The HappiTravel® Journal
Plain-spoken articles on wholesale travel, member economics, and how to evaluate any booking platform before you trust it with a vacation.
Online travel agencies do not own a single hotel room, airline seat, or cruise cabin. Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, and every OTA in their combined subsidiary networks are software companies. They operate websites and apps that sit between the supplier…
Every hotel room, airline seat, and cruise cabin you have ever booked passed through a chain of intermediaries before it reached your screen. Each…
You search for the same hotel room on five different websites. Same property, same dates, same bed. Five different prices. The price gap is…
Every hotel room on earth has a price the public sees and a price the industry pays. The industry price — the net wholesale…
Every hotel room, airline seat, cruise cabin, and rental car exists as a unit of inventory inside a supplier’s distribution system. Before a consumer…
Most advice on how to afford more vacations starts with the same list: skip the morning coffee, set up a travel savings account, fly…
The research is surprisingly consistent: yes, planning a vacation makes you happier — and the effect starts long before you pack a bag. A…
A timeshare pitch always starts with the same promise: own a piece of paradise, come back every year, lock in today’s prices forever. The…
The travel membership market splits into two categories: operators that deliver genuine wholesale access and operators that use the language of savings to sell…
The question has a simple answer and a complicated one. The simple answer: a travel club membership is worth it if the savings on…
The debate between using a travel agent and booking online has been running for two decades, and most of the advice you’ll find treats…
Yes. Expedia is marking up hotel prices. The company’s own financial disclosures describe exactly how: Expedia buys hotel rooms at wholesale rates negotiated directly…