The U.S. Dept. of Transportation completed a review and found that Virgin America remains in compliance as a U.S. citizen, and the two agreed that the airline would make some changes to ensure that it remains in good standing. From a marketing perspective, you have to love Virgin America's press release headline trumpeting the DOT finding: Virgin America Cleared for Take-Off in 2010: U.S. Airline [my italics] Applauds DOT Decision Reaffirming Fitness and Citizenship... Read More

Most popular travel websites in the US for the week ending January 9 2010. Data includes Top Ten travel search terms and the Top Ten Agency, Airline and Destination/Accommodation sites.... Read More

Travel social network WAYN has been through a number of incarnations over the years and is now considering a move to add gaming functionality as a result of seeing FourSquare's early success. WAYN completely overhauled its user interface and proposition in April 2009 as a result of a wide-ranging review of the entire business in the face of competition and growth from the likes of Facebook. Now, co-founder Jerome Touze admits that the concept of adding some kind of gaming element into the WAYN system has become attractive following the rapid growth and broadly positive critical reaction to FourSquare in late-2009.... Read More

Germany-based user review site Trivago says the average price of a hotel room across European is falling dramatically with some cities selling nights for almost half the price of January 2009. The continental hotel room price is around Euro 100 per night, down 12% year-on-year as hotels slash rates to help keep properties occupied. The massive drop demonstrates the difficulty the hotel industry is still seeing in terms of getting customers to book during what is still a serious global economic upheaval and widespread disruption to existing travel plans as a result of bad weather across the continent.... Read More

The FlyGlobespan saga continues apace - credit card payment firm E-Clear is in the High Court this week - and administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers clearly needs to find some money for creditors. Running alongside the various financial shenanigans surrounding the case is news that PWC is trying to sell the Globespan's "wonderful customer details". PWC is so excited that it even sent out a tweet.... Read More

Most popular travel websites in the UK for the week ending January 9 2010. Data includes Top Ten travel search terms and the Top Ten Agency, Airline and Destination/Accommodation sites.... Read More

Not a typo - just an illustration of the lengths companies such as Travelocity will go to in order to snap up domain names needed for when users mistype a brand name. The Sabre-owned online travel agency has just won a case through the National Arbitration Forum in the US to get its hands on Traveolcity.com. Officials argued that the existing owner Enom was using the domain in "bad faith" and trading links to Travelocity competitors.... Read More

Recently I have been looking at the user experience with a lot of online travel booking engines and other search tools. Frankly they mostly suck. This is in the main because this is not simple or easy. There are too many dimensions to the process. But that doesn’t mean that we have to put up with poor user experience in the main today.... Read More

Exclusive to Tnooz and almost straight out of the cutting room, Travelocity has released a round of new Roaming Gnome-led TV adspots as the battle for OTA supremacy heats up. The new collection - the first one of two is included here - comes as Expedia rebrands and unveils the first of its three new TV commercials. Centred as always on the infamous Gnome and his bizarre adventures around the world, Cabin Fever is the latest episode and is targeting ski fans in North America.... Read More

What you missed on Tnooz this week, Sunday 3 to Saturday 9 January 2010. Read on to see the most commented articles, the most controversial topic, and every other article this week...... Read More

Kayak, a metasearch engine and deal publisher, says it will begin to be a provider of exclusive hotel deals. Kayak began soliciting people on Twitter to sign up for the exclusive deals, called Private Sales, before it goes live. This has been in the works for several months, and apparently the debut of private sales is inching closer. Kayak says the hotel deals, which will be exclusively available to Kayak users who sign up, will feature hotel deals up to 50% off and will last until the inventory is gone.... Read More

Travelocity has taken its ExperienceFinder feature and used it as the basis of several new deal-search tools that it has quietly rolled out over the last several weeks. Within a new Deals Toolkit are Travelocity's first desktop application, map-based shopping and a customizable deals engine, which has filters to enable consumers to search for flight and package deals by inputting theme choices such as romance, beach or family destinations. Troy Whitsett, who headed up the design for the project, says with these tools full of graphics and filters in one display "above the fold," little scrolling is necessary. Travelocity basically is giving consumers focused on bargains a concise, customizable and visual way to sort and search for their next getaways.... Read More

Airport security technology firms, perhaps seeing the bounty ahead if - as expected - governments around the world impose stricter checks on passengers, are questioning the performance of the controversial full body scanners. One such company is Guardian Technologies International which backs claims in UK media this week that the widely talked about scanners do not accurately detect low-density explosives such as liquid and powder explosives. The company has a product of its own to peddle, the PinPoint threat detection and identification system, but equally it raises an interesting point if the much lauded body scanners are unable to pick up the very materials that the recent alleged Northwest 253 bomber had on his possession.... Read More

More than three weeks after dropping a controversial social media policy for 2010 and stating that it likely would move "very quickly" on drafting changes, Carnival Cruise Lines still has not published a social media policy for 2010. A CCL spokeswoman says "it's still being looked at right now with no specific timeline." The initial 2010 policy, which was Carnival's first attempt at addressing social media, kicked off a storm of criticism because it would have prohibited the cruise line's travel agency partners from using any CCL trademarks on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any blog.... Read More

Thomson Holidays has admitted responsibility for what it says is a website error which saw its Build-Your-Own package holidays sold against incorrect insurance protection notices. Online Terms and Conditions for the TUI-owned brand's BYO holidays indicated that products were not covered by Thomson's ATOL bond when in fact, the company says now, they were. The error comes against an unfortunate backdrop of the ongoing war-of-words against online travel agency TravelRepublic, which won a court case against the UK's Civil Aviation Authority in November 2009 over its own decision not to ATOL-protect customers who build their own holidays.... Read More