Search Results forTravelocity
Jennifer Catto appointed executive vice-president and chief marketing officer at Sabre
Travel technology firm Sabre Corporation recently announced the appointment of Jennifer Catto as its new executive vice-president and chief marketing officer. As part of Sabre’s Executive Leadership Team, Catto will take an active part in developing the company’s global marketing strategy and brand. Her work is expected to help drive growth, deepen customer engagement, and position Sabre for the future. According to Sabre president and CEO Kurt Ekert: "Jennifer’s appointment reflects our commitment to bold, strategic leadership as we accelerate Sabre’s journey to become the premier technology platform in travel. She blends creativity, operational focus, and a deep understanding of digital transformation in a way that is rare to find. With Jennifer’s leadership, we will enhance Sabre’s brand, deepen engagement with our customers and partners, and amplify our differentiated value in the marketplace." A wealth of experience Catto joined Sabre in February of this year, bringing more than 25 years of experience helping companies navigate and accelerate through moments of transformation. A strategist at heart and a disruptor by nature, she has built and repositioned brands at the intersection of technology and customer needs, leading integrated marketing and growth strategies at Travelport, Telaria, Travelocity, Condé Nast, and SAY. Throughout her career, Catto championed the use of data-driven insights, bold storytelling and cross-functional collaboration to create new market opportunities and drive lasting relevance for brands in fast-changing industries. As she puts it: “A brand is a promise you make to the market that the business has to keep. I’m thrilled to take the helm of a great brand for a business that has doubled down on its commitment to innovation and product delivery—keeping its customers at the heart of every solution it pioneers." Catto further explained that Sabre has modernised its foundations, something that many companies only talk about. She said: "Today, it’s a unified, intelligent travel marketplace that prioritizes performance over promises. I’m here to shape a brand that reflects that transformation with precision, one that signals confidence to the market and elevates Sabre’s presence across every channel and customer experience." A recognized industry leader, Catto is a Cannes Lions Award nominee, an AdAge Brand Leader Award winner, and a GBTA WINiT Top 50 honouree. She is also a frequent speaker and commentator for major media outlets and is passionate about redefining how companies engage audiences and build enduring value through innovation. With Catto's appointment, Sabre continues to strengthen its leadership team and sharpen its focus on delivering innovative technology solutions that power the future of travel.
Expedia unifies loyalty programmes in one global rewards platform
OUR TAKE While Expedia is making significant changes to its tours and activities business since 2019 with its recent strategic partnership with Viator this month and its other partner GetYourGuide, it has now taken strides towards unifying and expanding its already existing loyalty programme. The group has now announced to include all brands and products so its customers can soon enjoy the most complete travel rewards offering in the industry. The programme will consist of unique member pricing discounts and the ability to earn and redeem rewards across all Expedia Group brands, such as Expedia, Vrbo, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz. The new program will span flights, hotels, vacation rentals, car rentals, cruises, and activities. With more than 145 million members across its current and separate rewards programmes, Expedia Group already has one of the largest loyalty platforms in the world. According to Jon Gieselman, president of Expedia Brands, creating travel products and features that are simple to use and even more rewarding for those who travel with the company is vital. “We want our customers to get the most of their travel experiences, plain and simple. No one needs to do anything right now, but soon their current rewards will be even more valuable, as they will gain access to the world of Expedia Group through one consolidated, easy to use programme,” Gieselman added. To date, Expedia Group’s Member Only Deals and loyalty rewards have saved customers nearly $10 billion on travel alone. The company plans to build on the great benefits currently offered across Expedia Group’s loyalty offerings, such as member pricing, reward boosters, and upgrades and social amenities offered at thousands of properties worldwide. The unified and upgraded programme will continue to be free to join. Current members and anyone interested in joining will be met with a seamless experience once the new program launches. All current members will continue to earn rewards through their existing programs and look forward to even greater flexibility and value in the future.
