Roundup

Farecast.com wins Web 2.0 Travel Award
Farecast.com beats out Kayak and Real Travel to take SEOmoz Web 2.0 Travel award. What makes it an honor is that many recognizable bloggers, including Pete Cashmore and Danny Sullivan, were the judges. (Disclosure: I work at Farecast.)

Evite finally teams up with Hotels.com
For several years, Evite and Hotels.com were both owned by Interactive Corp. but not until now, after Hotels/Expedia were spun out, have they teamed up to combine hotel planning and booking within the evite platform. Read more about it here.

Unmanaged Roadwarriors

I found an interesting stat while reading Diane Clarkson's blog, "39 percent of travelers who take 10 or more business trips per year do not have a managed travel provider. And this number doesn’t include those business travelers who take between 1 – 9 business trips per year." This is based on the Jupiter Research Frequent Travelers' survey.

Seems to me this segment is best served by meta-search players today, Kayak, SideStep, Farecast, etc., not the OTAs due to the great filtering functionality that helps unmanaged business travelers filter down to the right times, stops, airlines, etc. However, Orbitz recently built out a microsite, Tools For The Road Warrior, dedicated to highlighting features and providing relevent content to these important customers.