2016 › November

In the same way that R&K has made the world larger with its travel reporting, expect them to do the same in this new form.

The Standard and Bunkhouse properties have developed highly engaged communities of loyal guests and local residents due to their carefully curated design and social spaces unique to their neighborhoods.

We at Skift will try and make sense of the epochal changes ahead, for ourselves, for this industry we so dearly love, and for the world curious about the future of travel and our industry.

TripAdvisor stated earlier this year that its transition to transactions, or Instant Booking, would show progress in the second half of 2016. There is indeed a morsel of progress but not enough to satisfy investors and other critics.

Despite the rapid shifts already caused by mobile, even bigger changes are on the horizon as voice search, artificial intelligence, and conversational messaging are transforming how travelers interact with travel brands. While there is a lot of excitement around the promise of each of these technologies, we now face the challenge of implementing them.

The very nature of investment in the travel startup space remains complicated. A lot of hype but also plenty of opportunity and big payouts for those who can bring together the right tech, the right user experience, for the right market segments. This report delves into what has worked and what investors should be paying attention to moving into 2017.

What a year it has been for Facebook and the travel industry and it's not over yet. For a company with the unparalleled size and reach of Facebook to say that travel is the industry it's putting some of its most significant investment towards in the next year should tell you something about the state of the industry. We can't wait to see what's in store for 2017.

Anyone who thought the three new online travel agency leaders — Jane Sun, Glenn Fogel, and Mark Okerstrom — intended to be mere caretakers of their predecessors’ policies and legacies would have been mistaken. To a large degree, they are stepping out into new territory.

Tourism and hospitality companies have an opportunity with Mapillary to create their own ground-level, photo-based mapping platforms without having to wait for Google Street View teams to create or update them.

Most startups fail, as Anand Sanwal of CB Insights points out, and sounding pessimistic can sometimes sound smart. But big companies should ignore them at their peril because, as he says, "They're not coming for your basis points, they're coming for your commas."