Travel Booking on Instagram and 7 Other Digital Trends This Week

Travel Booking Is Finally Coming to Instagram: When Facebook enabled airlines and hotels to build booking functionality into their Facebook pages years ago, it was a total bust. But Instagram and Whatsapp seem to have an engagement level that was missing last time around, making these e-commerce moves appear to be a lot more feasible.

Airbnb’s Event Ambitions Won’t Disrupt Meetings Sector Airbnb’s acquisition of Gaest makes a ton of sense for the homeshare giant, but doesn’t represent any major shift in the overall meetings and events space.

The Inside Story of an Activist Investor’s Fight for Travelport: Few companies other than activist investor Elliott Management expressed a serious interest in acquiring Travelport. Elliott twice lost potential private equity partners after they reviewed Travelport’s books. The deal price is underwhelming, and that’s a signal that some things haven’t been going the company’s way.

Priceline Wields New Firepower in Defense Department Deal: Military family members notice when businesses are military-friendly. This deal with the Pentagon is certainly a win for the Priceline brand, if not a gargantuan boost for its business. Plus, it seems as though the Pentagon will be responsible for a lot of the marketing.

Booking CEO Opposes Proposed EU Tax as an Innovation Killer: Booking.com CEO Gillian Tans sounds like a typical corporate boss, opposing additional taxation as anti-business. The proposed EU tax on revenue would amount to double taxation, and that’s seldom a good thing.

Expedia Group: The World’s Travel Platform. Really? Expedia Group is arguably — OK, clearly — not “The World’s Travel Platform.” But we understand that marketing machines strive to do their thing.

What Is Expensify Thinking With Its Pricey Super Bowl Ad? Feeling pigeonholed, the expense-tracking company is betting big on the Super Bowl to break free.

How TripActions Looks Beyond the Booking: TripActions wants to do more to make business travel simpler and ease the pain of disruptions. It’ll be interesting to see how deeply the platform delves into personalized service going forward.