JAL preps the largest travel IPO of the year, China's two largest online travel agencies do battle, and more items in our roundup of the stories that are making news and driving opinion on 20 August.Japan Airlines to IPO later next monthJAL’s IPO will be the next-largest globally this year after Facebook's, the year's largest travel IPO, and the fourth-biggest IPO in Japan ever. In a gimmick, the world's most profitable airline will give anyone who buys shares and hangs on to them for three years a really cheap long-distance plane ticket.
CTrip hits the skidsCTrip, which claims to be China’s largest online travel agency, saw its
share price drop to its lowest in three years.
Analysts downgraded the stock on news that rival
Qunar, which also claims to be China's largest OTA and is an arm of the giant
Baidu.com, has decide to place wholesalers' hotel inventory on its site.
Inventive IT has another travel industry success
SiteMinder adds sales staff
German business travelers are relatively skeptical of mobile devices
Polls of 1,000 business travelers in each of six countries -- the US, the UK, China, India, Germany, and Brazil -- found that German travelers carried the fewest mobile devices on average. A third of Germans say they only carry one or two devices on a trip, compared with the four or five device average among the other nationalities.
Germans were also the only one of the six nationalities where a majority of business travelers said mobile technology is overrated. The survey was commissioned by
Four Points Sheraton.
NB Photo courtesy of
CTrip.