2015 › November

No one has been pushing for hotel groups to develop better meetings industry content than Skift. While Connect+ is an impressive move by Hilton in that regard, there's a lot of opportunity here for more authentic content and intuitive content delivery.

Virgin's unique position comes with its own challenges, but it also allows the airline to go it alone when necessary, confident its relationship with its best passengers will help it out.

It's all about scale for Expedia. The company can use its expertise to add vacation rentals to heighten conversion, which in turn enables Expedia to spend more on marketing. That's good for vacation rentals and, in theory, for hotels as well as it should generate increased demand.

Three or four years ago, when Booking.com was trouncing Expedia quarter after quarter, you might have wondered why the Expedia CEO still had a job. Now he and Expedia-Trivago-Hotels.com-Travelocity-Orbitz-Wotif-HomeAway are on a big-time roll -- a rollup that's unprecedented in online travel.

From a financial perspective, charging a booking fee to travelers was the missing piece from HomeAway -- and the company telegraphed several months ago that it was coming. Charging travelers fees will enable HomeAway to lower commissions to vacation rental owners to be more competitive with Airbnb and Flipkey.

With more than one million paid listings in more than 190 countries, Expedia's pending acquisition of HomeAway is a game-changer in that it saves Expedia years of building up its own vacation rental supply in an increasingly important lodging sector.

Countries like Singapore and Malaysia will soon become the top international destinations for Chinese cruisers.

These are the newest travel startups from AngelList vying for travelers’ interest and investors’ attention.