Skift Take

We're putting a focus on travel technology at Skift, and to be the best we can be about it, we're bringing in one of the best in the business.

Today we’re adding another key player to the Skift Editorial team with the hiring of editor and writer Sean O’Neill.

Sean is our first Travel Tech Editor, a new role at Skift that will focus on covering technologies, companies, and startups powering online travel, distribution, and innovation.

In this position, Sean will cover the service providers and vendors that are at the heart of online distribution tech, mobile tech, hospitality tech, airline tech, the global distribution systems, revenue management, booking engines, marketing tech, data management, and related travel technologies.

If your company is making a hotel’s backend more efficient or secure, he’d like to know. And if you’re a startup with an idea about how to innovate anything, he’s going to want to talk to you.

Background

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, working with, and competing against Sean over the last decade. I first met him when he was an editor at what was then still called Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine. At the time I was working with Arthur Frommer on his daily blog (at a different company — confusing, yes), and Sean often received misdirected mail expressing displeasure about various political or social stands Arthur has made a habit of taking over the years. My first impressions at the time were that he was smart, creative, and loyal.

He recommended a great editor for me to hire at one point (which I did) and, later, when he went freelance he began writing for me at Frommers.com. Coincidentally, I was editing two excellent freelancers for Frommer’s at the same time: Sean and Dennis Schaal, who’s our Executive Editor. Small world.

After years on the consumer side, Sean began looking more closely at the industry. As he explains it, “My effort at understanding how consumers can become better at trip planning led me to ask more and more questions about how the industry really works. I got hooked, and in 2012 began focusing full-time on the inner workings of the travel tech trade, freelancing for BBC Travel and Tnooz.”

In July 2015 Sean became the Editor-in-Chief of Tnooz, where he’s guided coverage while editing and writing at the same time, and becoming one of the more trusted voices in online travel technology in the meantime.

We liked calling him a friend before, and we’re thrilled to call him a colleague now.

He can be reached at [email protected].

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