Without a doubt this recent period of posts on the BOOT have been dominated by consolidation and deals:
- Lonely Planet admitted that it could not meet the challenges of the Internet on its own and sold out a majority stake to the enterprise division of the BBC;
- Opodo shed Karavel with the story being broken by an blogger from the inside;
- TUI made a bad decision in buying asiarooms and once again search traffic predicted a deal;
- the battle for Travel.com.au (who now own the lastminute.com brand outright in AU/NZ) is not yet over with Webjet and Wotif at each others throats and AOT sitting not so quietly on the sidelines;
- Rakuten made some healthy profits and set itself for further expansion by selling out of Ctrip;
- the Flight Centre privatisation fell in a heap in an embarrassing way for the Flighties board;
- rumours flew that Priceline want Travelzoo and the comments section filled up with a debate on the merits of this idea; and
- we have the as yet to be confirmed rumour that TravelCLICK are about to be bought.
- every media outlet there is ran a story about how bad the US air industry is prompting me to run my own series of the Airline Industry brought to you by BusinessWeek, the Legal Fraternity, Wharton, NPR, the Economist and Pizza Hut. Conclusions were that the US air traveller is stuffed and no-one is taking responsibility. In fact Marion Blakely quit as head of the Federal Aviation Authority to join the peak airline lobby group the Aerospace Industries Association;
- the T-List is soon to be a book. The BOOT submitted three stories:
- UGC vs Editorial. What's better? What's the balance? What's more 2.0?;
- Helping Airlines Stay on top; and
- the fourth phase of online travel - "too much information"; and
- it looks like Dead Herring for Red Herring.
- one muppet shouted at two others;
- a lion, a crocodile and a buffalo tried to sort out their differences the old fashioned way; and
- the BOOT saved the world by defusing a jar of olives.
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