This week....... Big 10 email competition closes, cruise.co.uk launches community app and Google Hotel Finder is in beta

It’s been yet another busy week here at CWT Digital and we have lots to fill you in on. It feels like summer is finally here and we are enjoying the sunshine here in Brighton. Read below to see what’s happening with the Big 10 campaign and of course we still have the top picks of all industry news for travel and technology.

CWT Digital News:

Big 10 email marketing competition finishes- 29th July- On Friday at 5pm we closed our email marketing Big 10 competition. Thank you to everyone that entered, we had some great entries and we will be contacting the winner shortly so make sure you follow our Twitter and Facebook accounts for the announcement. We will also open up the next Big 10 shortly so watch this space!

Cruise finalists- 1st August- As part of the Big 10 cruise prize CWT Digital and NCL will be interviewing the 2 finalists at the NCL offices in London. The 2 finalists will be notified this week, keep an eye out on our Facebook and Twitter for the announcement. The interviews will be covered by Travel Weekly and we will be keeping you updated with live updates of the event on our Twitter page so make sure you follow us!

Travel News:

Med Hotels wins battle against taxman- 1st August- Bed bank Med Hotels won their battle with HM Revenue & Customs last Friday in their Upper Tribunal in which they were fighting against the charge of £7.1 million in unpaid tax. The tribunal ruled in favour of Med Hotels on the basis that as a bed bank they acted as an agent for hotels, where as before it was ruled that it was acting as a principal. It is believed that this will come as great news to other travel businesses who use dynamic packaging and are similar in structure to Med Hotels. Though it is believed that HMRC are likely to appeal the case so this could continue.

Delta Air partners with Living Social- 29th July- Delta Airlines have made a partnership with Living Social in order to get customers to sign up to their ‘My Trips’ section of the site. The idea of the partnership is that once a customer has booked a flight they can log into My Trips and sign up for deals in the destination they are flying to for the duration that they are staying. Voucher sites such as Groupon and Living Social are proving to be increasingly popular with travel companies what with Expedia acquiring Groupon for it’s ‘Groupon Getaways’ scheme earlier this year


Technology News:

Cruise.co.uk launches app for it’s community- 29th July- Cruise.co.uk have released a new app for both the iPhone and Android which is focused on it’s massive community of 100,000 reviews/ opinions, 170,000 questions answered and 11,500 uploaded photos. The app gives users access to all the forums and online chat with the functionality to search through content and topics. Seamus Conlon, managing director of cruise.co.uk  expects the app ‘to be used to source opinions from other cruisers while on holiday’. CWT Digital are very excited by this announcement as the review platforms on the site themselves were built by our development team.

Google Hotel Finder in beta testing- 28th July- Google are taking the plunge further into the hotels market with it’s new feature ‘Google Hotel Finder’ a tool which enables users to choose areas of a city by creating a shape over the area you wish to stay in. Once you have selected your area Google will show reviews and ads from hotels in that area. The ads shown are from major tour operators that have an affiliation with Google, for example Expedia, Booking.com and Travelocity. You can try the tool for yourself here, but it is only currently working for certain areas in the U.S.

Chrome overtakes Firefox- 31st July- The Guardian announced yesterday that Google Chrome has overtaken Firefox as the most popular browser in the UK. IE still being number one, Chrome accounts for 22% of UK users. Chrome has only been launched for 3 years so this growth has been a great success, which is believed to be down to it’s speed.

That’s all we have this week for you, we hope you found our picks interesting! Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook to keep up with all things CWT Digital, have a great week!