Travel

Aven Hospitality launched a booking engine on Wednesday designed to keep travelers on a hotel’s own website through checkout.  The tech eliminates the redirect to a separate booking page — a step the company says drives abandonment. Aven says the engine was rebuilt from scratch, rather than adapted from the technology it inherited as a

Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS Hotels spent the last decade trying to convince travelers to book directly. Hilton’s “Stop Clicking Around” campaign became one of the most recognizable direct-booking efforts in travel history, helping launch an industry-wide push to reduce dependence on online travel agencies. But ten years later, OTA market share has barely moved. In this episode

Navan CEO Ariel Cohen says rivals are merging — and their customers are coming to him. During Navan’s fiscal first-quarter 2027 earnings call earlier this week, Cohen pointed to upheaval among rival travel management companies as a meaningful driver behind Navan’s accelerating deal pipeline, one of several factors that helped the company see revenue jump

Lotte Hotels & Resorts spent over $1.3 billion assembling control of its Manhattan flagship, the 909-room Lotte New York Palace on Madison Avenue. This week, it hands the keys to someone else. Highgate, the New York investment and management firm, will begin running the Palace “in the next few days,” according to Richard Russo, a

For American destination marketers, the World Cup is a chance to reverse a slide in international visits and the campaigns they’re running share a single word: welcome.  For international tourism boards, the tournament is an opportunity to inspire travel, particularly for smaller countries making their World Cup debut. For American destination marketers, it offers a

Ireland’s Kerten Hospitality will be opening its first property in India before the end of 2026, possibly ahead of the fourth quarter, CEO Marloes Knippenberg told Skift in an exclusive interview. And the initial target of 1,000 keys in the first phase of its India launch could go higher, Knippenberg said, driven partly by the

Travelport formally launched TripServices on Thursday, a cloud-native API platform the company says can connect flights, hotels, and extras through one system while handling more of the booking work developers previously had to build themselves. The GDS wants more of that complexity to sit inside its own system, not with the agencies, startups, and AI

Even as airlines around the world increase airfares in response to surging fuel prices, executives on both sides of the Atlantic told Skift that travel demand is not letting up. It’s not what they expected.  “I expected a bigger elasticity effect than we’ve seen so far. I still do expect it,” United CEO Scott Kirby

American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said the carrier is weighing a widebody order with Boeing or Airbus as it looks to bolster its profitability and better compete with Delta and United. “We’ve been making several long-term investments to improve the business. One good example is the work we’re doing right now to shape the future

MakeMyTrip is still weighing next steps for a domestic Indian IPO and thinks it has already won the AI debate. The structural hurdles to the IPO are real for the company, which has traded on the Nasdaq since 2010. India’s restrictions on dual listings and the company’s Mauritius incorporation make this anything but straightforward.  “It

The spike in jet fuel prices was a dominant talking point at this week’s IATA Annual General Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, forcing airlines to ask how much pain they can absorb before passengers start feeling it. For Cathay Pacific, the answer – at least for now – appears to be quite a lot. Speaking

The $6.3 billion take-private of Amex GBT by Long Lake Management landed a few weeks ago with the usual noise. I spent the day pulling apart SEC filings with my team, calculating who made money and who didn’t. American Express walked away with a $975 million pre-tax gain, Expedia was underwater on the Egencia stake,

Travel companies may soon have to decide which parts of their apps belong inside Siri. Apple pushed that question forward Monday at its developer conference, where it rebuilt Siri to better understand personal context, take actions inside apps, recognize what is on screen, and answer questions using broader world knowledge. For travel executives, the question

What will one of travel’s most exclusive brands look like with a private-equity owner? The change for Soneva, which has three resorts in the Maldives, takes shape Monday with a rebrand: “Barefoot Luxury” becomes “Bare Luxury,” anchored by a new operational mantra, “Just What Matters,” and a new logo.   Soneva opened its first resort in

United CEO Scott Kirby is still interested in merging with American, saying that he has heard interest in the tie-up from unions and customers. “We would need the unions, we need the customers, the shareholders, the regulators, and the management team,” Kirby said to reporters at the IATA AGM in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.

Online travel agency Ixigo said Friday it plans to acquire a 54.66% majority stake in hotel booking platform Brevistay Hospitality for INR 657 million ($17.4 million). Once the deal goes through, Brevistay will become a subsidiary of Ixigo. Brevistay was founded in 2016 and offers short-stay and overnight hotel bookings through a network that includes

The CEO of Air New Zealand has pushed back on suggestions that the airline’s headline-grabbing premium products are difficult to justify at a time of mounting losses and cost cuts. “These projects for us, they’re not vanity projects, they’re existential,” Nikhil Ravishankar told Skift on the sidelines of the IATA Annual General Meeting in Rio

Skift Take: We heard from more than two dozen of travel's most important tech leaders — the people actually deploying AI solutions every day. Here's what the industry still needs to get right. Read the Complete Story On Skift View original source here