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Expedia Shocks Travel Industry And Customers, Actually Lowers Fees

November 6, 2009 at 5:24 PM | by Omri | 0 Comments

Expedia just announced they're waiving their $20 fee for the 7% of Americans who book their itineraries over the phone, establishing themselves in a niche and sticking a finger in the eyes of competitors. Airline centers mostly charge $5-$35 for telephone bookings—Southwest is the only exception—while Orbitz and Travelocity charge $25 per ticket. Priceline doesn't even offer that option.

This won't be much use to us, since our calls to booking agents are limited to rants about the impossibility of reserving rewards travel these days. But Expedia had already eliminated flight booking fees online, and it's nice to see anyone cutting any fee for any reason, no matter how marginal or symbolic the gesture:

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Kayak Launches Massive Old-Fashioned Ad Blitz

November 2, 2009 at 1:54 PM | by Omri | 0 Comments

You'd think the recession would have catapulted price comparison engine Kayak.com into universal traveler awareness. The company's internal figures, though, tell a different story. Less than 1/3 of the more than 100 million Americans who use travel booking sites know about Kayak. Even less are able to differentiate Kayak from similar-on-first-look but significantly different competitors like Expedia. In a move that's bound to raise eyebrows in the travel industry and among travel advertisers, the company is shifting their resources into a massive offline ad campaign.

The new ad blitz was launched over the weekend and is set to blanket primetime cable through 2010. CNN, ESPN, and MSNBC have all been selected as venues, presumably on numbers promising that most coveted of travel industry demographics: 25-44 year olds with disposable income. Forbes.com has a full writeup on the campaign, including a description of one of the "witty 30 second spots":

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Brits Can Win Their Dream Break With 20 Words Or Less

October 16, 2009 at 8:59 AM | by amandak | 0 Comments

We like winning stuff, so we pricked up our ears when we heard that UK-based travel booking site superbreak is running the Build Your Dream Break contest. You could win the chance to create your own short vacation—up to the value of £1,000 ($1,600), anyway.

The contest closes on October 31 and involves describing what your dream break would be like in 20 words or less. It might sound simple, but we think that it'd take us a few more sentences than that to explain our dreams. Although if you check the terms and conditions it sounds like the winner will be drawn at random, so perhaps the quality of your 20 words isn't all that important.

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American Airlines' New 'Black Atlas' Network Targets Minority Travelers

October 12, 2009 at 11:18 AM | by JetSetCD | 0 Comments

Does the world really need another traveler social network? A whimpered "yes?" comes from the direction of American Airlines, who this week will be launching BlackAtlas.com, a part-facebook, part-travel guide serving as "your passport to the black experience." Indeed they are targeting African-American air travelers, who want to read articles titled "5 1/2 Things About Brooklyn" and watch videos about places like "Sonia's Hair Salon" in Madrid.

The Site doesn't officially launch until Thursday the 15th, but from sneak peek screenshots and more, we're thinking it looks like an expensive new toy for an airline which maybe shouldn't be spending that money right now.

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'Jetsetter' Launches, Introduces Travel World To Trip Sample Sales

September 30, 2009 at 5:57 PM | by JetSetCD | 1 Comment

We warned you they were coming: vacation sample sales from the luxury discount shopping site Gilt.com. The site launched today, along with their new iPhone app, and they're beginning their life pretty strong, offering "discounted" rates on hotel rooms and cruises from top names like Seabourn Yachts and Peninsula Hotels.

So are you getting a deal? First, the "sample sales" are tremendously limited in time, so you better know that when you're headed to New York in order to book a deal at The Standard New York, prices starting at $225. Now we've definitely stayed there for less, so you have to understand that these sale prices are off the rack rate, which is pretty easy to get around in the first place if you search all the usual travel booking sites.

Even "private" islands get the Jetsetter treatment, after the jump.

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Tips And Tricks For Scoring The Best Priceline Rental Car Rate

August 14, 2009 at 10:24 AM | by Omri | 0 Comments

Priceline is dicey for some things, good for others, and fantastic for a very few. There's an anti-Priceline argument to be made for airlines because flying is enough of a hassle without adding in unpredictability. Hotels are much better, since if you're flexible on location you can pretty much control everything else. Rental cars, however, are all the way at the great end of the "Priceline is awesome" spectrum, since car companies are functionally interchangeable and for the purposes of a short trip, a car is a car is a car.

Name-Your-Own-Price car rentals come with the usual Priceline disadvantages. As always, bids are non-refundable and changes are unavailable. Car rentals specifically also come with the caveat that you can't bid on one way trips.

That said, car rentals also come with the usual array of advantages. Just out of the box, you're likely to get 20%-30% off the discount price. You can push the price down even more by using the usual array of insider Priceline strategies.

