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Florida tourism board mines data to attract visitors
DestinationsPalm Beach County, Florida, loses 8,000 jobs every year between March and August. That’s 12 percent of the leisure and hospitality jobs, one of the county and state’s most important industries, and it’s 1.6 percent of the county’s total nonfarm jobs. Imagine if that didn’t happen. “Our role should be to alleviate that as much [...]
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Hospitality data startup Duetto raises $10 million in first round
DigitalDuetto Research, a startup focused on big data technology for the travel and hospitality industry, announced a $10 million first round financing today. The funding was led by Battery Ventures and Altimeter Capital, with participation from existing investors Thayer Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff. The company’s main product is Duetto Edge, a revenue [...]
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The U.S. hotel industry will end 2012 with high marks all around
RoomsThe hotel industry had a thriving year through November and is expected to end on a similar note in the coming weeks, says hotel industry analysis firm STR. Data released on preliminary 2012 year-end results found that hotel supply, demand, ADR, and occupancy had all increased in 2012. The exact numbers are as follows: Increases [...]
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Ten big data dilemmas that travel companies are working through
SkiftXI’ve spent the last six months talking to business travel executives from across the spectrum- marketing, pricing, performance strategy, analytics, IT, CRM and more. Despite the breadth of job roles, they all have one thing in common. Every single one of the professionals I spoke to is dealing with copious amounts of internal DATA. Data management [...]
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TripAdvisor acquires Wanderfly to build out its social travel efforts
DigitalIt’s another pivot for Wanderfly — into the arms of hotel-review site TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor has acquired “travel inspiration site” Wanderfly, though no more details were forthcoming. Wanderfly had raised around $1.4 million in funding to date, and knowing TripAdvisor’s acquisition pattern of picking up sites/apps on the cheap and Wanderfly’s lack of traction in the [...]
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Google gets exclusive access to open transport data from German railway
DigitalDeutsche Bahn, the German railway company, is entirely owned by the state. So you may think it reasonable that its timetable data should be freely available, in line with the open data trend that’s growing so quickly in Europe. Think again. Not long ago, an enterprising group of open data enthusiasts calling themselves openPlanB got [...]
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What’s behind Hopper’s $22 million gamble on big data travel planning?
DigitalHopper CEO Frederic Lalonde says “planning a trip can be tedious and frustrating,” and takes a long time, and the same can undoubtedly be said about Hopper, which was founded in 2007 and is still in private beta. But news that Hopper picked up $12 million in funding in a round led by OMERS Ventures and [...]
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TripAdvisor’s friendship with Facebook hits its bottom line this quarter
DigitalTripAdvisor has been diversifying its paid-search marketing away from Google and toward Facebook, and its stock took a beating over the last couple of days because of the new strategy. That’s because the new search engine marketing tactic, which is designed to increase partner conversions when users navigate from TripAdvisor to its hotel and online [...]
