May 23, 2012 - 09:20 AM ET
Enterprise Holdings announced the acquisition of car-sharing service Mint Cars On-Demand. According to Enterprise, Mint Cars On-Demand serves 8,000 customers in New York and Boston and "by year's end" will be combined with existing Enterprise car-sharing services including WeCar and PhillyCarShare to create the new Enterprise Car Share brand. "We have been anticipating and meeting local transportation needs for more than 55 years, so underscoring car-sharing's connection to the Enterprise name and legacy makes perfect sense," according to Enterprise assistant vice president Ryan Johnson. Terms of the Mint acquisition were not disclosed.
May 22, 2012 - 09:40 AM ET
Limos.com appointed Ann Hoey to serve as CEO, succeeding T.J. Clark who "has decided to pursue a new venture," according to the
ground transportation reservations system provider. Limos.com also appointed to its board of directors former Drugstore.com CEO Dawn Lepore. "The combined efforts of Hoey and Lepore will represent a significant shift in leadership for Limos.com," which according to the company includes "a new executive team to lead operations in finance, product design and innovation, customer care and engineering." Hoey last year joined the company as chief revenue officer from digital advertising brand Mediaplex.
May 22, 2012 - 09:20 AM ET
Travelport announced a multi-year full-content deal with Avianca and Taca, subsidiaries of Latin America's AviancaTaca Holding S.A. Under the agreement, agents connected to the Galileo, Apollo or Worldspan global distribution systems will have "complete, global access to the group’s best publicly available fare inventory," according to Travelport. Travelport also said it struck a technology services deal with the airlines, including deployment of Travelport Rapid Reprice "across multiple distribution channels, fully automating the manual process of repricing and reissuing airline tickets when passenger itineraries change."
May 18, 2012 - 01:30 PM ET
The number of passengers traveling in international premium cabins grew by nearly 9 percent year over year in March according to data
released this week by the International Air Transport Association. While the
impact of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the political uprisings in the
Middle East curtailed premium volumes in March 2011 and therefore
"exaggerated" the gains this year, IATA indicated that premium
travel, underpinned by healthy business demand, remained strong. "We
estimate that premium travel was about 4 percentage points higher this March
than it would have been in the absence of the Arab Spring and Japan
earthquake," according to IATA, "but that still has the market
growing at a solid rate of over 4 percent in March."
May 16, 2012 - 09:45 AM ET
Amadeus became the first GDS user of daily airline schedule transmissions from OAG, which has been providing about one-third of Amadeus' flight schedules. "This enables travel agents and their customers to access more accurate information when they're looking to book a flight—a major competitive advantage for any global distribution system," according to John Grant, executive vice president for networks at UBM Aviation, parent company of OAG. OAG "processes up to 50,000 airline schedule-change messages per day," according to a press statement that also noted carriers can file schedules themselves directly with Amadeus.
May 14, 2012 - 01:25 PM ET
Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest and Virgin America scored rights to serve daily nonstop routes from Reagan Washington National beyond the 1,250-mile perimeter limit that currently restricts flight operations at the airport. The U.S. Department of Transportation granted permission to Alaska for flights to Portland, Ore., to JetBlue for service to San Juan, to Southwest to operate to Austin and to Virgin America for flights to San Francisco. The recent
Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization enabled the new services, and according to DOT, "also allowed four large carriers already serving Reagan National to exchange a total of eight slots for flights within the perimeter for an equal number of slot exemptions to permit nonstop flights beyond the perimeter. As a result, American Airlines will trade one roundtrip flight to Dallas-Fort Worth for a flight to Los Angeles, Delta Air Lines will trade one roundtrip flight to New York LaGuardia Airport for a flight to Salt Lake City, United Airlines will trade one roundtrip flight to Chicago O'Hare for a flight to San Francisco and US Airways will trade one roundtrip flight to Dallas-Fort Worth for a flight to San Diego."