Friday's Travel InsideOut

Southwest and JetBlue now are flying into some major airports instead of off-the-beaten-track landing strips. Will they be able to maintain their value proposition as they get right in the middle of all of the hub-bub?

Wall Street Journal: Southwest Lands at Logan, Bringing Low Fares Mainstream: Next week Southwest Airlines Co. will do something that Herbert Kelleher, its legendary former chief executive, said would never happen: The airline will offer flights at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Read more

-----

Following are two articles, one from the Los Angeles Times and the second from the Havana Times, detailing efforts by U.S. citizens to defy the Cuba travel ban. Hey, it's Travel InsideOut, you know.

Los Angeles Times: Violator of Cuba travel ban seeks to force court action: Erika Crenshaw returned to Los Angeles this week from a 10-day trip to Cuba with a message for authorities charged with enforcing a ban on travel to the communist-ruled island: Come and get me. Read more

Havana Times: US Travel Ban on Cuba Losing Teeth: While visiting Cuba is still illegal and subject to fines for US citizens, Washington’s travel ban appears to be losing some of its teeth. Read more

-----

A new tool for revenue managers helps hoteliers determine how to set their opaque rates on Priceline. How high is too high? How low is too low? Let’s limbo some more:)

The Center for Hospitality Research: Setting Room Rates on Priceline: How to Optimize Expected Hotel Revenue: Executive Summary: This report and tool combination develops a novel approach to set prices on Priceline.com to maximize revenues received from releasing rooms to Priceline. When setting rates on Priceline, hotel properties face a straightforward auction-like pricing decision. Read more

-----

A new hotel application on Twitter shows more experimentation with travel search and planning on the social media site.

InventorSpot:Twihotels, The Twitter Hotel-Finder Launches: Hotel booking sites like Hotels.com can locate a number of hotels anywhere in the world and if you are diligent enough to cross-reference with TripAdvisor you can most likely obtain a review on that hotel's performance. But until now, there was no one site that could surface hotel recommendations for you firsthand, without a lot of searching and cross-referencing. Twihotels is filling that void nicely with a new app they just rolled out in August. Read more

-----

It’s too soon to tell whether there will be fewer cruise-ship repositionings or vacation cancellations, but hurricane watchers have downgraded their hurricane forecast after a pacific start to the hurricane season.

Travel Weekly: Hurricane forecast altered after a quiet two months The lack of hurricane activity prompted the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to alter its 2009 forecast on Thursday. Read more

-----

I’m betting that Orbitz will take Ratestogo.com’s modified retail model out of Asia and Europe and into North America in a meaningful way.

Dennis Schaal Blog: Does Orbitz Ratestogo.com Mean Merchant Model To Go.com?: Orbitz Worldwide CEO Barney Harford is bullish on subsidiary ratestogo.com, the Sydney, Australia, hotel business primarily selling last-minute rooms in Europe and Asia. Read more

-----

Travel InsideOut is a Dennis Schaal Blog daily feature. Get a thorough-going look at the day's travel industry top and tangentially interesting stories. Feel free to comment on them below.

Travel InsideOut is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.