Dennis Schaal

Skift Founding Editor/Executive Editor, member of leadership team: Author of The Definitive Oral History of Online Travel, The Oral History of Travel's Greatest Acquisition, Booking.com, and The Definitive Oral History of Short-Term Rentals. Dennis Schaal also wrote a Skift ebook, The Future of Travel Booking. He has been a reporter focusing on online travel and short-term rentals for more than two decades at Skift, Tnooz, USA Today, and Travel Weekly. Freelance for Boston Globe, Computer Shopper, and Etihad Airways Inflight Magazine. Also worked at The Star-Ledger, Connecticut Post, and was Editor in Chief of Corporate Responsibility Officer Magazine. Known for tough one-on-one interviews on stage at conferences, including CEOs/top execs of Expedia, Airbnb, Uber, Booking Holdings, Priceline, Kayak, Hopper, Marriott, Agoda, Skyscanner, Vacasa, and more.

Latest Stories

Media and PR

Video: Review scammers try to blackmail restaurants for freebies

Review websites in the U.S. are protected from lawsuits over fraudulent reviews, but they should clamp down on abusers. Restaurant should turn the tables on patrons and out them in social media.

Airlines

Virgin America takes hit from its transition to Sabre

Welcome to the big time, Virgin America. All this growth "don't come easy." Meanwhile, it looks like it is straightening things out with its Sabre reservations system and things should be on track before long.

Hotels

Room 77 to remain in the cloud after Amazon outage

Travel companies should fine-tune their cloud strategies after an Amazon Web Services outage took down Room 77, Pinterest, Instagram and Netflix. Given the cost-savings and efficiencies of cloud computing, travel companies won't be abandoning such services -- nor should they -- any time soon.

Skift Originals

Delta SkyMiles voted worst in frequent flyer survey

There's nothing worse than an airline frequent flyer program when it's tough to book awards travel, and respondents to this Frequent Business Traveler and FlyerTalk survey expressed frustration with Delta in this regard. The airline, which has been all over Facebook with its booking widgets, prides itself on its technology so it must be especially disappointing that road warriors expressed their frustrations with the SkyMiles awards calendar.

Hotels

Portico Club and Inspirato face off for vacation club supremacy

Can Portico by Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato resort to marketing super-exclusive vacation clubs to the mega wealthy? What Greek debt crisis? There probably is a market for this, and Steve Case and a bunch of other venture capitalists are making a downpayment on these clubs' viability.

Online Travel

Is Hipmunk the best travel booking website on the planet?

Hipmunk is innovative, for sure, but is it more than a few features and does it have enough staying power to get its brand known beyond Silicon Valley?

Online Travel

KwikChex rates review sites through its own lens

KwikCheck, which represents hotels, hates unverified hotel reviews so TripAdvisor is near the bottom of the list. TripAdvisor-owned Flipkey, which publishes only verified reviews about vacation rentals, is a favorite. In publishing its list, where is KwikChex's transparency about filing complaints with UK regulatory authorities against at least two of the companies in its ranking?

Media and PR

TripAdvisor’s Facebook app surges through paid marketing and social growth

What's behind the surge of users of TripAdvisor's Cities I've Visited app on Facebook? It didn't happen by chance.

Business Travel

Will the GSA per diem change really ruin business travel?

The Power of Travel Coalition, in lodging a protest over GSA per-diem rates for federal government travel, may have gone too far in objecting to the removal of "upper upscale hotels" as part of the calculations.

Airlines

Zagat airport restaurant ratings could be coming to Google

Expect a lot more airport, airline, airport restaurant and hotel coverage from Zagat as its content begins to permeate Google search.