Skift Travel News Blog

Eddy Travels, a digital travel assistant service founded by entrepreneur Edmundas Balcikonis, is being acquired by TripAdd, a New York-based travel product provider, a subsidiary of the Blue Ribbon Bags group, the world’s leading service for lost luggage tracking. TripAdd hopes to bolster revenues through personalized bundle recommendations for users.

Financial details of the deal, announced on Friday, were not disclosed. The companies only described it as a “multi-million dollar acquisition.”

Eddy Travels was founded in 2019 with the goal of bringing the world of travel to messaging apps, offering an artificial intelligence (AI) service that facilitates the process of travel for its customers. This includes planning flights, booking hotels, and searching for restaurants, amongst other things. The service is made possible by Eddy AI, a chatbot assistant, which uses so-called natural language processing (NLP) to help users find what they’re looking for.

Co-founder and CEO Balcikonis, is excited to join TripAdd for an optimized experience of the digital marketplace. “They are extremely business savvy, with amazing sales and marketing skills,” Balcikonis said about TripAdd, “which perfectly complement our technology and product development capabilities.”

Both parties expressed their excitement about the merger, looking to put their services together to maximize the travel experience for the customer.

Airbnb has just announced the expansion of its automatic translation service, Translation Engine, to reviews of rentals and hosts.

First introduced in Airbnb’s 2021 “Winter Release,” Translation Engine provides both hosts and guests with automatic message translations in over 60 languages.

The company signed a deal with Translated in 2021, the largest deal in the history of translation services. Using ModernMT, the proprietary technology of Translated, has significantly improved the quality of communication for listings, according to a 2021 review by Slator.

Airbnb now plans to extend the service to its reviews, allowing users to access reviews without first needing to manually translate the text. And with over 550 million reviews, they hope to make the information more easily accessible for users.

The goal of the technology is to bring hosts and guests closer together, with the goal of making exchanges more accurate and efficient for both parties.

Map Happy, a news-you-can-use, consumer travel site run by co-founder and CEO Erica Ho, has joined Penske Media as part of its SHE Media network of voicey content brands, such as SheKnows, BlogHer, STYLECASTER, and Soaps.

The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but Ho said it would “bring more firepower.”

Map Happy has offered travelers advice on all aspects of traveling. While primarily supported by ads and affiliate links, it has had an independent editorial streak, such as its 2017 review of why an Away suitcase disappointed a reviewer.

While the U.S.-based company has mostly been a sole proprietorship, it has stood out for being owned and led by a woman in a media market still too often dominated by male voices. Independent product reviews along the lines of a Wirecutter for travel remains in short supply, too, and Ho made sure that reviews have tended focus on questions such as “Is this useful to me when I plan my travels? Can I use this in every market I go to? Are there lots of markets covered?”

Penske has been on an acquisition tear in recent years, as the New York Times reported earlier this year.

Owner satisfaction surveys and demographic trends are favorable for timeshares in the U.S., according to a new report Wednesday from the industry lobby, the American Resort Development Association (ARDA), via its foundation.

The pandemic boosted the popularity of timeshare. A survey found that 84 percent of owners would purchase a timeshare product again, a significant increase from 77 percent in 2020.

Gen Z and Millennials now account for 57 percent of U.S. timeshare owners, more than half of new sale purchasers, and nearly two-thirds of resale purchasers. 

The online survey of 1,600 timeshare owners ran from March 13 to 31, 2022. A total of 1,600 timeshare owners in North America.

New data from Morning Consult suggests that U.S. travel demand may be losing some steam in the face of high prices and other economic worries. A pulse survey by the New York-based intelligence company that routinely asks a panel of travelers about their trip plans for the coming year saw a sudden weakening in July.

“Check out that drop in early July 👀- our weekly return to normal data shows that intent to travel in the coming year has significantly cooled, suggesting people have taken their “revenge trips” and are now pulling back.”

— Lindsey Roeschke, travel and hospitality analyst, Morning Consult, via Twitter.

Interestingly, Morning Consult’s data suggests that U.S. travelers are cooling to the idea of travel more than travelers in many other countries.

Adding to the pain is that about four out of ten business travelers don’t forsee a return to pre-pandemic business travel.

Seven out of ten upcoming hotel projects in the Middle East are for properties that can command high rates, according to the latest Middle East Hotel Construction Pipeline Trend Report from Lodging Econometrics (LE).

As of June 30, the Middle East has a hotel pipeline of 545 projects with about 140,055 rooms. For the second consecutive quarter, 72 percent of the projects in the Middle East are in the top three chain scales (luxury, upper upscale, and upscale), with “upper-upscale” projects reaching record high project counts of 121 projects/31,950 rooms as of the second quarter, LE reported.

