Articles tagged “funding”

Busbud sets itself apart from other bus travel startups in both the breadth of its inventory and the markets it is going after, especially South America where bus travel is more common than the U.S.

For hotels that don't have the resources to develop their own apps, the Alice hotel app and concierge service, and others like it, could be a useful solution for making concierge services more mobile-oriented.

In startup land, B2B companies providing services to the vacation rental and apartment-sharing industry are hot, hot, hot.

As vacation home rentals and apartment rentals go more mainstream, you can expect more vacation rental management companies, broadly similar to Turnkey Vacation Rentals, to emerge as owners seek to make the hosting process more efficient and less of a hassle.

Hipmunk is hoping that the funding will help it avoid the fate of Room 77, which also struggled to break out of the pack, and withdrew. Hipmunk is going to keep at it for awhile, but it has a tough road ahead of it given well-funded competitors such as Kayak, TripAdvisor, Google, and Trivago.

Metasearch has plenty of potential and hard work to do in vacation rentals as the wide swath of owners and other hosts are really just beginning to come online. Tripping could be part of the next generation of such metasearch sites.

Concur still has only a minority stake in Cleartrip, but clearly Concur's $68.3 million total investment in Cleartrip shows that Concur considers Cleartrip and India as a strategic investment.

This is a blow to national tourism marketing organizations worldwide -- including our own BrandUSA -- and could spur a rethink worldwide on how to fund tourism promotion.

In the eyes of the boating industry, BoatBound is a gateway drug for early adopters who will hopefully grow attached to the experience and become lucrative customers later in life.

Reputation management firms such as ReviewPro are evolving into being more than reputation management firms as the competition heats up. One of the key issues for hotels is that many of these tools aren't truly global, failing to tie into Chinese social networks, for example, and working only in a limited number of languages.