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Higher bandwidth and on-demand entertainment are today's competitive weapon of choice. Whether crowded passengers will forget their woes by watching shows is anybody's guess.

Despite some differentiation, Only Apartments faces a daunting task of standing out in new markets where some of its competitors are advertising on TV and have so much money to burn. If it can scale up by using channel managers, so can everyone else.

Among Certify's clients, at least, It's a battle between Hampton Inn and Marriott for the most expensed brands in terms of hotel spend. The fact that business travelers spent less at Hampton in terms of average cost could be one of the reasons why it took over the top spot in the third quarter as road warriors may have found more value there.

Do we need another lifestyle brand?

As millennial travelers continue to grow in affluence and influence, travel and tourism companies need to develop strategies to better engage with and drive business from this rising new breed of customer.

B2B travel companies are taking advantage of social media's inherent function of connecting with real people.

The survey brings home the point that travelers' smartphone behaviors vary widely from country to country. India's MakeMyTrip tries to keep users on smartphones, and Expedia makes it easier for users to transition from device to device. The differences are dramatic.

Although airlines are safer and more profitable than any time in history, the industry must innovate much more rapidly in order to secure its environmental and financial viability in the future.

Innovation is a buzzword thrown around by executives who want to sound open-minded, but actually fostering an environment where employees feel empowered to take risks and make mistakes is much harder to do.

If designers and trends watchers keep pushing airlines to think beyond the Class-Divide cabin, we might see more imaginative structuring of the aircraft cabin on the major carriers too. Time will tell.

Although lifestyle hotels are trendy, hotel brands are wise to focus some of their marketing efforts on the luxury sector, where interest is heating up.