- Why Priceline Group Is Changing Its Name to Booking Holdings by Fortune. Didn’t realize that booking.com was quite that big.
- Didn’t Receive your Wyndham Points? Now you Can! by Deals We Like. Such an absurd system where you have to contact an independent blogger to get a promotion that had it’s terms changed mid promotion.
- Toys R Us Continues to Shutter Away with an Additional 200 Stores by PYMNTS. You can view a list of stores here. Fingers crossed gift of college gift cards hit Best Buy soon.
- From New Airbnb Plus, Properties With More Amenities by NY Times. Was hoping they would announce a loyalty program if I’m honest. I think you could usually tell which properties were Airbnb Plus by the reviews and the listing itself.
Don’t really see the point of the Airbnb Plus, as usually you can tell from the reviews and if the person has left a detailed description what you’re going to get. I guess maybe some sort of analytics were telling them people weren’t completing the deal because of not knowing what to expect?
Also at the average price point, I’d probably just prefer staying in a Hotel unless it’s an entire house shared with a few people.
2nd that comment on Gift of College gift cards / Toys R Us. Please!! Those cards at Best Buy would qualify as a deal of the decade for me. I haven’t stepped inside a Toys R Us in 25 years and hope to never do so.
Same. I just dropped $3k on GoC GCs at a Toys’R’Us. As a childless adult male, it was weird to be in there. Last time I was excited to be at Toys’R’Us was when I got my Game Gear in 1993.
Yeah, booking.com is way more successful than most of us “super travelers” — the folks who use these booking websites — would ever think. I use booking.com several times a year, usually when there’s no other online booking option or they’re throwing bonus money at me. I appreciate that they require detailed information from the hotels (things like actual room size, and some photos), but no one would think “Wow, these guys run an amazing travel website.” I think their “secret sauce” is they provide a free booking management tool to small independent hotels, and charge these properties a lower commission than sites like Expedia. None of it seems magical, and their stock has always seemed expensive to me for what it is, but they’ve now had many years of growth and success. So maybe the hotel booking business is harder to break into that it would seem.
The NYT article didn’t mention it, but Airbnb is rolling out a number of changes and they do include a “Superguest” loyalty program that they’ll be introducing this summer. No deets yet though.
Thanks