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Expedia Incorporates SeatGuru Into Their Flight Booking Fun

August 4, 2009 at 3:21 PM | by Omri | 0 Comments

There's been a bit of buzz going around about the new "partnership" between Expedia and SeatGuru. The agreement will allow Expedia, which is owned by Expedia Inc. which owns TripAdvisor which owns SeatGuru, to integrate SeatGuru's plane-by-plane, seat-by-seat reviews into Expedia's interface. Here's the lo-down:

The partnership, announced today, integrates SeatGuru flyer reviews of airplane seats into the seat maps for most flights sold on Expedia.com. This development marks the first time user-generated airline content is available on an online travel booking site.

First things first. The reviews are not "user-generated reviews from real flyers." They're the same carefully crafted reviews that SeatGuru has always had. This is not "the first time user-generated airline content is available on an online travel booking site." Southwest has had an online community going for a while now. And it's not really an "exclusive partnership" since SeatGuru data will still be available even if you don't use Expedia.

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Are Vacation Sample Sales In Our Future? Gilt.com Hints At New Site

July 24, 2009 at 9:39 AM | by JetSetCD | 4 Comments

Update 08/11: Racked.com reports that the new site is called "Jetsetter" and is accepting pre-launch sign-ups here.

Could we be on the verge of purchasing travel in an entirely new way? If the founders of the uber-successful upscale sample sale website Gilt Groupe have anything to say about it, choosing and purchasing your vacation will become an adrenaline-fueled, timed transaction that mimics the way their fashion site works now.

We just happened to be at last night's Racked.com panel discussion on the future of retail, where Alexandra Wilkis Wilson of Gilt divulged their plans to move beyond selling discounted designer clothing overstock and into the world of selling hotel rooms, vacation home rentals, and trip packages. They will be luxe, of course, and "ski chalets" were especially named.

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Dopplr's iPhone App Tracks Trips And Doles Out Tips

July 23, 2009 at 11:04 AM | by JetSetCD | 3 Comments

While it's beginning to seem like you aren't a relevant, modern business if you don't have an iPhone app, the latest to join the club just seems like they should have had one all along. It's Dopplr, the trip detail-tracking website which we've been using to plot our travel hops since it was still an invite-only site.

As Dopplr moves toward incorporating more Yelp-like content of recommended restaurants and more, the site and app even welcomes those who haven't created a trip profile, since now and then everyone just needs a little help making decisions in a foreign place. Utilizing the iPhone's GPS function, the Dopplr app will spot you in the world and reveal great places to dine, sight-see, and sleep as recommended by other Dopplr users. But it also deals out the features we've come to know and love about the Dopplr website:

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Gliider.com Wants To Help You 'Plan Funner Trips'

July 20, 2009 at 5:39 PM | by Omri | 3 Comments

Launching a new travel web app has to be hard. The market is already saturated with search engines, trackers, planners, search engines that double as trackers, trackers built into planners, and so on. In addition to finding a niche, raising capital, and designing the site, startups then have to reach out to busy travelers - to say nothing of jaded travel bloggers - to get them to try the new site.

So when the new site Gliider.com was launched, its creators released an instructional video and passed it around the intertubes. We're not sure why they choose a Keanu Reeves sound-a-like to narrate it, just like we have our doubts about the site itself, but here you go:

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Virgin Launches VTravelled.com Online Travel Community

June 23, 2009 at 11:16 AM | by JetSetCD | 0 Comments

Hot on the heels of Virgin Atlantic's 25th Anniversary flight and celebration, good old Richard Branson is launching yet another new product into the travel ring. But this time, it's not a spaceship or a smartphone; it's a website: vtravelled.

Taking serious inspiration from Dopplr, vtravelled focuses its content around "Trip Pods" that you create for each of your trips. In their words, a Trip Pod is "a tool to store and organise travel ideas and aspirations. It’s easy to bookmark content from other sites and then share with friends and family to create the ultimate itinerary." These pods are then scattered around a map of the world, powered by Google, with each featuring a photo that you have to upload.

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RentaBikeNow Makes Two Wheels Almost As Easy To Borrow As Four

June 23, 2009 at 9:22 AM | by BS | 0 Comments

Our number one travel biking request here at Jaunted is for cheap, Velib-style bike-sharing in every city on earth, but until that happens, we’ll settle for a national bike rental service that makes hopping on two wheels as easy as renting a car.

On the path to this is RentaBikeNow.com, a web-based company that partners with bike shops to provide rentals in 157 different cities across the U.S. and Canada. The site launched a few months back and got a boost recently when Lance Armstrong’s coach, Chris Carmichael, shouted them out on twitter.

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