News & Stories

Berlin/Frankfurt. From this spring onwards, the German Centre for Tourism will allow future hotel guests to book their rooms directly through its homepage. The initiative follows in cooperation with Dehoga and the German Hotel Association, which now stand to phase out their online portal hotellerie.de and end their cooperation with the German direct enquiries service 11880.

Southlake/Texas. Sabre Holdings will be sold to a private equity firm and a private investment partnership company. Last Tuesday, the parties signed a definitive agreement under which Silver Lake Partners and TPG will acquire Sabre Holdings for 32.75 USD per share in cash. Some days before the merger between Worldspan and Travelport Ltd was announced.

Cambridge. The American priceline.com online travel agency is now including its British subsidiary, Active Hotels in its huge brand. Active Hotels Limited will run under the name of booking.com similar to the German subsidiary.

New York. Hotel marketing experts are urging hotel managers to do the math before placing pay-per-click advertisements.

New York. Hotels revenue from their Web sites is still lagging far behind online travel agencies. Three years ago hotels were the forerunners.

Nuremberg. The online hotel-booking platform of hotel.de will be marketed under the domain of travelres.com on an international level. At the same time, the company is opening up a distribution office in London and plans to open offices in other countries.

Berlin. Travellers finding themselves still at the airport, train station or in the centre of town without a bed for night can now book a room in over 80 outlets of the Reisebank - in some outlets even as late as up to 10 o'clock at night.

Parsippany. Cendant Corporation announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell Travelport, the Company's travel distribution services subsidiary, to an affiliate of The Blackstone Group for approximately 4.3 billion USD in cash. The completion of the transaction is expected to close in August 2006.

London. Spa Finder, Inc., a large spa marketing and media company based in New York, is stepping up its international marketing strategy with the launches of Spa Finder Europe and Spa Finder Japan this month. The new Spa Finder ventures will offer regionally targeted spa consumer websites throughout Europe, beginning with the UK and Ireland, and in Japan.

Salzburg. After the trip is before the trip. Never before has this been shown so clearly as by the "Austrian Online Guest Survey 2005", conducted by the Salzburg centre for Future Studies. "Almost two thirds of those surveyed indicated that they informed themselves about their holiday destination on the internet: Up until now, this result has been exploited by as good as none of the tourist associations," Roman Egger says, head of the study at Salzburg's University of Applied Sciences.