As the horrific conflict in Gaza continues, the US public opinion on support for Israel is changing, and not as one sided as earlier thought and portrayed by media, a survey I did recently showed.
The US public opinion on support for Israel’s military actions against Gaza is not as one-sided as media portrays it to be.
Because the world’s largest international airline paid a giant sum for it, that’s why. Emirates, along with other Gulf region airlines, has taken over sports sponsorships around the world, and this World Cup is no exception.
Last week the FCC caused a huge wave of annoyance amongst airline flyers in US, when the agency in charge of regulating cellphone use on the ground and in the air announced that it was considering opening up wireless access on flights, permitting wider use of mobile phones through both text messages and calls.
Along with the FAA’s relaxation of rules on the use of digital devices on US airlines came a hefty and dense 222-page report that the committee behind these rules put together. Besides laying out the case for the new landscape, it also has two charts that the main airline lobbying organization Airlines For America supplied to the committee and make for an interesting read.
France’s shadow over Africa still looms large, decades after it started decolonizing out of the continent. And no, we’re not talking about its recent forays back in, with Mali and now Central African Republic. France, one of the largest outbound tourist countries in the world, is the largest source of visitors to Africa, according to a new “Africa Tourism Report” by World Bank.
The US government shutdown is now well into its second week, and the national parks cross the country remain closed. With it, hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to the local communities that surround the depend on tourism for their sustenance.
American Express, in the midst of restructuring and trimming cost on its ailing business travel unit, has finally decided to sell it off, at least half of it. It said today it is in talks with an investor group led by private equity firm Certares to create a joint venture for its Global Business Travel division. Certares, based in New York City, has partners that have significant experience in the business travel market, including companies such as Travel Leaders Group, Travelport, Carlson Wagonlit Travel and others.
Yesterday Skift highlighted a new report by Concur, the annual “Expense IQ Report” on trends data around business travel habits, based on the $50 billion expense transactions per year that it processes.
Earlier in the month on Capitol Hill, the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade held a hearing about how the tourism industry benefits the U.S. economy, and representatives from all across the U.S. travel industry came to testify, including senior execs from Marriott, InterContinental, Enterprise, VisitFlorida and others.
The locus of travel has rapidly moved eastward, a trajectory likely continuing into 2013 and beyond. Both consumer and business travel trends are now being defined and tested out in regions other than the US and Europe. User experience and its intersection with design is the lens that travel will increasingly be defined by, and regions like Middle East, Asia and West Africa are at the forefront of those trends. This was discussed at length in a report earlier this year: “13 Global Trends That Will Define Travel in 2013.”
Lonely Planet, the storied travel guidebooks publisher owned by BBC, is about to be sold, we have learned. And the buyer is a doozy: reclusive Kentucky billionaire Brad Kelley, who spent the 1990s selling discount cigarette brands like USA Gold, Bull Durham, and Malibu, then sold the company for almost $1 billion in 2001, and parlayed that money into becoming the one of the largest land owners and conservationists in United States.
American Airlines has confirmed its new logo and livery designs. CEO Tom Horton announced on a webcast this morning that, “We know there are still big decisions to make about our future,” but the redesign is the next step.
The Wikimedia Foundation is tentatively slated to launch Wikivoyage next week, on January 15, Skift has learned.
It starts out well, or well-meaning at least. Chinese outbound tourism is the fastest and biggest growing sector in travel, as outbound tourists rose to 70.3 million in 2011, and are expected to rise to 82 million this year, up 17%. And everyone wants these hordes of Chinese travelers spending money, especially the recession and debt crisis beset European countries.
from Skift.com
