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25 Moments that Mattered in 2015: To make our selection of 25 moments, we thought back to the stories that drove reader engagement and sparked discussion among both travel experts and the general public. Some stories were quick blips that represented bigger things while others were narratives that built slowly through out the year. Each one, though, spoke to where we are right now when it comes to the big business of global travel.
Skift broke the story more than a year ago that Amazon would attempt to transform its heavily discounted and sporadic hotel-booking service and seek to get serious about hotels, offering hoteliers the chance to sell their rooms on an ongoing basis at published rates.
It launched Amazon Destinations in April, as a limited service that focused on hotel stays within driving distance of several locales in the Pacific Northwest, Southern California and the Northeast. Then it abruptly shut down its hotel business with little notice in October.
Asked why Amazon obliterated the service, a spokesperson merely said that the company had learned a lot from the experience.
Perhaps the situation was best-summed up obliquely recently by Expedia CFO Mark Okerstrom, who said at a financial conference, without specifically mentioning Amazon, “And I think that like many before them have found, it’s not as easy as coming up with a website, it’s different.”
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Tags: 25 moments 2015, amazon, otas
Photo credit: Amazon tried a more robust travel product in 2016 and then it gave up. Skift