Daily Getaways week 5

This week marks the fifth and final week of the U.S. Travel Association's Daily Getaways deals. For those of you who don't know this is an annual promotion that offers travel getaways across the United States at discounted prices every weekday at www.dailygetaways.com. Offers are sold at a fixed price in limited quantities and are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Offers are purchased on the site but booking can be done at a later date. Offers go on sale at 1:00pm ET each weekday and began April 4th, 2016.

2016 Annual Freddie Awards (26th) results out...Southwest and Marriott winners

You may remember getting all those annoying mass emails a few months ago from every airline and hotel chain you have ever used asking you to vote for them in this years annual Freddie Awards. For those of you who don't know what these are, according to their website at freddieawards.com:

Introduced in 1988 by InsideFlyer magazine’s Randy Petersen, the “Freddies” are named in honor of Sir Freddie Laker and have grown in stature and importance to become the most prestigious member-generated awards in the travel loyalty industry. The goal of the Freddie Awards is to give voice to the frequent flyer and to honor the efforts of an industry that counts more than 300 million members worldwide.

Things just got MORE interesting with the Starwood buyout

As announced earlier this week, another player entered what seemed like an already set in stone deal between Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Marriott International that has shook up the travel industry. As outlined in a prior post, the relatively unknown fully financed Beijing-based Anbang Insurance Group had submitted an initial offer for $76 a share which was already higher than Marriott's offer and they just upped the ante to $78 per share which equates to buyout of around $13.2 billion.

Things just got interesting with the Starwood buyout

As many people have already probably heard by now, there has been another offer on the table for the upcoming Starwood acquisition that was announced earlier today. The offer came from Beijing-based Anbang Insurance Group which is largely unknown in the US but did make headlines when they bought New York's Waldorf Astoria for $1.95 billion back in October 2014 which was the largest-ever U.S. real estate purchase by a Chinese buyer at the time.