Dennis Schaal

With GetYourGuide's latest funding, making it the most heavily funded startup in the annals of tours and activities, a potential acquisition price just got racheted up. With TripAdvisor's acquisition of Viator, the market indeed is a "land grab" now for global expansion.

Without a doubt, Yelp, which marks its 10th year this summer, is in play regardless of how company officials seek to downplay all of the merger and acquisition activity swirling around them.

The growth rate of people using TripAdvisor's hotel metasearch product, Hotel Shopper, has been decelerating. Perhaps TripAdvisor's next TV ad campaign will provide more of a direct tie-in to Hotel Shopper rather than its current generic bent, "Visit TripAdvisor New York" etc.

A half dozen travel companies, including Southwest, Delta, United Continental, Wynn Resorts, Marriott and the Priceline Group have seen fairly massive -- more than 50% gains -- in their market caps compared with this time last year, as the big keep getting bigger. Hotels dominate the world's 15 largest publicly traded travel companies.

TripAdvisor's loosening of its purse strings in 2014 reflects an intense merger and acquisition environment fomented by rivals, including the Priceline Group and Expedia Inc., which have been spending even more than TripAdvisor on acquisitions so far this year.

Hilton Worldwide's room-selection initiative is vindication for fading startup Room77, which sought to get hotels to adapt the feature, but met resistance. Guests will want additional room intelligence, including images, ratings and amenity information.

Virgin America needs to attract more business travelers if it is to fill those first class and Main Cabin Select seats to maintain a passenger revenue advantage over low cost carriers.

If you build it, and it is comprehensive and works at breakneck speeds, they will come. That's the mantra of Google, which is taking its sweet time to expand its flight and hotel partnerships around the world.

How much emphasis will TripAdvisor really give to vacation rentals in the short term. It is already preoccupied with hotel metasearch and now restaurants. Can it do vacation rentals really well at the same time?

Let the games begin as the Priceline Group's acquisition of OpenTable, and TripAdvisor's acquisition of LaFourchette officially place restaurants firmly in the "travel" space in terms of mindset. Yelp anyone?