Give the World a Shot! Expedia announces global vaccine partnership with UNICEF
Expedia Group and its family of brands – including Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, ebookers and CheapTickets – announced a joint programme calling on travellers to join to help safely re-open the world, one trip and one shot at a time. Starting today, each purchase made via Expedia Group’s mobile apps will result in a donation to help UNICEF’s global COVID-19 response, including distributing safe, effective COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments in over 180 countries, bringing us all one step closer to experiencing the world again. Participation is simple. Customers can download any app from one of the Expedia Group brands, plan and purchase a trip through the app and in turn, they can help get a vaccine to someone, somewhere in the world who needs it. Travellers can visit here for the full program details and learn more. Globally, the Expedia Group family of brands represents a community of passionate travellers dedicated to seeing the world but, more importantly, believe in the importance of having an equitable world. They share our vision that travel is a force for good because travel brings people together and broadens horizons. We know travelling won’t be the same until the whole world is open to travel, and so, to get there as quickly as possible, we must all help accelerate rapid and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. It is essential that everyone, everywhere has access to vaccines, but currently, less than 1 per cent of the global supply is reaching those living in low-income countries.1 As the world’s single biggest buyer of vaccines, UNICEF’s expertise uniquely positions it to help address the logistical challenge currently facing many low-income countries around the world. Peter Kern, vice chairman and chief executive officer in Expedia Group said: “We support a global and equitable approach to vaccine distribution and embrace efforts to help protect everyone, everywhere. We are proud to contribute to UNICEF and what will be the single largest and most rapid global vaccine deployment ever. I hope other companies, and anyone else who can, will join us in accelerating vaccine rollout, fighting global inequity, and igniting a movement that will help bring the world together. We all must do our part for the world to be truly open again.” A portion of every eligible booking will support UNICEF’s global COVID-19 response. With the help of travellers around the world, the Expedia Group family of brands will donate a minimum of $10M to UNICEF’s work.
Airbnb-like start-up for business travellers Mint House raises USD 15 million
Start-up Mint House, Airbnb-style for business travellers, raised USD 15 million in Series A funding led by Revolution Ventures. Revolution Ventures has participation from key hospitality executives, including former Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide CEO Tom Mangas, former Travelocity CEO Carl Sparks and former St. Regis Hotels president Kerry Hatch. Founded in 2017, Mint House aims to combine short-term rental experience with the reliability of a hotel. Mint House CEO Will Lucas claimed that he prefers to use Airbnb and short-term rentals even when travelling for work. "When on a business trip and on a tight schedule, I didn't have room for error and couldn't gamble with [a host] not being there or [me] not being able to find the room. [I saw] there was a need to professionalize the experience and improve upon usability, and we knew we could achieve that through smart application technology and elevate the quality across the board," Lucas said. The company operates 200 rooms in Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami and Nashville and plans to add another 200 by summer 2019. An additional 250 rooms are in the pipeline, and Lucas said Mint House will enter 10 more cities within the next 12 months, including San Diego, Minneapolis, Louisville, Austin and Dallas. Mint House CEO Will Lucas said that 60-70% of its users are corporate travellers. The technology includes a mobile app that allows guests to book, check-in, access services and amenities and communicate with a dedicated 24/7 concierge staff responding to guests across the U.S. In addition to the app, guests can book via the website, via online travel agency channel partners or via a corporate partnership.
