Business Travel News

Downtown Phoenix is an established and spirited meetings destination due to significant infrastructure investments in recent years. Building on that, the public and private sectors are now collaborating more intentionally to connect meeting planners with the region's thought leaders in technology, healthcare, and other advanced industries.

Elite members of Hilton's Honors program will soon see some significant upgrades. Marriott and Starwood should take notice.

It makes sense that the City of Fort Worth and Visit Fort Worth leveraged SXSW's cool factor and global tech audience to help reposition the destination brand around innovation and creativity. The question now is how to keep that momentum going moving forward.

Wasn't the whole point of these surcharges to prevent the global distribution systems from taking a cut of that juicy ancillary money that is now flowing in? One has to wonder what the terms of Air France-KLM's deal with Amadeus and Travelport really are. For now, it looks like the global distribution systems that took the new distribution capability seriously are reaping the rewards.

Aman wants to create more customers for life by catering to families with kids and teenagers. It's a smart long-term strategy, but the company will need to involve younger travelers in a way that makes sense for a luxury brand.

Smarter technology is making it easier for companies to track what employees actually spend on travel. This is good news for travelers as well, since travel managers and accountants will have better insights into what policy mechanics actually save the company money without ruining the business travel experience.

Beyond automatically integrating travel booking with expenses, a lot is being done to give travel managers and financial departments more powerful tools to track spending. It also helps that these tools will eventually make the expense report process much easier for travelers.

The last thing travel tech giant Travelport needs is to be sold to private equity. It's still digging out from all the debt Blackstone saddled it with. Our best guess is that it will be forced to partly sell eNett, a payments business.

TUI is using some of the cash it amassed from selling companies such as Hotelbeds to buy a business from ... Hotelbeds. Maybe its taken a bit of time for the management to realize that tours and activities are strategic and a potential growth area.

Gone is the buttoned-down, forced formality, and in its place comes the freedom and confidence to treat guests as individuals. A new generation of hoteliers is learning to embrace informality.