This is the regular Tnooz roundup of product news from around the travel, tourism and hospitality industry, all with a technology, online and digital twist - Tuesday 30 August 2011.
- Jetsetter updated its iPhone app with a bevy of new features, including 360-degree property photos and upgraded searching and filtering. Among the new wrinkles, users can activate the gyroscope feature on their iPhone or iPod touch, hold the device upright and pan around the various images by turning the device in different directions. Jetsetter says users can also access destination maps, their Jetsetter itineraries and support when offline.
- Want to impress your dining mates with your extensive culinary knowledge and worldly experience? Enter the iPhone app ($2.99) Tip This by AppInfinite. The app provides provides a supposedly definitive guide to calculate the appropriate restaurant tip, but along the way your guide, Maitre'd Malone, informs you about the correct pronunciation of foie gras (fwah grah), the history of Caviar, and the role that economic sanctions against South African wines played in ending apartheid. An appetizing app, to say the least.
- Marriott launched a new mobile application for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices this week. The hotel chain also announced the simultaneous unveiling of a new "app-like" mobile website. Both services allow users to find nearby hotels, make a booking, check upcoming reservations and obtain additional details about hotels, including photos. Marriott Rewards are also available through the platforms.
- Buuteeq, a digital marketing system for hotels, and HMS InfoTech, provider of the Hotelogix hotel management system, are collaborating through a sales and marketing partnership to offer their respective software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems together.
- MTrip bucked the trend of others that replicate their websites for a mobile service, by going the other way. Users of the company's mobile apps can now add geo-located pictures and notes to trips and sync them online on a personal page accessible via a web browser on a PC, iPad & Android Tablet.