‘I built a travel data start-up because of a selfish desire to keep in touch’
Andres Fabris earned a finance degree from the University of Texas at Austin in the hopes of working in the finance side of the IT industry. Instead, he has spent 23 years growing, then disrupting, the travel industry: leadership roles in Sabre, World Choice Travel and Travelocity prepared him to build a web-based travel proximity alert service that would allow him to stay in touch with his classmates after finishing graduate school. This became Traxo, which is now a rising star in travel data aggregation and itinerary intelligence analysis. We joined the start-up founder in uncovering if – and how – his heritage informs this passion project. Here he shares with us in his own words: I was born in Argentina, but I moved to the US as a boy. I grew up in a bilingual and bicultural household, and my oldest memories are of travelling back and forth to be with my relatives. I think that upbringing programmed me to be more open towards exploring new cultures and new mindsets. While that approach definitely applies to leisure travel, I brought some of that openness into my career. After college, I wanted to pursue a finance role in a tech company. But I entered the travel industry in 1995 when Sabre – then still owned by American Airlines – offered me the role I wanted plus free flight benefits, which was a rare and compelling combination at the time. I quickly moved up the ranks in finance and product roles to become director of emerging business, corporate strategy and business development at Sabre, where I also returned to once I finished business school. After a stint with World Choice Travel, I took on leadership posts in Travelocity.com, where my role was to establish and negotiate the company’s major distribution, content and technology partnerships. My career has been a happy accident, really. I didn’t know that the trajectory of my early decisions would bring me here! Traxo TRAVELER itinerary diagram Traxo began as a selfish desire to keep in touch with my graduate school classmates. I made amazing friends while pursuing an MBA degree at Harvard Business School. My closest friends hailed from all over the world – Argentina, Brazil and Spain. I knew I wanted to continue meeting with them in person after graduation. In graduate school, I wrote a white paper about network effects, where I proposed an idea: a programme that would let people know where their friends or family would be going in the future. It would proactively tell users of everyone’s upcoming travel plans and alert them in advance of any future overlaps. Then I thought, “Would it be possible to reliably know people’s locations?“ I soon realised that OTAs and travel suppliers were the only companies that knew people's confirmed future locations, and I began working on a web-based social proximity alert using technology to detect trips from these travel sites. I like to say that Traxo is a platform of assisted serendipity – you discover overlaps in travels with people you know and you meet with them at places neither of you live nor work in, but at the same time our technology makes sure that these meetings happen. While we were doing so, we stumbled into a really elegant way to create a master itinerary or super-PNR consolidating travel data from multiple sources. Over time we combined social proximity, itinerary management, and loyalty dashboard functions into a single, customer-focused platform, which became Traxo. We started out with 10 sites, which grew into 40 sites, then 200, then 400 sites. The service was very consumer-focused as a result. Sometime after our first five years – Traxo started in 2008, so it’s 10 years old now – SAP called. The third largest software company in the world wanted us to add our travel data into their corporate expense reports. Now we’d never done it before, but it made sense for us. We realised that corporations and their travel providers needed to have visibility into the trips made by their workforce. So we entered a huge licensing agreement where SAP would use our aggregation engine tech to directly populate their expense reports with the data we had collected for the traveller. This led us to enhance our itinerary management and data aggregation tech. We came up with technology that automatically detects travel data as it passes through email inboxes and corporate email servers. To complete the transition from B2C into B2B, we proceeded to raise venture capital investment and set up a formal sales team. Traxo provides the data that power the innovations that have become today’s buzzwords, like artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, our own products and processes don’t use any of them at this time. That said, I think that big data is still relevant in the travel industry today. Without data, there would be no way to introduce and improve on services and products that travellers need. Data is the foundational element that teaches these technologies to conform to a certain structure in order for them to be useful in the first place. But I do have some caveats. It’s always been difficult to consolidate data because it’s stored in thousands of systems in different formats. Booking data is particularly fragmented, especially with the rise of metasearch and GDS. And now with the introduction of NDC, the distribution cost charge, and the strengthening power of supplier loyalty programmes, it's bound to get even more challenging to gather all this travel data together. I'm personally interested in cryptocurrency (I like bitcoin), blockchain and their synergy and applications. But they still have a lot of nascent potentials, and their application to the travel industry still needs to be developed. Regarding AR and VR, if done correctly, they should stimulate the occurrence of real travel, but I don't believe they will ever substitute it. The joy of travel relies on being physically present; AR and VR only allow you to see it, but how do you sense it? How do you