This week...Lastminute launches credit card, the power of travel reviews and What do you Love? by Google

Welcome from all at CWT Digital. Another week has been and gone and as usual a lot has been happening in both the travel and technology world. To fill you in on all the top news we’ve selected what we feel are the best picks of the week’s news. We hope you enjoy the latest instalments of this week!


Travel News:

Lastminute.com launches credit card- 27th June- Lastminute.com have announced a collaboration with NBME and Mastercard to produce the lastminute.com card. The card offers users exclusive offers and discounts on travel and lifestyle products.

Amadeus rolls out it’s extreme search technology- 27th June- Amadeus has started to roll out it’s new technology which will enable users to search more vaguely on travel sites. The technology is built so that users coming to a site that don’t know where they want to go can ask vague questions that will give them several results. For example with the new extreme search technology a user could type in ‘Where can I go on holiday in Europe for less than ….. etc..’. Now that the technology had been built it is now a question of how sites will enable this feature to appear.

Technology News:

The power of reviews on travel sites- 28th June- Anthony Rawlins, MD of Digital Visitor, looks at a several different polls which deal with customer reviews on travel sites. Here is a round up of the results, 27% of customers believe that positive reviews are the most likely factor to make them book a holiday. 62% of customers search for reviews online. Uploading your reviews to your social media sites, in particular Facebook can generate 2.5 times more visits to your site. 46.7% of customers have written a review. These stats show just how influential and increasingly important it is to include reviews on your site. You can see the rest of the results on Tnooz’s article.

Holidaymakers will get hit by huge bills-28th June- According to new research the majority of british holidaymakers will come home to a bill over £100 more than normal. The study carried out by Carphone Warehouse showed that 79% of smartphone users will use the internet whilst on holiday. 1 in 5 of respondents asked said that they accessed the internet at least once a day, mainly to update their status on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. Holidaymakers are being warned of the expense of using their roaming abroad to avoid extortionate charges.

Google launches ‘What do you love?’-28th June- Google has launched a new service, which acts as a search service that brings up results from more than 20 different Google services. The search function looks very similar to the Google serach on the homepage but the results appear in boxes. The apps used include Google Translate, Trends, YouTube, Maps and Groups. The new feature has yet to be announced on the Google blog but you can have a look at the feature itself here

That’s all from this week we hope you found our picks interesting. If you want more then remember you can follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook to keep up with all the latest industry news.