Rafat Ali

Sabre has come up with its solution for Travelocity: Outsource its operation to Expedia. Sabre gets to basically offload a money-losing operation while holding on for now to its assets in Europe, possibly for a sale down the road.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social sources are now looked upon as legit travel information sources, while TripAdvisor lords over us all.

How long can Tripadvisor stick to its core of media and lead generation and how much growth is still left in there? That would answer the question of whether the company wants to spend material money in doing bigger acquisitions than it has done so far, and move into actual transactions and booking space in travel.

Airports, as miserable as they are in the overall travel experience these days, continue to be a place to show off, and social media outlets like Facebook are perfect venues for that.

Most of these are for hotel rooms of today, smart incremental improvement in guest experience and hotel room efficiency. The Hotel Room of the Future will need a lot more than this.

The best way to watch: full screen, preferably through your big screen TV, with the soundtrack coming through the best sound system you have. Then you can decide.

The U.S. visitor is falling out of love with Western Europe, barring Italy.

We'll let "experts" critique it, we think it looks cool and spacious, and will surely make a dent in the very competitive coast-to-coast routes in U.S.

Trendline: smaller destinations in Europe will continue to grow, especially economies that have gone through the financial crisis and come out better on the other end. Hence Iceland and Latvia, among others.

U.S. cities, barring NYC, are still not the most expensive large cities to do business in. Thanks to its mining boom and rising currency value, Australia clearly has a problem on its hands.