Back in October last year, IHS Worldwide CEO Steve Rowley told a travel conference his company was buyingFastbooking.
IHS is the Battery Ventures-backed umbrella brand for the consumer facing WorldHotels website and travel technology companies, Trust International and InnLink.
You would think that when any CEO announces he is adding a major brand to the portfolio that he or she has a high degree of confidence that the deal is likely to take place.
Any doubt over an agreement not closing would surely put the brakes on telling the industry until there was something more concrete to say.
In the case of Fastbooking, the France-based hotel technology provider, Rowley told the WebInTravel conference in Singapore that employees of both companies had been told of the imminent deal.
Such an acquisition made a lot of sense, in some respects, for IHS.
It had already acquired InnLink earlier in 2014 and therefore buying Fastbooking would have given it another weapon to its growing arsenal of hospitality services.
Fastbooking would have given IHS access to web development, booking engines, search marketing services and channel management tools, bolstering the technology it gained from reservation system provider Innlink and sales management specialist Nexus.
But during the five-month period following the announcement in Singapore, something clearly went awry.
In fact, despite talks clearly at a very advanced stage and Rowley being bold enough to tell an audience of travel execs, with members of the press present, the deal to buy Fastbooking never materialised at all.
Neither company will talk about why the acquisition failed to see the light of day (Fastbooking declined to comment, whilst IHS has not responded to two requests for comment).
But it is understood that the exclusive negotiations ended abruptly shortly after Rowley's announcement in November after the parties failed to reach agreement.
Since that public notification, both organisations have quietly made no mention of it all, clearly hoping the industry would forget and the story would be lost in the ether of noise and deals that emerge on a daily basis elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Fastbooking has dismissed recent reports in France suggesting it is an acquisition target for a major consumer brand in the industry.