Sean O'Neill

This week, travel startups announced more than $20 million in funding. The startups target high-end B&Bs, group travel booking, destination planning, and other concepts.

American Express GBT's top boss Paul Abbott knows that having a distributed workforce can boost business travel spending. The travel management giant itself went 90 percent remote in the U.S. several years ago, and it saw its business travel expenses rise.

The pandemic has sped up airline testing of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other technologies to train workforces more cost-effectively. Expect a few travel companies to join KLM in having "extended reality" IT teams by 2025.

Recent investor bets include a German short-term rental brand (Cosi), a Finnish startup that builds chatbots for hotels (Hotelway), an Australian startup that offers rural cabins for urban dwellers (Unyoked), and a French revenue management company (Yieldin).

This deal cements Vacasa status as the largest full-service property manager for whole-home vacation rentals in the U.S. That makes it a rare pure-play bet on alternative accommodations for its private equity backers, which have prompted Vacasa to consolidate more of the sector.

In old-school business wisdom, the large eat the small. Today the truism is that the fast eat the slow. No wonder Almosafer is looking to outrun the regional and global competition in Saudi Arabia and a couple of its bordering countries.

For many cultural heritage sites affected by the pandemic, it's "game on." Med Gaims and Questo offer some promising models for destinations looking to engage tourists in the recovery.

In a switch, Google is inviting hotels and online travel resellers to drive bookings through its price-comparison search for free. Well, free for now, at least.

It's easy to feel jaded about data breaches given how often they happen. But it will raise eyebrows that hackers obtained data on loyalty flyers of Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa, Malaysia Airlines, Singapore Airlines, United, and other carriers by exploiting a SITA tech system not used by most of them.

It's positive to see February gains in U.S. jobs in the leisure and hospitality industries. Hotel hiring trends looking to be turning after a bleak winter.