Franchise companies with the greatest number of projects in the region are led by Hilton Worldwide, with an all-time high project count of 98 projects (especially its Doubletree by Hilton brand), followed by Accor, with 83 projects.

In the second half of this year, another 63 hotels with 16,054 rooms are slated to open in the region. Within the next year, 87 projects are scheduled to start construction.
 
Countries in the region with the largest number of projects in the hotel construction pipeline are Saudi Arabia with 212 projects/60,045 rooms and the United Arab Emirates with 119 projects/33,121 rooms. Across the region, 61 percent of projects and 67 percent of rooms are in these two countries. Following distantly are Egypt, with record-high project and room counts of 74 projects/16,569 rooms, and Qatar, with an all-time high project count of 66 projects/15,168 rooms.

Dubai continues to lead the construction pipeline in the United Arab Emirates with 81 projects/24,382 rooms.

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts has been teasing since March its plans to debut an economy extended-stay brand, apparently named Echo. On Wednesday, Sandpiper Hospitality filed plans to build what will likely be the first Echo hotel in western Henrico, Virginia, according to a news report.

“Plans show the Echo hotel would reach four stories and include 124 rooms and 133 parking spaces,” reported Richmond BizSense. “HG Design Studio is listed as the project’s landscape architect.”

The site is at 9940 Independence Park Drive. Intriguingly, the rendering submitted by Sandpiper Hospitality showed the name of the hotel being Echo. Until now, the project had been referred to by Wyndham as Project Economy Hotel Opportunity.

Wyndham executives said earlier last month they had deals with developers to roll out 72 projects, with a goal of 300 hotels over the next decade.

Fosun Tourism Group said on Monday that a partial recovery in its Club Med vacation resorts during the first half of the year didn’t compensate for continued steep losses across its travel businesses — partly because of pandemic-related travel restrictions in its home market of China.

Hong Kong-listed Fosun Tourism generated revenue in the first half of 2022 of about $937 million (6.4 billion renminbi). But it endured a net loss of about $28 million (196 million renminbi).

In the first half of the year, Club Med produced about $838 million (5.7431 billion renminbi) in revenue, representing a recovery to 90.2 percent of the first half of 2019.

But executives at Fosun Tourism are optimistic. They plan to open four new resorts in the second half, having opened 3 resorts so far this year. If the company’s plan for openings stays on track, its annual resort capacity will be 18 percent larger in 2024 than in pre-pandemic.

Qantas Airways said on Sunday it sought to make amends with its most loyal customers for months of flight disruptions that some have called “airmaggeddon.”

The Australian flag carrier will offer $34 ($50 Australian) vouchers, extensions of loyalty status, and complimentary lounge passes to many frequent flyers as a way to make amends for several months of heavier-than-usual rates of flight delays, cancellations, and mishandled baggage, Reuters reported.

The company plans to send messages about the apology and benefits to its loyalty members on Monday.

The carrier also plans to take several steps to boost its performance for on-time flight arrivals and baggage delivery.

“On behalf of the national carrier, I want to apologize and assure you we are working hard to get back to our best,” said CEO Alan Joyce in the video.

“Covid gave Southeast Asia a break from overtourism. Now what?” That’s the question The Washington Post asked on Saturday.

Pandemic-related lockdowns and reduced tourism let many destinations take a break from heavy volumes of visitors. But now, many destinations are divided. Some want to preserve the benefits of lower tourist impact, such as wildlife recovery. Others want to discard many restrictions because they’re eager to max out the job-creating potential of their tourist landmarks and attractions.

Here are a few examples:

• In Thailand, the ministry of natural resources and the environment has ordered the country’s 155 natural parks to shut down at least a month every year. The idea is to give nature a chance to heal from heavy visitor footfall and boat traffic. The decision came after the parks were closed for the first time in 2020.
• In Indonesia, officials recently tried to limit visits to the ancient Borobudur Temple in Yogyakarta to 15 at a time while also hiking prices for foreigners from $25 to $100 to pay for conservation. (The historic temple has nine stone tiers that support statues and relief panels of the Buddha.) Local opposition has since appeared, however, and the price hikes are now on pause.
• Indonesia’s effort to raise prices on a heritage site and national park featuring Komodo Dragons has also stalled, Nikkei reported.
• Before the pandemic, officials in the Philippines shuttered the island of Boracay for half a year and then reopened it with some restrictions. “But in April [of this year], Boracay exceeded its daily visitor cap multiple times,” the Post reported.

Overtourism is a term Skift came up with years before the pandemic. Overtourism continues to be a thorny challenge for the tourism industry during the recovery that Skift will continue to watch closely.