When the Google behemoth speaks about travel, as one official did during the company's third quarter conference call yesterday, we listen. But, all we got were more generalities and little substance about Google's intentions in the travel vertical. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president of product management, was discussing chrome [not the browser] toasters and Google's efforts to improve the shopping vertical. "Real estate, finance, and travel are also other areas that we're going to get quite focused on and obviously we will also continue to improve Google horizontally," Rosenberg said.... Read More

UK-based Simonseeks made a reasonably big splash in June this year when it launched, mostly because it looks better than your average review site, got a decent run with the PR, and is the brainchild of the co-founder of Moneysupermarket. Four months on and its latest initiative is to aggregate and review flight meta search providers, each of which provides a revenue stream to Simonseeks, as well as having an exclusive white label widget from another provider (currently Kayak). Confused? Probably.... Read More

Southwest Airlines gets a lot of love for its Bags Fly Free Campaign. which enables travelers to check two bags for free. Here's the Southwest marketing message: "While bag fees have become the norm amongst our competitors, we don’t believe in springing unpleasant surprises on our Customers. Staying true to our reputation as the maverick of the airline industry, this is just another way that we dare to be different." But, actually the airline is more myth-maker than maverick in some respects because it is busy strategizing about optimal ways of attracting ancillary-services revenue in a host of other areas.... Read More

Sometimes I have to calm myself down and reel myself in. I was thinking about that in the days following stories I wrote about how "Google Sidewiki could be a sideshow for review sites" and "Why TechCrunch is wrong about Google Sidewiki." Will consumers really take advantage of the ability to comment about a publishers' website in a side window visible only to fellow Sidewiki users? I have to admit that I haven't opened Sidewiki, which sits in my Google Toolbar, since I wrote those posts. It takes an extra step and who has the time.... Read More

Need somewhere to keep the MP3 player, batteries, camera, leads, DS, USB keys and mobile phone tidy when travelling?... Read More

Responsibletravel.com has today given its online carbon offsetting programme the chop - a move almost guaranteed to inspire differing opinions about how to highlight climate change with air travel-hungry travellers. One of the first organisations to do so, the site proudly launched its offsetting programme in 2002 and spearheaded a round of soul-searching within larger travel firms as to how they should deal with the thorny issue of selling or promoting travel at the same time as appearing to be aware of its impact on the global environment. Fast forward seven years and ResponsibleTravel has abandoned the programme, citing a Friends of the Earth report into the wider offsetting issue.... Read More

Travel guide site TripWolf is to work with guidebook brand Footprint to digitise its entire portfolio of destination content from around 60 books. Following a trial for Footprint's Peru edition, TripWolf will spend the next few weeks and months taking the original text files of the remaining guidebooks and add a string of electronic marks to make it web-friendly. CEO Sebastian Heinzel says the Footprint content will be available alongside existing material on the Tripwolf site - but will include a Footprint stamp to indicate the source.... Read More

As the U.S. Dept. of Justice apparently continues to contact customers of Farelogix and Sabre, Farelogix President and CEO Jim Davidson rejected Sabre's allegation that their developer's agreement, which Sabre terminated earlier this year, "was an attempt to free ride off of our database and systems." Davidson says Farelogix made payments to Sabre for the developer's agreement, which enabled the FLX Platform to operate side-by-side with Sabre and provide travel management companies with additional functionality as they acquired content from GDS and non-GDS sources. Davidson won't say how much those fees were. But, I'm betting I might be able to pick up and garage a 2009 Acura TL 4-door sedan with 4-wheel drive or a comparable pleasure craft for the boatload of money that Farelogix likely paid for the agreement.... Read More

French travel search engine EasyVoyage has secured a further Euro 31.6 million round of investment - an injection of capital it claims is the biggest Leveraged Buyout in the country and the fifth highest for a technology firm in Europe in 2009. The deal is part of an LBO of the business by financial investors UFG and BIMV and comes three years after an initial injection of funds to the tune of Euro 9 million in 2006. The metasearch company says it will use the money as a warchest for new acquisitions around Europe after launching a number of country sites around the continent over the past few years.... Read More

I wrote this week about the shortcomings of the Apple Vacations website despite this major tour operator's adoption of Worldspan's e-Pricing, Rapid Reprice and XML Pro technologies. Now, it turns out, Apple Vacations has ended a two-decades-old relationship with Sabre and implemented Worldspan, but so far the installation has touched the wholesaler's back-end systems only. However, in December, Apple Vacations plans to begin a phased-in half-year project to update all of its front-end systems, beginning with its proprietary Resapi for its internal agents, then moving on to its Myappleonline for travel agents, and finally to the consumer website.... Read More

The travel industry is just one of dozens of sectors which have seen what many say is a major shift from off-the-shelf, version-based technology to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). A string of travel technology providers have adopted the model amid incessant chatter in the wider tech community as to the benefits of the having a SaaS programme to run critical systems such as researvations, booking, CRM, email and accounts. But as the following clip from ZDNet explains, SaaS still accounts for just 4% of the overall global software marketplace and is only expected to double in size over the next three years.... Read More

It has become an interesting conundrum that the GDS market for airline segments has been seeing cuts that outpaced the capacity and traffic cuts from the airlines. Some of this is obvious but some is subtle and not being noticed. What is more interesting is that the GDSs should be seeing pretty significant reductions in airline based gross revenues.... Read More

GDS and technology giant Amadeus is marching headfirst toward a massive public offering of the business after appointing a number of major US banks to coordinate the process. Dow Jones [closed network] says today that the Madrid-headquartered has hired Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley to run the affairs of the IPO in the run up to a public listing. Amadeus is refusing to comment on any aspect of an IPO of the company but sources within the organisation have reiterated that a listing would probably be located in Madrid, Spain.... Read More

The plot thickens with the BlueSky-Thomas Cook saga this week as Tnooz learns of moves at the European tour operating giant to ensure its live product system continues to run smoothly. It is understood that a team of 25 ex-BlueSky Technologies staffers are working on the system for Thomas Cook either as contractors or through agencies. Thomas Cook is also believed to have submitted a bid for the intellectual property rights for the BlueSky Technologies iTour system.... Read More

Air New Zealand suffered every airline's second worst nightmare - after in-flight aircraft failure - when its computer systems went down for six hours last weekend, causing inevitable chaos and disruption. Rob Fyfe, chief executive of Air New Zealand, launched a scathing attack on IT supplier IBM for the power outage, saying in an email which unsuprisingly found its way onto the web that "we were left high and dry and this is simply unacceptable". The collapse of the airline's check-in and boarding systems led to 10,000 passengers being delayed for up to ten hours at a time as staff manually processed tickets and each flight's manifest.... Read More