A six-month-old Danish room booking service in hotels has acquired its Swedish competitor in a bid to corner the Nordic region. Gaest was launched in January this year and has bought Bokarum for an undisclosed fee. The ambitious company says it wants to build the leading the online marketplace for the…
In years past, there was a dominant form of agricultural practice – sharecropping. A landlord would rent out his land, and farmers would rent it and pay in harvested crops. There was usually no other way for the farmer to get land, so the landlord was king! Today, decades…
Vacation rental tech house Rentivo has acquired Klik.Villas, a competitor in the sector that focuses on the Asia-Pacific region. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Rentivo is fresh from raising $425,000 in capital from a crowd-funding campaign earlier this year on the CrowdCube platform. The acquisition of Klik will…
Airbnb has taken another step in the direction of its rivals in the vacation rental sector, with what it claims are milestones on booking and technology. For all its popularity and the apparent tech-driven nature of its brand, until now Airbnb has been behind others in the world of…
The deadpool is full of failed online travel startups – it’s a crazy idea to even think about starting a new business, right? The sector is dominated by the Priceline and Expedia groups which spend north of $3 billion dollars per year each in online advertising Google’s flight and hotel…
JetBlue Vacations has partnered with Utrip, a Seattle-based trip-planning portal that aims to achieve true personalization in designing vacation itineraries. Utrip launched five years ago as a fairly standard booking site, but it has harnessed artificial intelligence and machine learning and added curated local recommendations to take trip planning…
This is a roundup of announcements related to people moves and business expansions in June 2017. Tuesday 13 June 2017: TravelCar expands to US The airport parking and car-share provider will open an office in Los Angeles to concide with launching its first US destination in the city, with 20…
Commissions paid by hotels to intermediaries have risen by more than 7% over the course of the last year. This is according to the 2017 Trends In The Hotel Industry study from CBRE. This is ringing alarm bells across the industry. Not only because it eats further into hotel…
We operate in a multi-device, multi-channel and multi-touchpoint digital world, and the hotel planning and booking customer journey is becoming increasingly complex as a result. NB: This is a viewpoint by Max Starkov, president & CEO at HeBS Digital. In fact, according to Google, the average consumer engages in…
Hoteliers today face a number of problems – coming from within their own sector and from on the peripherary. As well as the perennial issue of competing with rival hotels, the growth of private accommodation bookings through platforms such as Airbnb is also concerning. Now more than ever, hotels…