After terminating their exclusive agreement with Expedia just over 3 months ago, Ryanair announced a new partnership with Booking.com, Europe’s largest and fastest growing online hotel reservation service. Ryanair’s passengers can now gain access to Booking.com’s inventories of over 57,000 hotels in more than 15,000 destinations in Europe and beyond.

Just before the weekend United States based Travelzoo, known for it’s travel offers from various other travel companies, announced that it purchased the domain Fly.com for an astonishing amount of $ 1.800.000,00.

Whereas other travel companies are limiting their expenses, Travelzoo is looking confident in making such an investment. According to Travelzoo’s announcement the fly.com website will be relaunched in February and will feature a new travel search engine.

(press release) Online travel guide tripwolf announces a second round of funding. The MairDumont Group, Europe’s largest publisher of travel information, has invested for the second time in the Austria based social travel website.

“Travel and mobility online are part of our core business,” says Stephanie Mair-Huydts, Publisher. “Despite the financial crisis, we want to expand our position in the online market. tripwolf is the perfect extension of our current offerings.”

It has been rather quiet on onlinetravelandhospitality.com last weeks, therefore I thought it would a good idea to share with you what has been on my mind and what kept me from posting regular updates on this blog.

Online travel supplier Travelta, based in the Netherlands, today announced their location-based hotel finder for mobile phones and PDAs at www.travelta.mobi, which allows users to find and book a hotel at their current position.

www.travelta.mobi, which uses location based services to determine the location of the user, lists hotels based on distance from the user and features up-to-date information on room availability and room rates. Next to that, users are informed about availability of specific room types, check-in and check-out times, what the rooms look like and the star classification.