Spending on travel and tourism declined last year for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Commerce Department said Thursday, as Americans canceled vacations, a strong dollar kept foreigners away and businesses slashed travel budgets.
As a result, the trillion-dollar industry — a major employer in the U.S. — is reeling, and [...]

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Savvy travel-marketing people already know that popular social-networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn and others are a valuable extension of any major marketing program.
As the social-networking phenomenon grows and evolves, travel agencies, home-based agents, suppliers and destination marketers who sit on the sidelines may risk missing significant opportunities to engage existing customers, recruit [...]

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Internet bookings will surge. Demand for online virtual meetings will gather pace. Domestic travel will stay stable or grow. Long haul travel will fall sharply. And the most pain will be felt in the business travel and MICE sectors, according to the latest ITB World Travel Trends Report.
Internet bookings will surge. Demand for online virtual [...]

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Ryanair has become involved in an online fakery dispute over a Twitter ‘account’, claimed to be from the airline, which was abusing bloggers and passengers.
The apparently official account @RyanAirOnline was used to make fun of passengers, saying that they “smell like urine” and describing them as “mostly stupid”.
Ryanair initially confirmed that their marketing team had [...]

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While trying to keep up-to-date on the latest interactive tools, some marketers have lost track of how powerful incentive and loyalty programs can be. They have an outdated view of them as generic or unsophisticated, with the “free iPod with purchase” program as a perfect example of a primitive reward program.
An effective interactive marketing campaign [...]

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Where will your hotel be positioned in the market place after being M.I.A. throughout the economic downturn? How long will it take you to capture or recapture your fair share? How many new competitors will you be facing?
Wouldn’t you rather be one of the hotels that come out of this recession positioned and armed so [...]

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The U.S. recession presents a strong headwind to the travel industry, especially for business travel, which is declining more rapidly than leisure, the chief executives of two online travel agencies said on Monday.
“There’s been a more rapid downturn in business travel than leisure travel,” said Boyd, Priceline.com Chief Executive.
Boyd linked the decline in business travel, [...]

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Extended-stay hotels like these have been popular among hotel companies in recent years because they’re cheaper and easier to build. In 2008, the number of extended-stay rooms grew 6.7% to nearly 300,000, the highest growth rate in seven years, Highland Group says.
With blocks of guests staying weeks at a time, they also have fewer check-ins [...]

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Despite nearly half of travel transactions being made online , new findings from RBS WorldPay, reveal more than half (62 per cent) of consumers feel security is at risk purchasing over the internet.
With over half (55 per cent) of consumers ranking security as the most important factor when making an online purchase, the payment solutions [...]

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