Dan Peltier

Skift sat down with 17 online travel CEOs over three months to better understand what matters to them as they look at the future of travel booking. Understand the trends, buy the e-book.

Americans visitors to Cuba saw significant growth in 2014, and an easing of the U.S. travel ban doesn't mean the floodgates will open. No one knows for sure yet how quickly things will progress.

Figuring out how to keep the tone of content on Snapchat different from other social platforms will be the big challenge for Marriott, as users view Snapchat very differently than they do other platforms.

FlightView has somewhat of a utopian vision where mobile devices tracked by airports aren't attached to passenger identities. In the real world, it's not clear how private this mobile tracking actually would be.

It's no longer enough for a travel brand to have an app and hope that convenience alone will lead to a booking. By not needing to input a credit card number to make a transaction, the freedom to make that last-minute booking just got expanded.

U.S. airlines continue to lag behind foreign carriers for on-time performance. Although Alaska Airlines continuously ranks well for the U.S., its delay percentage is still high compared to many foreign carriers.

Some travelers love knowing exactly what to expect before they step foot in a destination so Oculus offers another fun way to get that insight. The question that remains is will travelers actually buy these headsets, and how long will it take before virtual reality becomes mainstream for destinations?

As Chinese and other Asian students watch their countries' outbound tourism increase, they're seeing an opportunity to better tourism in their own backyards by getting educated in countries where their friends and families are traveling to. They can then adapt some of these learnings for local tourism needs.

Being able to make guests smile and feel satisfied with their stay are more important skills for hotels than being able to memorize facts about business principles, though classroom training is still essential.

Rail travel vacations still have their appeal with travelers as they make the journey to a destination more unique and exciting, fully encapsulating what the travel experience is all about.