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

Hugely intriguing move at Thomas Cook, one of Europe's biggest vertically integrated tour operators, with the discovery that customers who build their own package holiday are in fact going on an Expedia trip. Thomas Cook has yet to officially announce the change but Tnooz has learned that any customer who books a bundled deal (flight and hotel) is already being serviced by Expedia white label offshoot Worldwide Travel Exchange (WWTE). The partnership is not simply a technological one - customers on a bundled deal are financially protected under an ATOL belonging to Travelscape (a little-known Expedia name often used to front its white labels), rather than the Cook's ATOL bond.... Read More

A little less than a year after the Travel Industry Association and the CEO-based Travel Business Roundtable merged, the rebranded US Travel Association has unveiled its new website. The website runs on an open-source LAMP platform and uses Drupal for content management. Eric Weber, U.S. Travel's vice president of technology, says the redesign project, which took one year from concept to rollout, was shaped in the following manner, and the formula may be useful for other companies undertaking similar tasks.... Read More

Expedia has confirmed its new logo and branding will be extended to other country sites - but the widely debated new tagline may be modified market-by-market. An official says the company plans to roll out the new image worldwide over time but it has yet to make a decision if the "Where You Book Matters" script will accompany it. The new marketing is being accompanied by three TV adspots in the US - the first of which launched this week.... Read More

The result of a defamation case in Paris, France, has shed light on the lengths companies will go to if search engines are providing users with incorrect or damaging information. The case, involving the Centre National Privé de Formation a Distance (CNFDI) and Google, centres on the search giant's automatic drop-down on its homepage query box. The system attempts to predict what a user is looking for and puts forward suggestions and the number of results available.... Read More

AirFareWatchdog has relaunched its website as it looks to push into new markets outside of the US including a dedicated version for UK travellers. The TripAdvisor-owned brand launched five years ago and was snapped up by the Expedia Inc powerhouse in 2008 as part of its wider strategy to develop additional brands through its Smarter Travel Media division. The new AirFarewatchdog site was cleaned up for the New Year period with a simpler user interface, says founder George Hobica.... Read More

Expedia Inc. historically has dabbled less in metasearch than Orbitz Worldwide and some of its other online travel agency competitors, but CEO Dara Khosrowshahi now is bullish on the channel. "We'll play in metasearch and we think metasearch will be around forever," Khosrowshahi told attendees at Citi's 20th Annual Global Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications Conference in San Francisco Jan. 5. At the advent of travel metasearch several years ago, the channel was widely seen as a supplier medium that might bring the OTAs to their knees, but much has changed since then.... Read More