I met Dave and the rest of the Yapta.com crew at the PhoCusWright Conference 2007 in Orlando. On the second night of the conference I had dinner with Dave, CEO Tom Romary, Jeff Pecor (Communications Director), and Mike Gurrette (Director with Alaska Airlines). The conversation was excellent and I got a chance to find out more about the company and the challenges of being a tech company in the NorthWest vs. Silicon Valley. In this interview, Dave...

Here is a quick montage of the Google after party at the PhoCusWright Conference 2007 in Orlando. In the montage are Eric Bjorndahl from Travbuddy.com and Martin Schobert from the Austrian National Tourism Office. By the way, Google knows how to throw an awesome party. Check out the glowing Google cups! I wish I had the foresight to keep one as a...

Paypal and billmelater technologies are being accepted by airlines now. Internet has been focused on low fares. Mandate is to focus on revenue and provide access to low fare information as it pertains to specific traveler requirements, for example the lowest direct fare, or the lowest first class fare, etc. Meta search and vertical search – What is NWA view of these intermediary channels (for example Kayak.com). Meta search is different...

My good friend Tatsuya Nakagawa over at Atomica Creative sent me a link to an post on 21st Century Citizen over the weekend. It was timely considering I just blogged about Carbon offsetting recently. The post is about how you, as an individual traveler, can offset your carbon emissions by using the Sustainable Travel International Carbon Offset calculator. The calculator lets you choose your departure and destination and then calculates the...

I am so excited to promote the first Canada-e-connect conference to be held in Vancouver. The goal of the conference is to profile Canada’s tourism industry and to highlight innovations in online marketing and technology that support tourism. This is especially exciting because this conference would normally have been in Ottawa or Toronto prior to the CTC’s move to Vancouver. This conference marks a milestone in the development of...