Travel Industry

VroomVroomVroom – Why this Aussie company will succeed in the U.S.

Alison Osborne — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 23:03:47 +0000

VroomVroomVroom is already one of the most spectacular online successes of the 21st century in Australia, and now that the cool rental car price comparison site has launched in the U.S. market, the car rental specialists from down under are on their way to the top here, too.

The company’s vision is a simple one: to be known around the world as the easiest way to rent a car! One reason VroomVroomVroom is popular (it’s #1 in Australia) is that the site offers a truly customer driven experience, enabling price-savvy users to book reservations with all the major car rental companies at over 2,500 U.S. locations, in addition to destinations worldwide.

Achieving the 4th “V” – VroomVroomVroom’s Vision

For the past 3 years, the VroomVroomVroom team has been developing the U.S. platform, from implementing cutting-edge technology to building relationships that help the team to offer real-time pricing and direct connections to all of the key car rental providers, all of which help give Americans a new choice for renting a vehicle with ease.

From downtown, urban areas to small towns to the major airports, travelers in the U.S. like VroomVroomVroom because it’s easy. It boasts the fastest interface in the industry, taking 28.5 seconds to complete a reservation. No other car rental site is so quick!

Moving Forward while Backing Up every rental with top-notch support

VroomVroomVroom helps its customers compare the rental car prices from 15 suppliers, and completes over a thousand bookings every day. An excellent team of car rental experts offers site users their choice of help over the phone, by email, or in a live chat room. Only a fraction of the competition offers this level of customer service!

The company motto at VroomVroomVroom is, “Our vibe is fun and positive, we innovate, and WOW, we make it easy! We are a team that values integrity, trust and respect, and we invest in the future to remain sustainable.”

A Completely Free Service – No Fees, No Ads, you don’t even need a credit card

VroomVroomVroom is getting closer to reaching its goal of providing easy access to cheap car rental prices all across the Earth, but still has lots of work to do. The service’s advantages include:

No ads on the site!
No booking fees!
No credit card required!
No cancellation fees!

No hidden costs whatsoever, and its hassle-free, no bull approach to rental car comparison is paying off! VroomVroomVroom enjoys success in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada, and has now established an American headquarters in Las Vegas.

Their mobile friendly site makes it easy to book on the run… and you can even have your booking confirmation sent straight to your phone as an instant SMS message.

Read one of VroomVroomVroom’s fun feature articles, including:

http://www.vroomvroomvroom.com/fun/best-views-from-your-car/

http://www.vroomvroomvroom.com/fun/best-road-trip-songs/

http://www.vroomvroomvroom.com/10-most-beautiful-drives.asp

Three New Free Travel Apps

Donna M. Airoldi — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:02:19 +0000

There seems to be no slowing down in the desire for travel companies to launch (or reboot) applications for a population that’s increasingly tuned into mobile devices. Here’s a look a three new free travel apps—beyond the new JetBlue app we wrote about a few weeks ago—that recently have hit the market.

AFAR
The media company with the gorgeous glossy travel magazine that launched in late 2009 recently released an iPhone app with a focus around Highlights. These bits of travel inspiration include a photo, title, description and location of a recommended travel experience. The app launched with 4,000 Highlights, with more being added daily. There’s also a contest running through the end of March for users to upload their highlights for a chance to win a trip to India. AFAR says that a version for Android phones will be released soon. Now how about some wildlife photos to inspire me to go on an adventurous safari in Africa?

TravelZoo
One of the earliest travel deal sites on the Internet, TravelZoo has launched a mobile website and added an Android app to join its existing iPhone app offering (introduced in August 2011) for travel discounts and deals. Mobile users can quickly access TravelZoo’s traditional Top 20 weekly deals listing, Local Deals, Entertainment Deals, Travel Deals and Last Minute discounts, which is not a category found on the company’s main website. The Android app features local deals based on users’ detected location. According to Tnooz, 17.5 percent of traffic to TravelZoo.com was already coming from mobile devices. Needless to say, this app is focused more on deals than say, travel photos and guides.

Travelocity
Last-minute deals for travel bookings on mobile devices—especially for hotel rooms—are gaining in popularity. Travelocity already went after this market last year when it enhanced its iPhone app for same-day hotel deals and some local information. The company has now launched an iPad app that offers additional discounts for flights, hotels and rental cars at rates through the app that are better than what’s available on the Travelocity website. In addition, app users get daily mobile-only deals. They also can access their Travelocity accounts through the app, which can auto-fill in purchase information to speed the close of the transaction.

