Articles tagged “kayak”

The impact of Airbnb's new ad campaign seems to be underwhelming to date. But if the idea is to broaden awareness about hosting, Airbnb may be willing to play the long game.

In Skift's top travel stories this week, we highlighted 10 tactical travel learning in travel from a year of the pandemic, Vacasa's move to acquire Turnkey, an Amadeus partnership with Microsoft, and Delta's move to reactivate its pilots.

At a time when a travel operator like Expedia Group is shedding brands to become more focused, private equity firm Certares is investing in a broad array of travel assets. Divergent strategies for two very different companies. Certares' goal is likely to wrangle synergies while making a ton of money.

Skift has long speculated that online travel agencies might launch soft brands, and now Kayak is attempting to do so during a dire moment for the hotel industry. Whether independent hotels would see any value in using a software package through the Kayak app is a wide open question.

Profit, revenue and trends became less relevant during the pandemic so many travel businesses with deeper pockets used the standstill to rethink their strategies. Plenty of the new efforts will fail, but on the other side of the crisis, some of these businesses will look significantly different.

The ever-lively Kayak CEO Steve Hafner said he expects a marketing blitz from Airbnb's rivals. Hafner also said Kayak is developing a property management system for independent and boutique hotels. This month, the metasearch company will push its business travel tools to 60 markets.

A theory made the rounds several years ago that Tripadvisor would be the next Booking.com. OK, that didn't happen, but dealt a bad hand by Google, Tripadvisor has been busy remaking itself. It's been a very long and uneven slog.

The travel industry needed a new reason to believe after months of enduring the body blows from coronavirus, coming on top of four bizarro years of a president who seemed to have little regard for his former industry. Read what executives had to say about the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

When it comes to brainstorming, there's no substitute for a Skift reporter ambling over to a Skift Research analyst's desk, and shooting the breeze about Oyo's model, or looking over a shoulder to view on screen how Expedia's marketing spend is trending. That dynamic is really tough to replicate on Zoom.

With parent company Alphabet generating $79 billion in revenue in the first half of 2020, Google is relentlessly rolling out new travel products. Not to mention, it is dictating content-licensing and advertising terms to cash-strapped partners while a pandemic rages. Enough said.