travel

The city of Houston has filed a lawsuit against online hotel bookers for keeping money the city claims should go towards its occupancy tax."We believe the (online) companies are, essentially, pocketing the money that should go to occupancy tax," Mayor Bill White told the Houston Chronicle. "It's unfair to those who are paying the price where the full taxes are paid."

In the official press release, forms of the word "merge" are used four times, "purchasing" comes up once, and "acquire" and "buy" are nowhere to be seen.  Nonetheless, the bottom line is that Kayak.com secured a spectacular round of funding, and proceeded to take over SideStep.com.

Websites in the health & medical and the travel categories received substantial traffic driven to them from search engines in November 2007.

The last Internal Hack Day at Yahoo, 24 hours of coding fun fueled by lots of pizza, has yielded a couple of new services that have been rolled out to their Travel and Shopping products.

Where I've Been (WIB), an interactive map that allows users to share the places they have visited has launched on MySpace.

Yahoo has added several new features to its travel Web site. The new version of Yahoo Travel focuses on personalized travel deals, travel guides and a new mapping system.

A pair of opposing ideas have been occupying web surfers as they cruise the Internet: the desire to ditch the office for a week in the sun, and the need to pay Uncle Sam his annual due with the money you might otherwise use for that vacation.

I've written in this space before about Web site searcher behavior, but I don't think I've ever talked about how it feels to search. To do so, I think it helps for us to compare the way it feels to search for information to the way it feels to search for a physical destination. I believe that we human beings have many of the same neurons firing when we engage in those two tasks. So, how is searching like traveling? I think it's all about feeling "in control."