Photo: AFAR

IHG to Launch Wellness-Themed Hotel Brand EVEN

maggierauch — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:57:28 +0000

For all those who blame travel for their tendency to fall in and out of a healthy routine, Atlanta-based InterContinental Hotels Group is launching a new brand for the U.S. market that aims to eliminate that excuse.

IHG plans to announce the first EVEN Hotel location in the second quarter of 2012 and to open its doors in 2013. The new wellness-themed properties will see investment of $150 million over the next three years. Amenities at these hotels will include:

Workout-ready guest rooms with features such as a coat rack that doubles as a pull-up bar
Group exercise activities
Equipment rental
Free tips and travel fitness advice
Menu emphasis on healthy options, with free mini-smoothies in addition to morning coffee
Restrooms built for healthy rejuvenation, with natural lighting, LED dimmers, antibacterial wipes and hypoallergenic linens

EVEN hotels will be priced mid-scale, according to a report in HotelNewsNow, which also lists cities IHG is eyeing for development: San Francisco; Los Angeles; San Diego; Boston; New York; Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Minneapolis; and Austin, Texas. According to HotelNewsNow, IHG is aiming to open 100 properties over the next five years, and the first locations will be conversions of existing hotels with 100 to 200 rooms.

Photo: InterContinental Hotels Group

Exciting News – Uptake joins Groupon

Yen Lee — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:17:53 +0000

Uptake has been acquired by Groupon! We had been watching Groupon for some time, and admire how they created a powerful new business model, assembled a world-class team, helped consumers discover deals with increasingly tailored recommendations, and saw global, record-shattering growth along the way. Today, we’re delighted to announce that Uptake is now a part of Groupon.

Before we move on to this promising new opportunity with Groupon, we’d like to look back at what we’ve built and accomplished together – our tenacious and creative team, partners, blogger community, investors, advisers, and the 75+ million travelers that trusted our sites and recommendations so that they could enjoy amazing travel experiences.

Lasting more than four years, it’s been a phenomenal journey working hard to execute on our mission: to make it fun and easy for consumers to create and enjoy their ideal vacation. Our mission was rooted in the belief that consumers didn’t want to search for hours on end, but rather preferred a more thoughtful, interactive and personal way to discover and plan their travel – for example, to find the right hotel for the romantic escape or the best activities during their kid-friendly getaway.

Uptake was early to harness the Wisdom of the Crowd for online travel research and recommendations. Since the summer of 2008, Uptake has connected travelers with recommendations, driven by their preferences and intent, and drawn from the largest online travel library. En route, we developed patent-pending technology to aggregate, analyze and recommend reviews, articles and blogs from over 30,000 sites for activities, hotels and restaurants. And because travelers could discover recommendations based on their travel companies and preferences at Uptake.com, we became the third largest U.S. travel research site, behind only TripAdvisor and Yahoo! Travel.

In 2011, we discovered our technology also allowed us to uncover and organize the most valued source of recommendations – the Knowledge of your Friends. While reading reviews is helpful, whose opinions do you trust more than friends and family who have been there previously? While Facebook’s open graph initiative will structure your friends’ future travel history, Uptake was able to determine the past 8+ years of your friends’ travel histories to identify over a thousand destinations your friends have already been – without any additional work required!

All in all, we were able to combine the Wisdom of the Crowds and the Knowledge of your Friends – something no one else in the travel space has been able to cultivate to date.

Behind all of these amazing accomplishments was a stellar team of Crud-loving, problem-solving technology geeks who love travel, and travel junkies who love technology. Our new adventure at Groupon is possible thanks to the drive, energy and talent of the entire Uptake team.

We’re excited to jump in at Groupon right away – with our attention focused there, you may notice that some of Uptake’s features will slowly wind down. We hope you’ll use Groupon to continue to explore your city and fantastic places around the world.

We can’t thank you enough for all your support over the last four years! It’s been one heck-of-a ride.

All the best,
Gene & Yen

Tuesday, February 28th in the Year of the Dragon

Co-Founders Gene Mckenna and Yen Lee

Nasty Viral: American Airlines Flight Attendant Spins YouTube Hits Into Petition

maggierauch — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:27:29 +0000

What began as some bad YouTube publicity for American Airlines is growing into an employee-led drive for change in brand positioning and corporate leadership at the legacy carrier.

