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.

(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.”

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.

(press release) The Benelux’s largest independent travel review website Zoover started its European expansion in the UK. Zoover is the largest travel review website in the Benelux and features over 700.000 reviews of close to 150.000 accommodations worldwide. The demand for independent information about holiday destinations has grown explosively during the last years. In the Netherlands Zoover has more than 50 million visitors a year which makes it the market leader and most visited travel website in the Benelux.

Independent
One of the main priorities of Zoover is that it’s not a bookings website and therefore fully independent. Zoover operates by forging partnerships and co-operates with many international and local tour operators as a platform for informing their visitors of independent reviews.

With the current economic climate most travel companies are facing declining demand and uncertainty for the future. The latest forecasts in PhoCusWright’s U.S. Online Travel Overview reflect these lower expectations for travel companies’ performance. Travel companies must prepare for a downward trend as fewer people taking trips and companies being more selective towards travel expenses.

PhoCusWright projects the overall U.S. travel market is expected to increase by 4% and 2% in 2008 and 2009, respectively. These are the slowest growth rates since 2003, when the market declined by 8% following the effects of the terrorist attacks in 2001. All segments are expected to be impacted. Also, it is foreseen that in 2010 the market is expected to be recovered again.