American Airlines, Sabre, Uber, KLM, Ushuaia Ibiza Beach Hotel, Flip.to, EarthCam, and NextGreatPlace all appear in our roundup of the stories making news and driving opinion on 25 October.
DISTRIBUTION
KLM has selected WorldPay’s alternative payment services for the 85 countries where the airline is selling online. WorldPay offers over 200+ alternative payment types.
A jury trial started today in the case of American Airlines versus Sabre. It's a father/son spat, as American spun off the data business 12 years ago and now accuses it of trying to "crush competition." BusinessWeek has a long report.
US private car hire service Uber is expanding. Next up, Phoenix.
Did you know California's Nor1 is the leading up-sell technology platform? "To date, more than 65 million upsell offers have been made to hotel guests through Nor1’s signature eStandby Upgrade solution. Hilton, Hyatt, and Fairmont, are current customers.
SOCIAL COMMERCE
Next month, the Ushuaia Ibiza Beach Hotel will use London's World Travel Market to show off its latest technology. Created by a Spanish provider called Pay-Touch, the technology is essentially a biometric scanner which checks and matches the user’s fingerprint against a pre-registered and verified image. The hotel has twinned Facebook-sharing options with cameras, and WTM attendees will be able to post live updates via Facebook using their fingerprints.
Flip.to continues signing up hotels to its social media marketing platform, which now has a multi-language feature that lets users’ native language to convert guests into brand advocates. Flip.to claims that hotel campaigns on its platform "typically have engagement rates in the 15% to 25%.
Free live views of Istanbul's most famous landmark are now online round-the-clock. EarthCam, a New Jersey pioneer of the network camera software and distribution now lets anyone watch worshippers and tourists at the Hagia Sophia, one of the oldest houses of worship in the world.
AIRPORT TECH
SITA, the air transport IT specialist, and NEC Europe (NEC), leaders in biometric technology, will jointly provide an automated border control (ABC) gate solution. that "incorporates sophisticated face recognition, and optionally fingerprint verification for use at immigration control points at airports in the European Union." NEC face recognition technologies were ranked number one in tests carried out by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.
DIGITAL MARKETING
NextGreatPlace has launched “Work Vacation Balance” (www.workvacationbalance.com), "an innovative corporate benefit program that improves employees’ satisfaction, loyalty, retention and performance by optimizing their vacation time."
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