BCD Travel unveiled a new global hotel division and branded service, Stay by BCD Travel, for managing hotel programs.
The division will be led by April Bridgeman, who assumed the newly created role of SVP of hotel solutions two months ago while retaining oversight of the travel management company's consulting arm, Advito.
Bridgeman spoke with BTN lodging editor Donna M. Airoldi about the strategies behind the new hotel initiative.
Airbnb Adventures features more than 200 tours that are either exclusive to Airbnb, or provided by operators not typically found on any other major booking platform.
The platform describes the tours as “bucket list-worthy multi-day experiences hosted by local experts that take groups to epic, off-the-beaten-path locations and immerses them in unique cultures and communities”.
The new venture is an offshoot of Airbnb Experiences, which launched in 2016 to travellers to boost excursions, classes and activities.
Expedia has been fined more than $300,000 for selling travel packages to Cuba – including to Cuban nationals – that breached US sanctions.
In news that will reverberate around the global travel industry, the Seattle-based firm agreed to pay $325,406 for providing travel to Cuba, or to Cuban nationals, in breach of laws that have been in place since 1963.
The travel involved 2,221 persons and took place between between 2011 and 2014, a time before restrictions were briefly lifted after Barack Obama and Raul Castro brokered a diplomatic breakthrough between the two countries in December 2014.
Despite widespread adoption of online booking tools by corporations, driving traveler use of those channels remains a struggle for many organizations.
A new study indicates that simplified and streamlined booking processes may move the needle. Of the 202 corporate travel buyers that the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and American Express Global Business Travel surveyed globally, 92 percent have adopted online booking tools, while 81 percent mandate that travelers book through the such platforms.
However, less than 5 percent of those surveyed reported full adoption of the OBT, and just 59 percent reported more than 70 percent adoption. Meanwhile, 5 percent of travel buyers reported less than 10 percent adoption.
Travel marketing is all about capturing the imagination of the audience and while this can be easily done with stunning images of a service or a product and big personalities, there is another way.
A small budget can make the desired engagement with a brand seem impossible to achieve, but a little bit of creativity can go a long way.
Break from the norm and tap into an element of travel that has often been overlooked to get the greatest return on investment (ROI). If that seems like an unachievable dream, look to these campaigns to see how it’s done.
Video is coming in fast and hard to dominate both the entertainment and marketing space.
The preference for video content is not just limited to streaming online movies and shows or watching YouTube video clips, video is now extending into brands with studies showing that consumers (over 50%) are interested in video content from brands or businesses that they support.
Facing the growing demand by users for more visual content, more brands are building video into their marketing strategy to build sales, brand awareness, trust, and a growing customer base. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook are the most common.
Apple: iMovie update adds new tools useful for video marketers
Following a wave of unprecedented growth and major client wins, IDeaS continues worldwide, multi-vertical expansion plans.
IDeaS Revenue Solutions will showcase its cutting-edge revenue science technology products at the Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition and Conference (HITEC).
This year’s HITEC convention in Minneapolis, home to IDeaS’ corporate headquarters, corresponds with IDeaS’ 30th anniversary. Founded in 1989, IDeaS pioneered revenue science and has blazed new trails ever since for the hospitality and travel industry, and the past year has brought new levels of success to the thriving technology organization.
A Fort Lauderdale woman and her attorney reached settlements with at least 20 hotels and motels in Florida because their websites’ reservations systems “failed to provide any information regarding the accessibility of the hotel or rooms”.
The surge in lawsuits is partly due to a lack of clarification around ADA, which was enacted back in 1990, before the rise of the internet. The law only provided the requirements for businesses’ physical locations to properly accommodate disabled individuals but didn’t provide any guidance for the internet, or web-based and mobile applications.
Instead, hoteliers have to make their best judgment based on the suggested guidelines from the Worldwide Web Consortium or W3C - the governing body of the web.
