust warning about its 1.63 billion euro bid for Sweden-based Etraveli Group, three people familiar with the matter said.

Approximately 91 percent of LGBTQ+ travelers in India now consider their personal safety and well-being when selecting a travel destination, according to a Booking.com survey. This represents a significant increase from 70 percent reported in the previous year. The LGBTQ+ travel research conducted by Booking.com, now in its third year, sheds light on both the progress made and the recent setbacks faced by these communities in terms of travel experiences.

In the past week, the European Commission has issued two separate statements of objections to Google and Booking Holdings over antitrust concerns.

The traditional knock on Expedia Group in its matchup against rival Booking Holdings is that Booking has been way more profitable. And Booking can take those profits, plow them back into marketing, and win more market share.

Many renters of vacation homes want the free option to cancel reservations if necessary, while hosts want confirmed, non-refundable bookings. Entering the fray is Booking.com, which encourages hosts to accept a compromise.

The European Union’s antitrust regulators on Friday warned that Booking Holdings’ planned acquisition of Sweden-based rival ETraveli may strengthen the U.S. company’s position in the market for hotel online travel agencies, and push up costs for hotels.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT last November, there were a few companies that released tools right away or even shared plans to do so.