Vacation rental startup Stay Alfred has raised its first round of capital – a sizeable $15 million – in a bid to expand the company outside of the US. The company confirmed the Series A round but has declined to give the identity of the Seattle-based private equity group…
Let’s play a game that I like to call “Who said this: Donald Trump or Michael O’Leary?” – US president-elect versus the Ryanair CEO. NB: This is an opinion by Matt Walker, chief storyteller at LikeWhere. “The Beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” (who?) “I think I’m…
Travel brands should ensure they consider the search “intent” of prospective customers when optimising their pages, as Google turns more to advanced tech to serve results. That’s the key message from the annual report by marketing agency SearchMetrics, in a study of 10,000 keyword searches and results on Google. With the…
President-elect Donald Trump is well-known now for not only mixing his metaphors but also proclaiming one thing and then saying something else later. Countless examples are being paraded in the mainstream and social media on a daily (probably hourly) basis as the controversial hotel magnate gets ready to take…
Two trends stand out from InterContinental Hotels Group’s annual trends report, released this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The report ‘The Uncompromising Customer: Addressing the Paradoxes of the Age of I’ looks at the conflicting situations consumers find themselves in and which impact their purchasing decisions….
Airbnb ended 2016 ahead of Booking.com for the first time in visitor numbers on US travel websites, although Expedia remains ahead of both. Data released by audience tracking service SimilarWeb saw the home sharing service reach 87.8 million visits in the last quarter of the year. This was 5.5 million…
2016 was the year of ‘the loyalty wars’, the battle of the century between online travel agencies and hotel brands. NB: This is a viewpoint from Peter O’Connor, professor of information systems at Essec Business School in Paris, and European online analyst for Phocuswright. Hilton, Marriott, Accor Hotels and…
Those organising travel services on behalf of major corporations still consider mobile as the biggest challenge to them and the industry. A survey of 150 leading travel buyers for the Travel Technology Europe trade show found that mobile is the technology that “excites” them the most, ahead of the…
Accommodation service BudgetPlaces has ended almost 14 years as an independent company and sold to travel group eDreams Odigeo. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. eDreams Odigeo says the deal will not any impact on 2016-2017 capital expenditures as it follows the sale of part of its corporate travel…
Huge investment sum to the tune of $50 million going into Upside – on the day Jay Walker officially unveils the site. The startup (TLabs here from June 2016) has been in beta testing for months but used today’s launch to disclose that it has raised the money from a…