hear, smell, touch and taste a place you’ve never been in? I once read that a person's 10 fondest memories include marriage and the birth of a child in the top two spots; all the rest are related to travel. Traxo has had a great 2 years. In 2016, TripAdvisor became a Traxo investor when we closed our US$5.2 million Series B funding round. Last year, we managed to raise US$725,510 in new equity funds. We also launched Traxo FILTER, a game-changer for companies flying blind when it comes to capturing and aggregating travel data, in 2017. It’s a compelling product because it helps track reservations and itineraries made by corporate travellers outside of OTAs and TMCs in real-time, without requiring employees to remember to take any action. Our plans for 2018 include becoming fully profitable later this year. This year, business is projected to grow beyond 500% year-on-year. With the proceeds from our last round and some recent add-on investments, we’re looking to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts to a global level. This is because our selling and marketing are currently centred here in the US where we are based, even if our product is available worldwide. We’re looking towards Europe and Asia, which we feel also have fragmented data but for reasons different from the US. Both regions have more independent hotels and smaller chains than we do, and they also have different attitudes towards booking and loyalty. Our team just finished a business trip to Europe last week, so our focus in the coming weeks would be to build our Europe-based data centre. We have also started working on our accreditation for GDPR compliance. We’ll make our way towards Asia in 2019. To start-up founders and young travel entrepreneurs – I’m sorry, I know this is a complete reversal of position, but please: no more trip-planning start-ups! We've seen dozens of them in the last 10 years all mushroom and then land in the graveyard. If anything, start-ups should focus on other technologies, like traveller identification. Some innovations that particularly excite me are chat- and voice-activated applications and platforms like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Home. In our 10-year journey, I’ve learned that the process of creating a company is extremely rewarding. When you are able to consolidate compelling products, an amazing team, and strong investors and advisors together, it makes all the stress and hard work worth it. That said, I’ve discovered that it is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to play the long game and learn how to manage the psychological and emotional parts. You need to develop ways to modulate the highs and lows of the process because they are always on the extremes – very high or very low, nothing in-between – especially during the early years. * This is part of a series called the Crush List, featuring the hottest startups in travel tech. Watch this space for more startups that are killing it this 2018!
Visit.org Launches Distribution Partnership with Expedia® Expanding Network for Social Travel Activities
The lead marketplace of immersive and impactful travel experiences, Visit.org, has launched a distribution partnership with Expedia, one of the world’s largest full-service online travel companies. The venture will offer Visit.org’s social impact travel experiences to Expedia’s massive audience. Customers will be able to add short experiences hosted by local social ventures (nonprofits and other community-based enterprises) with the click of a mouse through Expedia Local Expert®. Visit.org creates mainstream tourism products for its charitable partners that are unique to their cause pro-bono. The platform offers users these authentic activities that can be added to any trip itinerary in 67 countries. 100% of the hosts’ revenue is then invested back into the local community that they aid. The partnership is poised to reach the goal of featuring all 545+ activities and will continue to grow as the Visit.org network of partners expands. Expedia travelers may book over 50 impactful experiences on more than 60 points of sale including Expedia.com®, localized Expedia Local Expert sites and sister sites such as LastMinute.com.au®, Wotif.com®, Orbitz®, Travelocity®, etc. After a user books flights or accommodations, they are prompted with the opportunity to book social travel experiences located in the area they are visiting. Once they find an activity that fits their interests they are able to make an instant booking to add the short immersive activity to their travel plans. This technology expands the social ventures tourism product offering by making it both mainstream, user-friendly, and easy to book. Travelers may discover ancient Greek mythology in Athens through walking in the footsteps of philosophers ($40), try weaving with craftswomen in a Rwanda village ($62), make coffee with farmers in at a plantation in Guatemala, learn about upcycling and urban gardening inNew York City ($28) or adventure around Siem Reap on a motorbike ($84). Travelers fold these unique experiences into their itineraries that benefit local communities and hosts’ revenue is invested back into the local community. “Responsible travel is one of Expedia’s core values. Expedia Local Expert has been live for over 15 years and are thrilled to join the UN Year of Sustainable Travel by debuting this collaborative effort with Visit.org in 2017. We appreciate the opportunity to promote sustainable travel experiences that will benefit local communities.” said Jen O’Twomney, Vice President of Expedia Local Expert. “Partnering with Expedia Local Expert has vastly expanded our audience and therefore potential advocates for the various causes we promote. Expedia is a leader in the travel industry and we are honored that they’ve chosen to expand their tour offering by adding in philanthropic experiences with Visit.org. We share a common mission of increasing local impactful travel to communities globally,” said Michal Alter, Visit.org CEO.