It started when Gailen David, under the username SkySteward, began posting videos to YouTube starring himself, dressed in frumpy corporate drag, as “The Aluminum Lady,” an AA executive with a panache for cost-cutting and a disdain for flight attendants. In one video, “The Aluminum Lady” plays with Fisher-Price dolls dressed in blue uniforms, saying, “We can run each one of these aircraft with about three less flight attendants. It looks like it’s perfectly doable.”

An American spokesperson made a public statement against the videos and reportedly called David in for a disciplinary meeting that he did not attend.

“We all have tried to deliver such great customer service,” David said in an interview with NBC Dallas-Ft. Worth. “And in return, it feels like we keep getting kicked in the gut, so this was a time for me to do something to make us all laugh for a change and really say what needed to be said.” He added: “They may fire me for it, and that’s going to be OK.”

To say something like that in today’s economy, you have to just not care whether you have a job, or have a plan and a passion for what you are doing.

It turns out that for David, it is the latter. This week, he launched a “sAAve American Airlines” petition through Change.org, appealing to U.S. Bankruptcy Court for “…a new flight plan with a new leadership team made up of individuals with a proven track record of winning rather than years of compounded failures.”

David is no rookie in the social media world. He runs a website, DearSkySteward.com, about the airline industry with a special focus on in-flight etiquette, and currently has 22,825 followers on Twitter. The petition currently has close to 3,300 signatures, far from its target of 250,000.

We will leave it for someone else to judge how much and what kind of change is needed at American, which is in Chapter 11. But this developing story is an example of how social media can work for or against a company. Media-savvy David, often interviewed in the national press, could just as easily use his platform to make his employer look good—in fact, it seems like he still might, if he sees some of the changes he hopes for at the airline.

Video: YouTube

Planning a Presidential Road Trip

maggierauch — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:19:47 +0000

If your road trip takes you past Zillah, Wash., check out the 90-year-old Teapot Dome Service Station—erected as a reminder of the Teapot Dome Scandal that marred Warren G. Harding's presidency.

If you’re taking a road trip this holiday weekend and want to work in detours to a few presidential landmarks in honor of Presidents’ Day… There’s an app for that.

The Roadside Presidents app is now available in the iTunes store for $2.99 from RoadsideAmerica.com, a website with videos, news, maps and free tools to help travelers plan their own road trips. It allows travelers to find historical sites, from traditional ones like graves and birthplaces, to the more offbeat.

“We’ve discovered so many bizarre presidential sights out there,” says Ken Smith, senior editor of RoadsideAmerica.com. “By visiting conventional landmarks, but also the hidden treasures, you get the broader, nuttier picture of America’s history. You’ll never think of George Washington quite the same way after you’ve seen his whiskey-making still—or of Ronald Reagan after seeing a statue of him eating a potato pancake.”

Travelers can search for sites along their route, or search by president. In addition to driving directions, the app gives opening hours, phone numbers, photos and irreverent write-ups for each site. First ladies, vice presidents, first pets, assassination and scandal are all in the app.

The Roadside Presidents edition is the second app from Roadside America, following the original Roadside America app, introduced in 2010.

Photo: Public domain, National Park Service

Great Deal, But Does it Come With TV and Wi-Fi? CheapAir.com Adds Amenities to Listings

maggierauch — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:08:29 +0000

Virgin America planes are among those that offer individual TVs for passengers.

CheapAir.com is betting that travelers looking for the lowest airfares care about more than just ticket price and schedule—amenities are also important when choosing how to spend your money and your time en route to your destination. The online travel agency now tells customers which flights have wireless Internet access, movies and live television.

A flight search on CheapAir.com still generates a list of options with various schedules on various airlines at a range of prices. But that list now also includes a column of icons that let a traveler know whether they can send emails, watch the evening news or enjoy a movie on their trip. There is also an icon for CheapAir Top Picks, which are selected based on price, total travel time, on-time percentage, airline ratings, comfort and on-board amenities.

“Our site is still the best place for people who want the lowest fares, but these new tools are incredibly useful for those who also have other priorities.” says Jeff Klee, CEO of CheapAir.com. “People are busy and really value their time. Many are willing to pay a few dollars more for a flight they can enjoy or that enables them to be more productive.”

