Quick Reviews

Travellerspoint.com
Eric over at Travellerspoint reached out recently to let me know Travellerspoint launched travel maps. Which is valuable because "besides showing where you've travelled, your travel map will show any photos you took for a given leg of your trip, as well as any blog entries you wrote while you were there." Great reason for the 78K members to enhance their experience, or for new folks to sign up. Interesting to see you can insert Travelistic videos into blog entries.

geobeats.com
Vishesh brought my attention to geobeats, a company "that produces and distributes short online travel videos." The examples he provided were very informative and useful - check out the Burano Island in Venice video.

TailoredTours.com
I heard from Lisa from TailoredTours about their new release: "TailoredTours.com lets users browse and buy self-guided walking tours online for as little as $2 each." You can receive these tours via emial or download them to your mobile phone. Lisa sent me a tour of Central Park to Rockefeller Center in NYC via email. Clean and simple layout. Seems like you would want to target the big online agencies as distribution outlets - over the past 3-5 years they have been more aggressive about selling "destination services" or add-ons.

Roundup

Lots of stuff going on in the world of online travel. For starters, just an observation, but Kayak just passed Priceline on Alexa. Impressive.

Also in the news lately, AA pulled international, business and first class fares originating out of the U.S. from Expedia. More on the story from Travelution Blog or check out the AA press release. Expedia is an expensive distribution channel relative to selling directly at aa.com and other channels. This move tells me Expedia was not willing to get fees to a place where AA could be channel agnostic.

Did you see this story on Virgin America's troubles with the U.S. Government. Here is the first sentance from The Independant article: "Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group has accused the US government of "pure protectionism" for denying permission for the launch of its planned low-cost airline, Virgin America." Kind of flew under the radar late last month. Full story here.

PhoCusWright just released a report titled "Groups and Meetings: Market Opportunity Redefined," released today that indicates that the group travel market will grow to $175 billion in 2008. You can learn more at the PCW site.

Back from CES

I headed out to CES on Monday on Farecast's behalf to meet with press contacts and pick up some hardware - Farecast won product innovation awards from PC World and Popular Science. What an event. Completely over the top. Nice recap of the top 5 CES trends by Katie over at Gigaom. As you've probably heard, the show was overshadowed by Job's iPhone announcement at MacWorld. Thoughts on how the iPhone pushes travel into mobile from Travelution blog.

As I moved throughout South and Central Hall, I scanned the floor for anything online travel related and low and behold PriceGrabber.com was present with an excellent display in a prime location. Even more impressive, when I asked the marketing rep what was new at PriceGrabber these days, the first thing out of her mouth was "we're doing some new stuff in the travel category".