Articles tagged “apps”

Google already had Google Maps when it added Google Flights in 2011 and later hotel metasearch and booking. With the launches of a destinations app, which pairs flight and hotel bookings, in 2015, and now the Google Trips app for organizing reservations and making tours and activities recommendations, Google's travel business is slowly, if steadily, becoming pervasive. Google can afford to bide its time -- it is, after all, Google.

Although Visit Orlando's new AI-powered travel app still has kinks, it shows the power of machine learning to provide more contextual and customized information to travelers — most of the time.

Travel managers seem to know that they need to get a better handle on mobile use — the question is how travelers will respond to clear-cut recommendations.

The holy grail for a travel manager would be an all-in-one app that travelers would actually want to use while staying within company policy — and on the radar in case of emergency. Goals are good.

Chat-based apps that use real travel agents are getting a lot of buzz; we're interested to see how they will fit into the corporate travel space.

We haven't always been enthusiastic about travel apps. These five, though, have something that most others can learn from.

Google tends to favor digital products over human-facing services but it's possible that a new "travel assistant app" could blend the two. Then again, they've tried this before.

Give Kayak credit for going where the users are and building a travel-search app on top of Slack. Is Slack the optimum way to plan a trip? Hardly. But there will be some users, who are chatting at the office in Slack all day, who could find it convenient. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp would be fertile ground as well.

It's a bold idea and the software might turn out to be beautiful (bold and beautiful) but do leisure and business travelers at scale REALLY want to abandon self-booking tools in favor of human travel agent interaction on a mobile app? We are going to find out.

An in-depth look at how companies in the travel and hospitality industries can leverage mobile applications to better serve their customers and grow their businesses