freeTravel247

Congratulations to blogger and travel/payment executive Martin Collings. For six year Martin was an executive at Amadeus in Europe and Chicago. For two and a half year Martin blogged on online travel and ancillary sales via his Shearwater press site (also a Tnooz node). This week I learned that Martin had moved back to Australia to take up a position as VP Market Development for Mastercard. Martin is pausing his writing at the Shearwater blog. But I thought I should share with you some of his best posts.

1. "Using a Bow Tie to Make Optimal Marketing and Technology Investments": great piece fro 2009 on ancillary revenues and the inspiration funnel;
2. His five part series on Tnooz on travel inspiration including the Inspiration Footprint Matrix;
3. "Google Travel delivers best piece of market research I've seen in the past year": distilling some great insight into the Euro/UK online travel market;
4. His irreverent take on innovation and travel in "Awards from PhoCusWright that you may not want to win" ; and
5. Great piece on Hipmunk on Tnooz where he manages to get a reference to Fortitude Valley Brisbane into the same sentence as Silicon Valley

Many more over at the Shearwater blog.

Thanks to Bill on Capitol Hill for this fantastic photo of the old mastercard and visa branding