Trip tips

One of the many aspects travel gets flogged over is its carbon emissions. If you’d like to contribute to setting the planet on fire, getting on a plane works. What about if you don’t? What about if you’d prefer to reduce your emissions? Skipping domestic flights is the obvious first step, but what next? With this in mind, I decided to track my carbon emissions over my recent three-week trip to Vietnam. Here’s what I found.

Despite rising household expenses, nearly 60 percent of European travelers won’t cut back on traveling or spending on trips in the next six months, according to a survey by the European Travel Commission.

Travelers make multiple purchases in preparation for their trip, a consideration Tripadvisor believes should be noticed by marketers. The company honed in on the purchasing intent of its audience and found that despite rising prices, plans to travel is on par with 2019 levels.

FCM Travel, Flight Centre’s principal corporate-focused agency, is gaining from the business travel pick-up in every part of the world — apart from Asia. As a whole, the Australian group only managed to break even in the region, according to its 2023 first-half results, when taking into account business and leisure sales.

While airlines not running international flights at the pre-pandemic level could be a short-term bottleneck, Chinese online travel agency Trip.com Group believes the country’s outbound travel will start to pick up in the second quarter when flight capacity gradually recovers.

Many companies in the travel industry have shared opinions about how generative AI could affect business, but few so far have implemented the technology.

Experiences play an integral role in the so-called connected trip, where travelers want to seamlessly plan, book, and manage in real time all aspects of their trip in one place. And TUI, the world’s largest tour operator, has just done a soft launch of what can best be described as its own flexible version of a connected trip with TUITours.com.

China’s Trip.com Group has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saudi Tourism Authority to promote Saudi Arabia as a tourism destination. As part of the collaboration, Trip.com and Saudi Tourism Authority will launch joint marketing campaigns in several markets to drive awareness and attract tourists to Saudi Arabia through Trip.com, Ctrip, Travix, and other travel companies. These markets include Australia, China, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and UK. In addition, both parties will also embark on several capacity-building and knowledge-sharing initiatives in various aspects, including digital payment solutions, sustainability, ticketing, and training. “With Trip.com Group’s market capability and advanced technology, I believe the partnership will encourage and entice more visitors worldwide to Saudi Arabia and further enhance recovery in the global tourism sector,” said Fahd Hamidaddin, CEO of the Saudi Tourism Authority. In November last year, Trip.com Group signed an agreement to promote Qatar across the globe as a family-friendly tourism destination, and an agreement with Abu Dhabi was signed in May 2022. Speaking at the Skift Global Forum East, Trip.com’s Chief Operating Officer, Schubert Lou, said old marketing strategies would not work on the new Chinese traveler. Saudi Arabia had earlier said that it aims to attract 3.9 million visitors from China annually by 2030. In 2019, when Saudi Arabia opened to tourism, the maximum number of tourist visas issued were to Chinese tourists. More than 100,000 Chinese tourists visited Saudi Arabia in 2019.

Travel bookings in China have recovered to pre-pandemic levels after being suppressed last year by zero-COVID policies, and are set to boom for the upcoming May Day holiday, according to data from popular booking apps.

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.

In a move to prioritize resources, Google Travel eliminated the feature that enabled Gmail users to view their past and upcoming trips, including everything from accommodations reservations to flights and things to do bookings, on google.com/travel.

Online travel company Trip.com Group has joined hands with flag carrier Cambodia Angkor Air to position the new Angkor International Airport as a smart airport in the region.

Even as more than 70 percent of its customer requests are currently handled by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, online travel company Trip.com Group remains cautious about the commercial implementation of AI.

Liam McDonald, Andrew Newell, and their group of six friends and family spent roughly $1,200 each for flights and hotels in Istanbul this weekend. 

Trip.com Group, the largest online travel company in the world, looks to address China’s population decline and aging demographic by offering cash incentives to employees to have kids.

Trip.com was among the first large online travel agencies to release a simple chatbot powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify each week. Follow this link if you're listening on Apple News.

I’m a traveler who embraces stark contrasts. Take, for instance, my recent trip to Mexico’s Riviera Nayarit.

I’m a travel and food writer based in London. Long intrigued by all I had heard about up-and-coming Albania, my partner Dan and I booked a four-day weekend in the capital, Tirana.

For an admitted Type A vacation planner like me, I enjoy the ins and outs of planning a Disney World vacation. When my alarm goes off 60 days before my vacation, signaling it's time to begin booking my Disney dining reservations, I pop out of bed full of excitement. I also get a little thrill when I snag the Disney Genie+ or virtual queue times I was hoping for.

With a month until the official start of autumn, leaf peepers are already eagerly plotting their fall foliage trips with fingers crossed that they get the timing right. A weekend too early or too late, and you’ll miss the most dazzling colors.