Dennis Schaal

Lyft has quite a few bucks to bankroll penalized drivers in NYC for awhile, but this confrontation with the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission is going to heat up and is headed for the courts.

With only a minority of passengers purchasing Wi-Fi on most airlines, Spirit Airlines realizes it can make more money doing without the Wi-Fi and the fees it would charge if the airline offered it.

With the U.S. hotel industry performing well, it is losing some business from the sharing economy, but there isn't a lot of hurt yet. That could come later.

Mobile hotel booking apps, whether tonight-only or last minute, are hot, and HotelQuickly and GREE are joining forces to see if they can have an impact in Asia Pacific.

Kudos to JetBlue on several fronts: First, moving past the burden of online check-in would be a really nice leap forward. Second, JetBlue doesn't intend to make automatic check-in a perk for the elite, but plans on extending the service to passengers throughout the plane.

Expedia and Orbitz, which launched a rewards program in October 2013 geared to incentivize hotel bookings, are battling for consumer loyalties and competing against one another with these new programs.

American Express Global Business Travel now has a new opportunity and $900 million bankroll to reinvent itself. The challenge will be to make meaningful and relatively rapid changes in an organization that historically has been very conservative.

CheapOair has created a niche as a go-to place for airlines such as US Airways, American and now Spirit to accelerate the distribution of their ancillary services, but in the Spirit case, at least, travelers aren't getting a bargain when compared with booking on Spirit.com.

Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson says he is having "fun" watching the development of Airbnb. He adds that Millennials will be a "massive" portion of Marriott's customer base in a decade. It won't be too much fun, though, if Millennial travelers stray from hotels as their best options for a stay.

Expedia doesn't comment on rumors and speculation unless it is convenient or necessary to do so. It has done so regarding eLong sales rumors because Expedia has a long-term commitment to grow eLong in the highly competitive and strategic Chinese market.