Top Stories
-
The real-world challenges for travel startups, as mirrored in Hipmunk’s story
DigitalHipmunk co-founder and CEO Adam Goldstein, 25, believes his flight and hotel metasearch company can one day be larger than Kayak, and with $20.2 million in funding and revenue that has trickled in from the moment Hipmunk debuted, he thinks he has the time to prove it. “We think we can be bigger,” Goldstein says, [...]
-
Five startups that want to define the future of travel in five different ways
DigitalBetween business and leisure travel, transportation that ranges from planes to bikes, and booking platforms for everything from hotels to tours, there are endless opportunities to define the future of travel. This week’s SkiftSeedlings speaks to that breadth of opportunity by including everything from a media company looking to launch the world’s largest consumer travel [...]
-
Dubai hotel goes overboard with iPads: Hands out $10,000, gold-plated tablets
DestinationsGuests at the self-proclaimed world’s most-luxurious hotel, the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, are being bestowed with a new privilege on arrival – a gold-plated iPad. As lesser hotels struggle to provide free wi-fi, guests at the Burj Al Arab, one the world’s tallest hotels, are being offered one of the 24-carat devices, worth £6,715, [...]
-
Top ten iPhone apps for business travelers
DigitalTravel is high-tech – especially for business travellers who need to stay in touch with the office and keep communications secure. An iPhone or iPad can be a handy tool to finding your way around an unfamiliar city, but now it can also be used to check in at your hotel – as our feature [...]
-
Google Glass: No relief from privacy invasion even at the urinal
DigitalThe future came crashing down on me this week at the Google I/O developer conference while I stood at a bathroom urinal. I had just wrapped up a conversation with a man who owned a pair of Google’s Internet-connected glasses, Google Glass. He had explained that one of the gadget’s greatest features is the ability [...]
-
How Google creatively maps terrain too tight for cars
DigitalMost people know about the fleet of Google cars that go around filming streets. But what about the submarines and the tricycles and the backpacks? At Google I/O this week, the company showed off the collection of off-road gear it uses to map the places the cars can’t go.
-
Distracted flying? Pilots text controllers about flight conditions
TransportPilots and air-traffic controllers texting each other? OMG! Your airline flight is finally starting to communicate the way the rest of the world does. Controllers and pilots aren’t using their cellphones to text, even though many passengers now do using apps and in-flight Wi-Fi. Instead, planes with modern cockpit systems can log on to new [...]
-
TripIt reveals preferred seat tracker details for TripIt Pro subscribers
TransportTripIt made good on its pledge and released a Seat Tracker feature in its premium TripIt Pro product. Subscribers to the $49 per year TripIt Pro service can share their itineraries, identify their seat preferences (window or aisle, front or back of cabin, exit row or bulkhead), and then Seat Tracker alerts travelers when a [...]
-
Choice Hotels’ big three priorities on tech: cloud, mobile, big data
DigitalChoice Hotels‘ tech team has identified three tech trends it hopes to capitalize on in the next few years: cloud-based technology, mobile and big data. Having Choice’s property management system housed in the cloud–which [it] says is the first of its kind–means owners and managers can access a property’s performance data from anywhere at any [...]
-
Airlines await yet another revenue stream pending faster Wi-Fi
Transport…despite the rapid expansion of Wi-Fi on airplanes, no one has found a profitable way to cover installation costs with the scant revenue generated by the limited number of passengers who have been willing to pay for Internet service at 35,000 feet. The great advances in airplane Internet connections are being driven far more by [...]
