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.
A resort vacation certificate is a voucher — sometimes paper, sometimes digital — that entitles the holder to a stay at a resort property, usually for a set number of nights. Certificates come in many forms. They may arrive as…
Travel is usually described as a reward: something you earn once the work is done. The research on travel and wellbeing asks a different…
The best family vacations on a budget start with a different question. Not “what is the nightly rate?” but “what will the whole trip…
Travel is usually talked about as a reward for a hard year. A small body of published research suggests it may be closer to…
Many travelers book luxury stays at retail, paying a markup on the same hotel rooms, resort suites, and cruise cabins that wholesale buyers access…
Researchers at Cornell University found that people derive more happiness from anticipating an experience than from anticipating a purchase. A team at the University…
Two business models sell the same hotel room to the same traveler. One charges nothing upfront and takes a cut of every transaction. The…
The travel industry runs on a pricing structure most consumers never see. Hotels, resorts, airlines, and cruise lines distribute inventory through commercial data feeds…
Online travel agencies do not own a single hotel room, airline seat, or cruise cabin. Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, and every OTA in their…
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…