In a few years, the streamlined, cross-platform searching that Hipmunk and Expedia are creating will be taken for granted because any company worth anything will have to offer it. So far Hipmunk Anywhere is more intuitive than Expedia's Scratchpad with fewer clicks or taps, but these are very early days.
World Cup buzz is expected to attract tourists to smaller Brazilian cities, while search growth is more modest in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro where tourism has already taken off.
To paraphrase a certain baseball philospher, it's getting late very early for flight-search startups. For any chance of success, they'd better offer something unique, have a lot of funding, and figure out how to attract substantial revenue elsewhere.
Facebook's success with Graph Search depends entirely upon users' willingness to share as much as they currently do, and then some. Whether or not that will continue to be the case is still to be determined.
Road warriors need not apply, but Bootsnall is tackling a mammoth, complex battle for those leisure travelers who are set on exploring the world. If the Indie booking engine works as advertised, Bootsnall will make some headway because of it.
The FTC should realize that Google's pointing consumers to its own products does indeed cause consumer harm. A free pass from the FTC would be a setback for consumers, although European regulators would likely be tougher on Google and could force some changes in its vertical-search practices.
User-generated reviews are beginning to pay a significantly larger role in travelers’ decision processes, but hotels can still participate in the conversation by replying to positive and negative reviews.