Online Travel CEO Interview Series

Hotel Urbano is focused on being a Big Data-infused travel company with an online travel agency platform in Brazil, one of the largest emerging markets in the world. Hotel Urbano claims it is not only riding that demand, but is also creating it.

OneFineStay has dug into a lucrative segment of the alternative accommodations market, although its approach is somewhat labor-intensive and doesn't scale like an Airbnb. For investors and like-minded companies, though, there are lots of dollars and euros at the end of the rainbow.

In Latin America, as in many regions around the world, the phone is the dominant way to book. No, not via the smartphone, but by phoning an agent in an online travel agency call center. Despegar is doing everything it can to ease the transition from call center to online bookings.

eDreams Odigeo's stock price has tanked since it started trading in April. Still, if you look at some of the company's technology advantages, the flight-search group has a lot of things going for it if the company can stick it out over the long term.

In the current M&A environment, HomeAway is both the pursued and the pursuer. And all of this takes place as HomeAway becomes an even more attractive acquisition target because it is getting aggressive and ahead of schedule, expecting a majority of its listings to be bookable online within two years.

Millennials? Not an overriding concern for Russia's Travel.ru, which is taking advantage of a boom in domestic travel, gives customers a variety of payment options, including pre-paying for hotels in cash at kiosks, and is navigating the shift from offline to online and mobile.

A legion of brand advocates and a focus on product and mobile alone won't be enough to take Hipmunk over the top. It is a dilemma it shares with many startups. How do you compete against the likes of Priceline/Kayak with that $61 billion market cap?

Qunar CEO Chenchao "CC" Zhuang isn't like some travel bosses who claim their companies can differentiate themselves based on the experiences they provide. Zhuang wants to compete on comprehensiveness and price, and he claims Qunar's platform is driving such efficiencies that he can win on price and by showing loyalty to consumers' wallets.

Skyscanner launched in the Americas about a year ago, and it seems as though things are going slowly for now. But, the search site has plenty of patience, believing these are just the early days of online travel.

Rather than working on making it easier for Indian travelers to transition easily between various devices, MakeMyTrip is focusing on keeping consumers on smartphones, and solving the clunkiness of the payment process on mobile. It's a bet that is India-specific, but might be instructive for some other parts of the developing world.