Expedia on track with SilverRail deal
Expedia has expanded its presence in the rail sector with the acquisition of SilverRail, the online rail booking platform. While the exact terms of the agreement were not revealed, it was confirmed that Expedia will take a majority interest in SilverRail Technologies, which was founded in London in 2009 and now has offices in Boston, Stockholm and Brisbane. The company's rail booking platform currently handles more than one billion searches each year, processing in excess of 25 million bookings for 35+ operators. "Rail is ready for an online revolution and we're ready to be a part of it. Rail's shift online is one of the fastest growing areas of innovation in the US$1.3 trillion travel market, and SilverRail is powering that innovation," said Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia's president & CEO. "We are tremendously excited to welcome the incredibly talented SilverRail team into the Expedia family." Following the closure of the acquisition, which is expected in mid-2017, SilverRail will become one of Expedia's brands. The company said it will "remain focused on transforming the consumer experience of rail for carriers, travel retailers, and corporate travel companies". "The investment by Expedia will make our business bigger, stronger, and faster in executing current commitments and meeting the demand of new business," said Aaron Gowell, SilverRail's CEO. "We were looking for an investor and partner that understood our ambitions and was committed for the long term. Expedia is an ideal fit for us, as it sees the huge potential in rail and has a history of keeping its brands nimble." SilverRail's platform was purpose built for rail bookings, and includes journey planning, inventory management, scheduling, pricing, booking, payment, ticketing, reporting and administration. It will now sit alongside other Expedia brands, including Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotels.com, CarRentals.com, HomeAway and Trivago.
Industry giants gear up for Travel Technology Europe
Industry leaders such as Google, easyJet, WayBlazer and Contiki will deliver keynote speeches at Travel Technology Europe, Olympia London, 22-23 February, as part of its extensive conference programme. Photo by Gil C Over 50 hours of conference sessions will see current and future issues, tools and opportunities discussed across the hospitality technology, marketing technology, travel technology and innovation conference zones. Shelley Hurley, Google Cloud Business Manager, commented: “I’m looking forward to attending Travel Technology Europe as a keynote speaker where I’ll share how Google Cloud platform capabilities can be used to enable more personalised targeting and recommendations for customers, to enhance their experiences. I’ll be in the Innovation Conference theatre on 23rd February at 2.40pm.” Keynote speakers include: Terry Jones, chairman of WayBlazer: Why AI and why now? Alexis Sitaropoulos, Contiki: Thinking like a publisher - how Contiki is mastering this Shelley Hurley, Google Cloud Business Manager: Using Google’s Cloud platform to make your business smarter Daniel Young, Digital Development Manager for Mobile, easyJet: How easyJet is acing mobile Phil Barden, Managing Director, Decode Marketing: Why people buy and how to get them to do it more Michael Jaconi, Founder & CEO, Button and Thierry Bedos, Chief Technology Officer, Hotels.com: Smaller screens, bigger bookings Hospitality influencers Hotels.com and Button team up to create the mobile solution customers now want and will be sharing with the audience their view of the future of the connected customer. The show also hosts a Hospitality Tech Showcase focusing on this sector with over 30 exhibitors. Another leader of the travel technology industry, who will be flying in from America to speak as a keynote, is Terry Jones, chairman of WayBlazer, founder of Travelocity and founding chairman of Kayak. Terry will deliver his keynote on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will drive the next revolution in travel and why travel companies must embrace them to survive the next few years. Online registration is now open for Travel Technology Europe. Visit www.traveltechnologyeurope.com/register to apply for a free visitor pass.
No companies found matching your search.
Return To HomeNo Event found matching your search.
Return To Home