Monday: Before the Q1 results, Priceline share price is around $62. The call is scheduled the day after, the share price will go up to $64 but close at $56.75 on Friday.
Tuesday: The online travel news Travelmole has announced the shortlist of finalists of the Travelmole Web Awards. This fourth edition of the awards ceremony will take place in London on the 24th May. On the hotel side, 3 companies have been selected:
www.ichotelsgroup.com
I am surprised that Sheraton with all their effort they've made on the new version of their site (more leisure oriented), hasn't made the shortlist.
Wednesday: The online hotel review community TripAdvisor, a subsdiary of Expedia Inc., has acquired a number of travel community websites:
- SmartTravel and BookingBuddy
- Travelpod
- SeatGuru
- Travel Library
If you want to know more about those companies, have a look here.
Thursday: By just being curious, I type "hotel" on Google and I find that Wikipedia is ranked #9 on organic (natural) results. Their definition of a Hotel is here. Something I didn't though:
"In Australia, the word may also refer to a pub or bar. In the UK similarly, many pubs with "hotel" in their name do not offer accommodation or even food.
In India, the word may also refer to a restaurant since the best restaurants were always situated next to a good hotel." source: Wikipedia
Friday: The private equity firm Blackstone Group who owns Travelport is finally taking Orbitz Worlwide Inc. public. There is no date yet for the IPO but the press release says that the initial public offering is expected to take place in the third quarter of 2007... Orbitz Worldwide operates different brands such as Orbitz, Rates2Go, Hotel Club, GTA, OctopusTravel, eBookers. The company globally generates around $10B in gross bookings (only $1.3B in Europe). The company has also reported a net loss of $146 million in 2006 on revenue of $752 million.
update: GTA and OctopusTravel belong to another division of Travelport called simply GTA
Great blog, Guillaume. I use it as a resource for my classes (the link provided is to the Revenue Management class).
It was my students who did the voting for the Travel Mole shortlist. There are some great sites out there, including the re-worked Sheraton, that were not even nominated. The short list, unfortunately, only reflects the 'best' of sites that had been nominated.
Therefore, I have recommended new categories for future Awards, e.g. best use of a mashup, best industry blog, best use of video, best tech for onsite customer service and so forth.
A further recommnedation is to use the blogger network and generate a more robust list of nominations.
If the good folks at Travel Mole act on the recommendation for next year...you heard it here first in your blog.
Posted by: E Caige | Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 05:39 PM