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Luxury brands across all sectors are entering the Middle East to tap into the local and visitor base of high-spending customers. Their online presence is as, if not more, important than their on-the-ground services.

TripAdvisor isn't an online travel agency because it doesn't take flight or hotel bookings. But, given its desire to expand further into a solution for in-destination tours and activities, you can make the argument that it is a more well-rounded one-stop shop for travel than many of the travel booking sites.

Most of the traveler leads that TripAdvisor passes along to online travel agencies and hotels don't come from its hotel metasearch search results pages. They come from the property pages where travelers read reviews and gawk at the photos. This is a huge differentiator from the competition and will afford TripAdvisor a big advantage in the long term.

For the last decade destinations have fought hard for airtime on reality shows, but we may be seeing a new metric for tourism success: the Bourdain Bump.

U.S. airlines are still way behind in creating watchable and shareable short videos, and could learn a lot from the non-U.S. examples listed here.

It can be argued that Africa is the next Asia, but the more difficult question is whether it wants to be. A booming tourism economy brings international dollars and job growth at the risk of environmental and cultural degradation.

The launch of TripConnect is a really big deal. In much the same way that Booking.com led the way in bringing on board apartment hotels, condos and villas, TripAdvisor will now enable that vast long-tail of smaller properties to participate and vie for direct bookings.

The maze TSA has built is just justification for its own existence. There is no end solution, just more means created to foster other means.

France will continue to be a big source of tourists, and also a big supporter of building tourism infrastructure in the poor Sub-Saharan African countries, but with China's big forays into the continent, and Middle-East countries investing in the region, that balance is going to change soon.

A redesign has to be more than pretty pictures, and TripAdvisor's facelift is geared to emphasize its no-apologies approach to user-generated content.

Given the expense of dispatching staff to each hotel to write reviews and take photos, Oyster never had a clear business model. But it is clear that TripAdvisor values Oyster's photos as a way to bridge the gap between hotel-supplied photos and very amateur guest photos.