Avis Brings Data Insights to Ground Transportation

Car rental isn’t very sexy as a sector, but cool stuff is happening slowly behind the scenes.

Avis Budget Group launched a new dashboard to give travel managers greater insight into spending, where employees are, and smarter ways for travelers to get around. It’s part of the company’s evolution into a mobility platform offering a variety of different services. Check out my story below.

Meanwhile, Carlson Wagonlit Travel rebranded to CWT, which a lot of people already called the company. Its various divisions already had CWT in their titles. A promotional image has a guy riding a hoverboard in it, signifying the future, so it looks like they’re ready for extreme digital transformation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

If you have any feedback about the newsletter or news tips, feel free to reach out via email at [email protected] or tweet me @sheivach. 

— Andrew Sheivachman, Senior Editor

Airlines, Hotels and Innovation

How Avis Wants to Build Transparency in Corporate Travel: Car rental giants are quickly becoming on-demand mobility platforms. Stronger analytics and data tools will help them to remain relevant in an age when business travelers have countless ground transportation options at their fingertips.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel Rebrands to Sound Cooler: Now we’ve got Amex GBT, BCD, and CWT: an alphabet soup worthy of a sector that relies on bromides and buzzwords over substance.

Wyndham Is Changing Back Its Loyalty Program to Be More Like Everyone Else’s: Does this mean that Wyndham’s experiment in creating a simple, straightforward loyalty program for the everyday traveler failed? Maybe, but not necessarily. It just means that there are some laws in travel loyalty programs that are there for a reason.

How San Francisco Deals With Skyrocketing Events Demand: San Francisco remains a major draw for events despite high costs and other pervasive problems. Perhaps the Bay Area can turn to the creative thinking it’s known for to solve some of these issues.

U.S. Airline Earnings Show Race Between Rising Costs and Higher Revenues: U.S. airlines are still struggling to recoup their higher fuel and labor costs. But as their fourth-quarter results showed, they’re making progress. How? With help from some strong revenue tailwinds.

The Future of Travel

The Airline Industry’s Glass Ceiling Is Still Sky-High: Aviation has terrible gender optics, and not just with pilots and engineers. The c-suite is nearly void of women for flimsy, unacceptable reasons. In this deep dive, women on the commercial side of aviation share how it feels to hit the glass ceiling in 2019, and occasionally break through.

InterContinental Lands Another Luxury Brand: Six Senses looks like a good addition to IHG’s high-end portfolio and should fit in well with the existing luxury brands, without too much overlap.

UK Regional Airline Flybmi Collapses and Blames Brexit: The shakeout in European aviation many have predicted looks like it is happening in 2019.

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Skift Senior Editor Andrew Sheivachman [[email protected]] curates the Skift Corporate Travel Innovation Report. Skift emails the newsletter every Thursday.

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