The European travel technology sector has seen its first major financial collapse of the current recession - BlueSky Travel Systems, based in Manchester, UK, has gone into administration this week. The company employs around 100 people and counts Thomas Cook, Mark Warner, First Choice and Slattery’s Travel amongst its roster of clients. Rumours of BlueSky's demise was confirmed by Steve Driscoll, former managing director and founder who still has a financial interest in the business.... Read More

TravelTainment, the Amadeus-owned technology brand, is well known for its focus on research and development - an area of the business championed by its enthusiastic chief executive, Andrew Owen-Jones. Add Microsoft Surface into the mix and the result is a rather exciting interesting technology prototype for travel agencies. TravelTainment purchased a Surface table earlier this year and started developing a number of applications over the summer.... Read More

British Airways will be hoping some of the features included in its new premium service from London City Airport to New York will deflect attention away from the negative press it has received in recent days. Much has been said about the unfortunate stopover for fuel in Shannon, Ireland, and the cost of a ticket coming in at around £4,000. Couple these with noise from the environmental lobby, which has taken the airline to task for launching a business class-only, transatlantic product with aircraft (Airbus A318) that have just 32 seats.... Read More

TripIt, the itinerary management company, has entered into its first distribution relationship with an online travel agency, Hotwire. Once the deal gets implemented in several months, Hotwire customers will be able to make a booking and click a button to automatically send their details to a TripIt itinerary. It would replace the current system, where Hotwire users - and customers of any other travel-booking service - have to e-mail their confirmations to TripIt to aggregate their reservations.... Read More

Virgin Atlantic has been quietly exposing elements of a new website to consumers over the past few weeks and is now ready to throw open the doors to customers around the world. The airline's core market in the UK will be the first to see a spruced-up homepage ahead of other new features being added on a regular basis over the coming months. Users of its country sites elsewhere will notice a switch shortly, say staff working on the project.... Read More

Facebook now has 300 million users and became cash-flow positive last quarter, perhaps a year ahead of projections, according to the Facebook blog. Suddenly, muse pundits like Alex Salkever of DailyFinance say Google should consider throwing in the towel. That’s because 80 percent of brands are now advertising on Facebook, and the ads are better- targeted and more cost-effective than Google pitches, which can’t go viral like Facebook ads, Salkever explains.... Read More

Hot on the heels of the announcement yesterday from network provider Orange that it would be selling Apple iPhone handsets to customers later this year, comes news of a similar deal for iPhones from Vodafone, another of the UK's mobile giants. Vodafone might be slightly bruised at missing out on the consumer and tech PR frenzy won yesterday by O2, but Apple will clearly be delighted at the momentum.... Read More

Airlines, it turns out, are pretty serious about beefing-up their own websites. I say that somewhat facetiously because, of course, airline direct-to-consumer distribution has been a priority for years. But, a new Air France-KLM Group agreement with iSeatz, the New Orleans-based technology company and inventory aggregator, symbolizes a renewed carrier push to, as iSeatz puts it, knock online travel agencies “further out of the food chain.”... Read More

Tnooz Node in Marseille Claude Benard secured an exclusive interview with Phillipe Fabry, ICT executive at tourism development organisation Atout France. Fabry explains how French DMOs and his own organisation are developing etourism strategies and embracing social media, mobile and complex technology to drive visitors to the country... Read More

I may have been caught out in one of my predictions for 2009 and it might be worth me starting with a possible mea culpa. In January 2009 I kick off the year with a post that made five (adjusted to six) predictions for 2009. The most controversial of these was that 2009 would NOT be year for mobile.... Read More

There is a dilemma facing many travel companies when they decide that implementing online user reviews is one of the best ways to improve their content and trigger some user interaction. European tour operating giant Thomas Cook Group’s Direct Holidays division is the latest in a seemingly endless line to have found itself with such a problem – create a review platform from scratch, borrow reviews from a friendly affiliate or white label an existing service? In this case, despite the opportunity to borrow a large number of hotel reviews from the main thomawscook.com site, Direct Holidays has decided to build its own service.... Read More

The just-launched Google Sidewiki is informative and pretty fun to play with even as it tends to disintermediate website publishers and fragments comments about their content. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is correct that the proliferation of review websites and blogs has made website owners much more open to free-flowing, few-holds barred commentary. So, yes, the gamut of publishers may not have the same visceral reaction that they had earlier in this decade. However, I think Arrington seriously underestimates the push-back and tempest which I believe Sidewiki will generate.... Read More

In a short blog post Dopplr has this morning confirmed that their rumoured sale to Nokia has completed successfully. So it's about the data. Interconnected data. One of the challenges with Dopplr is that it relies heavily on the network effect. The network, collectively, becomes more useful the more people join. This is true of most social networks.... Read More

News today from Orange that the Apple iPhone will finally be available in the UK to users its network and not just those than O2 will probably boost the chances of 2009 being the “Year of the Mobile” for travel, as so many have predicted. So while anger over roaming charges remains a problem, pushing the iPhone to yet another of the UK’s large service providers will not only boost sales of Apple handsets but also enhance the general connectivity of consumers on-the-go. This, some say, is an issue which has dogged mobile as a critical channel for travel brands. Nevertheless, interactivity still appears to focus around a key areas – something that examining the iPhone app charts can illustrate.... Read More

We are officially celebrating the one year anniversary of the GFC - Global Financial Crisis meltdown. I think by now much of the stories and speculation have been written. So let's look at some website traffic stats and see if there is anything we can deduce from them.... Read More