This week...CWT Digital are shortlisted for an award, agents poach Holidays 4U customers online and Groupon subscribers rocket up

Welcome back to another instalment of this week, we have as always been very busy here at CWT Digital, working on new projects and keeping up with all industry trends. Last week was a particularly busy week for travel with the departure of Thomas Cook’s Manny and the collapse of Holidays 4U, to help you keep up we’ve picked out the tops news of what’s happening in the world of travel and technology, we hope you enjoy!

CWT Digital News:

CWT Digital have been shortlisted for a TTG Award-4th August- Last Thursday we were very pleased to find out that we’ve been shortlisted for a TTG Award for Travel Service Provider of the year. We are up against some brilliant names in the industry and feel very proud to have been shortlisted. You can see the full list of nominees here.

Travel News:

Online agents pounce on Holidays 4U bidding-5th August- After the collapse of the Brighton based Holidays 4U, online travel agents scrambled to win customers looking to re-book their holidays. Bidding against Holidays 4U were companies such as On the Beach, Bookable and Lowcostholidays.com who tried to win over customers with ads such as ‘Replacement H4U Flights’ and ‘Last Minute Turkey Now On-Affected by H4U? Book Safely Now!’. Agents that reacted quickly to the collapse will no doubt reak the benefits of customers looking to salvage their holidays, there has also been an obvious increase in both flight and accommodation prices as more Turkey bookings are made.

TripAdvisor faces more liability accusations on fake reviews-5th August- There has been several articles in the trade press in the past week concerning damaging reviews on TripAdvisor. This is something that is repeatedly brought up in travel and last week the UK organisation Kwikchex announced they were continuing their legal battle against damaging hotel reviews. Kwikchex argue that reviews over a year old should be removed from the site and have been collecting data from over 3,000 businesses unhappy with ‘fraudulent reviews’. Parent company and  travel giant Expedia claimed earlier in the week that TripAdvisor ‘faces potential liability’ for the content on the site. TripAdvisor has clearly caused some distress for businesses but as to whether this will result in a legal battle is unknown, watch this space.....

Technology News:

Groupon hits 115 million subscribers-5th August- Mashable reports that Groupon has hit an all time high of 115 million subscribers, growing an impressive 127% since the end of 2010. The daily deals site has become increasingly popular both with subscribers and business looking to expand through the deals giant.

On Holiday Group utilise Facebook and cut Google spend-8th August- On Holiday Group (OHG) have released a second phase of their affiliate scheme which is based on users sharing holiday offers on their social networks. The scheme now named ‘Share and Earn’ has developed so that users can search for destinations that they have been to and would like to recommend to their networks. The platform has so far proved successful with OHG’s brand Holiday Nights on which the scheme is focused on, and the company claims to have reduced it’s PPC spend by 12%, still in it’s early days we look forward to seeing how the scheme progresses.

Google, Facebook and Hotmail aim to prevent holiday hacking-5th August- This is the peak season for accounts being hacked. Hackers target holidaymaker’s accounts and send out requests to contacts asking for money to be put in foreign accounts as they have been ‘robbed’ or lost money etc.... In order to reduce this Hotmail, Facebook and Google have created a two factor authentication when accounts are logged in from different devices/ computers. The system works by once signing in you will then get a second message asking you to enter a one time code which is sent to your mobile. The idea of this is to secure your accounts as well as authenticate that it is in fact you accessing the account, notably Yahoo have not yet shown any efforts to tackle this issue.

That's all we have for you this week, we hope you found our update interesting. Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook if you want to keep up to date with us throughout the week. Have a great week!