Digital. The Top 10 Travel News Stories of the Week: Day In, Day Out (Nov, the 8th)

Simone Puorto
Nov 8 · 3 min read
Digital. The Top 10 Travel News Stories of the Week: Day In, Day Out

Note: This last week has been so packed with exciting news that I've been forced to let some of them out. I will try to integrate them into the next issues of Digital.

Digital.1
Trivago
's CFO, Axel Hefer, will officially be the metasearch company's CEO by the end of the year, replacing Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder of Trivago and historical CEO for the last 15 years. Hefer inherits a company with yet another negative quarter: in Q3, Trivago's net income declined from €10.1M to €0.3M.

Digital.2
Even mother Expedia's Q3 "did not play out as planned," CEO Mark Okerstrom stated. The group's net income dropped 22% YoY, and the company blamed an "incremental weakness in SEO volumes" (likely due to Google's recent changes in its algorithm), "and a related shift to high-cost marketing channels." The stock sank.

Expedia’s Q3 “did not play out as planned”

Digital.3
And yet, another Google's major algorithm update can be imminent. It is called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), and it will allow Google to understand the context of a search better, marking another important step in machine learning of context and intent interpretation.

Digital.4
Bad news for Facebook as well, facing anti-competitive practices investigations by almost 50 U.S. states, with California being the latest state joining the bandwagon.

Digital. 5
Yet, it did not stop the company from unveiling a new logo. "Facebook," you can read on the official statement, "started as a single app. Now, 15 years later, we offer a suite of products” (Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal, Calibra, etc.). “Today, we're updating our company branding (by) introducing a new company logo and further distinguishing the Facebook company from the Facebook app, which will keep its own branding." Logos and assets can be downloaded here.

Facebook’s New Logo

Digital. 6
TrustYou
announced a collaboration with Impala and took another step towards a plug&play industry. TrustYou's Guest Survey and Messaging features will now be frictionlessly connectable to several PMSs (such as Oracle Opera, Protel, Fidelio Suite8, Infor HMS, Guestline, Mews, Clock PMS), thanks to Impala's technology, reducing integration time and investments.

Digital. 7
Ads are coming to Uber, which is considering selling ads to improve the profit margins on UberEats, eaten (no pun intended) by restaurants, and drivers' fees. And if you're wondering how the stock is holding up, the answer is "not well"

Uber Underperforming

Digital. 8
… and Shopping Ads are coming to YouTube. It makes perfect sense, as -according to Google- 90% of customers using video to inform their purchases found new products on the video platform.

Digital. 9
It seems that marketplace is the new black, and SiteMinder launched its Hotel App Store, with over 100 applications (Cendyn, TrustYou, OpenKey, Welcome Pickups, and Oaky, For-Sight, upgrade2, are just a few). I interviewed the guys during the unveiling at WTM: you can find the video here.

Digital. 10
Q3 performance' decline for Sabre was well: with YoY operating income down to $113.5M from $136.8M, likely due to increased technology investments while undergoing digital transformation. The company's CEO, Sean Menke, stated Sabre is "the first GDS to achieve full cloud deployment of shopping."

Simone Puorto

Written by

Travel Tech Journalist & Published Author. 20Y Experience in the Industry. Motto: #LearnWorkCreate

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