Good Sunday evening from a sunny Seattle . . . Our first Online Travel Update for 2026 is below. This week’s Update features new stories on China’s possible crack down on Trip.com, an update on Airbnb and its plans for hotels and the latest from Google and its rapidly evolving agentic platform. I hope you
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The Next Phase of Travel Distribution Rekindles Pricing and Parity Debates
By Greg Duff
Happy Monday evening from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 19, 2025, is below. This week’s Update features a heavy concentration of important legal updates on local Chinese efforts to investigate the practices of OTAs, the FTC’s newly announced investigation into Instacart and its alleged surveillance…
AI Turns Up the Heat: OTAs Defend Their Turf as Big Tech Redraws the Map
By Greg Duff
Good Sunday afternoon from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 12, 2025, is below. This week’s Update includes a number of updates to stories we featured previously, including stories on the existential threat (or not) to OTAs posed by new AI platforms and the Trump administration’s…
Travel’s Next Competitive Fault Lines
By Greg Duff
Good Sunday evening from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 5, 2025, is below. With last week’s Thanksgiving holiday break, our list of stories this week is longer than usual. Enjoy.
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- Otto Introduces AI Assistant for Business Travel. Seattle-based Otto’s release this past week of its
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The Unfinished Revolution: Why AI's Promise for Travel Remains Mired in Power Struggles
By Greg Duff
Good Saturday afternoon from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, November 21, 2025, is below. Google captured much of the industry’s attention and imagination early in the week with its announcement of new AI-enabled travel booking tools, but it then spent much of the remainder of the…
B2B and AI: The Twin Engines of Travel's Future?
By Greg Duff
Good Sunday morning from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, November 7, 2025, is below. Expedia’s quarterly earnings report garnered most of the attention this week as Expedia reported relatively strong third quarter results. We’ll include a transcript from this week’s earning release call in next week’s…
AI and the Travel Value Chain: Who Wins in the New Search Economy?
By Greg Duff
Good Sunday morning from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, October 31, 2025, is below. Booking Holdings garnered most of the attention this past week as it reported its third quarter earnings and updated investors on its ongoing artificial intelligence efforts. A copy of the earnings release…
The Growing Influence of ChatGPT on Travel's Future
By Greg Duff
Good Monday morning from Seattle . . . Our Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, October 24, 2025, is below. This week’s Update introduces readers to ChatGPT’s new browser, ChatGPT Atlas (and its new Agent Mode), and offers varying views on ChatGPT’s (and similar AI powered platforms’) long term effect on travel, the…
Between the AI Waves: Online Travel Catches Its Breath
By Greg Duff
Good Saturday morning from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, October 17, 2025, is below. Compared to last week and its seemingly endless parade of announcements around AI and online travel, this week’s unexpected shortage of announcements provided many of us the opportunity to catch our breath…
The Race to Reinvent Online Travel
By Greg Duff
Good Sunday morning from Seattle (actually, about 180 miles south of Seattle at one of Marriott’s new Post Card Cabins in Glennwood, Washington) . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, October 10, 2025, is below. This week’s OTU includes recent product updates from both Expedia Group (Hotels.com) and Booking…