No word on a column warning travelers about hidden fees, like the ones that have generated negative press for airlines and attracted the attention of the Department of Transportation .

Photo: VirginAmerica.com

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Travel Deals in Demand by Small Business Owners

Donna M. Airoldi — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:44:17 +0000

A customer survey conducted by B2B deal provider RapidBuyr has found that travel services and mobile technology top the list of purchases small business owners plan to make in 2012.

Sixty-two percent of respondents plan to purchase airline tickets, while 55 percent will need hotel rooms. Restaurants and rental car demand came in at 38 and 34 percent, respectively. Following close behind travel is a desire for electronic devices on which travel purchases increasingly can be made. A full 49 percent of respondents plan to purchase a tablet computer, such as the iPad, within the next 12 months, while 44 percent plan to buy a new mobile phone.

The survey results indicate that travel-service providers would do well to consider outlets such as RapidBuyr to better target deals to the small-business market (SBM).

“The small-business market is often overlooked by major vendors because it is highly fragmented with little potential for the bulk buying power that makes big businesses so attractive to vendors, says Pete Angus, director of marketing for RapidBuyr.

RapidBuyr offers local and nationwide daily deals to nearly 40 million U.S. SMBs, with discounts of up to 80 percent on products and services including electronics, general merchandise, local services, travel and sporting events.

More than 2,000 customers responded to the survey, which was conducted in November and December 2011. RapidBuyr plans to repeat the survey every few months.

Photo: MarkHillary (via Flickr CC2.0)

JetBlue Debuts iPhone App, New Web and Mobile Sites

maggierauch — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:43:57 +0000

JetBlue Airways is starting off 2012 with a new web and mobile strategy. The Forest Hills, N.Y.-based low-cost carrier just debuted its native iPhone app, along with redesigned web and mobile sites.

JetBlue is late to the game, but it has rolled out an app with high functionality despite its clean design. The airline developed its new digital strategy with the help of digital agency Rokkan, app developer DoubleEncore and the input of more than 15,000 customers.

The new app, available for download at the iTunes store, offers all the basics—booking, check-in and flight-status monitoring. Other features include weather reports for destination cities, and easy organization of past and upcoming trips. It also includes a virtual postcard tool and connectivity to social networks so users can share their travel experiences. In addition, travelers can scout in-flight amenities like snacks, beverages, movies and DIRECTV schedules.

JetBlue aimed for more personalization in designing its new platforms—what a user sees will depend on geo-targeting, booking history and any preferences they have entered into the TrueBlue rewards program. The website also includes a feature called “Pick Me Up” that allows users to not only share their itinerary with a friend in their destination city, but also to send that friend maps and traffic reports.

Travelers can expect to see better apps soon from other airlines, predicts Colleen Taylor writing at Gigaom.com. She points to a CNN story from last fall highlighting an Airline IT Trends Survey that found that more than 90 percent of carriers plan to increase their investment in mobile.

Photo: JetBlue

Fly to the U.S. Virgin Islands Direct With New Flight From JetBlue

Airline Industry Getting in on Travel Apps

Free Wi-Fi Rules as Most-Desired Hotel Amenity

maggierauch — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:30:21 +0000

Who cares about turndown service? I just want free Wi-Fi.

Those were two unsurprising findings of a recent TripAdvisor survey that asked 1,200 travelers and 600 hotel owners and managers what they considered the most and least important amenities.

After Wi-Fi, the top-rated perks were free breakfast, loyalty points, a hotel restaurant, and a complimentary shuttle to area attractions and the airport. After turndown service, the amenities getting the lowest marks were pet-friendly policies, spa, organized excursions and room service.

Perhaps as important as knowing what guests want is knowing what they will do in order to get it. Just over half of travelers surveyed said they have canceled a reservation to take advantage of better amenities at a different property. And 65 percent percent say they have gone to the lobby or other common areas to avoid paying for wireless Internet, while 41 percent have never paid for Wi-Fi access.

TripAdvisor is calling the study a 360-degree survey because it polled both travelers and hoteliers. And the results show that hotels understand some of the things that their guests want, but are missing the mark on others. Hoteliers underestimated the importance of guest loyalty points and shuttle service, while overestimating the importance of pet policies and room service.

Following are the lists of most and least desired amenities.

Photos: TripAdvisor