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On November 8, 2012, Priceline Group announced it would buy travel metasearch firm Kayak for $40 a share, or $1.8 billion, in a mix of cash ($500 million) and Priceline stock ($1.3 billion). The purchase price represents a premium of almost 27% from Kayak’s November 7, 2012 closing stock price ($31.54). With this acquisition, Priceline …

Market Overview Report by Henry Harteveldtwith Jeffrey Breen   Second in a two-report series Abstract The 12.4 million US online adult millionaire leisure travelers have been going online for more than 12 years, and are above-average adopters of smartphones and tablets. They’re keenly interested in using their mobile devices for travel planning, which makes mobile …

Atmosphere recently published our latest report, Marketing To US Online Millionaire Travelers. It’s the first of two reports in a series; the second report will focus more on this audience’s use of technology. A few highlights from the report, which is based on data from Atmosphere’s US Online Affluent Traveler Survey, Q4 2011 (n=1,004): This …

Travel sellers must put aside stereotypes to reach the tech-savvy, independent, and value-focused millionaire travelers of 2012. This profitable audience is 12.4 million strong in the U.S. alone, and our analysis shows there are often noticeable differences in behavior and attitudes between the various generations of millionaire travelers.

On August 8, 2012, I appeared on CNBC to discuss a possible merger between American Airlines (AA) and US Airways (US). Afterwards, I received several calls and emails requesting I elaborate on my perspective, since the on-air time was limited. Your wish is my command… Let me start by saying I’ve advocated that AA doesn’t …

Mobile Spotlight by Jeffrey Breen   Last Thursday, Orbitz released a brand-new iPhone app which raises the bar for ease of use for mobile travel booking. Their new version 2.0 is a clean-sheet effort centered around offering the complete shopping and booking experience for flights, hotel rooms, and rental cars natively in the app. Their …

Solution Spotlight by Jeffrey Breenwith Henry Harteveldt   Airlines are remarkably complex, demanding technology beasts. They rely on multiple systems to store and publish everything from flight schedules, fares, and inventory to crew scheduling to aircraft maintenance records. Airline systems literally run on a 24/7 schedule, requiring the highest level of performance reliability. Plus, because …

In less than a week, the United States will observe the annual three-day Memorial Day weekend which kicks off the summer travel season. As part of an online survey of 2,500 US leisure travelers fielded in early May 2012 covering topics such as technology device ownership, travel-related mobile and social media behavior, and ancillary revenue, …

For many, December 25, Christmas, is a very special day. Not for me — well, not at least this year. For me, my “Christmas” will take place on March 25, when the new season of “Mad Men” begins on cable network AMC. The period drama, set in a 1960s New York City Madison Avenue advertising …

Several years ago, prior to its acquisition by Google, Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software announced it was developing a new passenger sales and service (PSS) system. Among the tasks that PSS systems perform for an airline are the ability to create and store the airline’s schedules, inventory, and prices, publish those to its various sales channels (e.g., …