In a world where an active NBA player has just come out, the Supreme Court is considering the merits of same-sex marriage, and the CEO of the world’s biggest coffee chain told a shareholder to take his money elsewhere if he couldn’t get behind the company’s support of gay rights, there are still plenty of brands that still avoid aligning with the LGBT community in any way. 

United Airlines is not one of them. It has signed on as the official sponsor of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA) global convention this weekend in Chicago. The two organizations have had a relationship for more than a decade.

"With more than 85,000 co-workers from around the world, United proudly celebrates the richness not just of our employees' diverse backgrounds, but our customers too,” said Dave Hilfman, United's senior vice president of worldwide sales, according to Chicago Business Journal. “As we say, 'diversity flies with us.'"Continue reading...

Benjamin Franklin, Dr. J and the fictional Rocky Balboa have all resided in completely different versions of Philadelphia, but each showcases a different part of the City of Brotherly Love. Now, Philly’s tourism gurus are looking to showcase a slew of different views of the city to potential visitors by showcasing different neighborhoods.

It used to be that colonial-America relics, the Art Museum steps and images of soft pretzels and cheesesteaks were what sold Philly to outsiders, but consumers are a bit more discerning now, so Philly’s tourism board is using its varied neighborhoods to help draw people there. The city has launched its Philadelphia Neighborhoods site, which highlights 14 different areas of the city. According to a press release, the site features “600 new pages of content, photography, mapping, videos and a consumer-generated Instagram feed.”Continue reading...

Google has sold the rights to the eponymous Frommer's travel guidebook series… to Arthur Frommer, the creator of the brand. Frommer initially sold his rights to Simon & Schuster in 1977, and several brand changes later, Google snapped it up in 2012 amidst speculation that the search giant might fold it into Zagat, which they bought in 2011, with aspirations of owning the SEO on geo-location-travel.

Travel website Skift broke the news that Google would stop publishing print editions of several Frommer's series just seven months after it acquired Frommer’s from John Wiley & Sons for a rumored price of $25 million, however the sale of the naming rights will now allow Arthur Frommer to continue to publish print guide books and content on Frommers.com. 

A Google spokesperson told Skift, “We’re focused on providing high-quality local information to help people quickly discover and share great places, like a nearby restaurant or the perfect vacation destination. That’s why we’ve spent the last several months integrating the travel content we acquired from Wiley into Google+ Local and our other Google services. We can confirm that we have returned the Frommer’s brand to its founder and are licensing certain travel content to him.”Continue reading...

BBC Worldwide has only been the sole owner of the Lonely Planet brand since 2011 after buying 75 percent of it in 2007, but it's been ready for some time to let it go.

For $42 million less than it had purchased it for—and after years of partnering with Melbourne, Australia-based founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler to build the business into a strong global brand—BBC Worldwide this week sold the world's biggest travel publisher for $77.7 million. The buyer is NC2 Media, which vaguely describes itself as “primarily engaged in the creation, acquisition and distribution of quality digital content and the development of the technologies to make that possible.”

The media company is run by a billionaire Kentucky recluse who supposedly doesn’t use email, made a good chunk of money from selling low-cost cigarettes before selling them off and renouncing tobacco, and is one of the top five landowners in the U.S. with 1.7 million acres to his name, Brad Kelley.Continue reading...

Emblematic of the slow but steady rise in health and wellness awareness, the gold-standard of ‘conscious capitalism,’ natural grocer Whole Foods is taking its brand and business acumen into the health resort sector.

"We have the perfect vehicle for this," Whole Foods Market co-CEO John Mackey told USA Today. "Think of it as a center where people would go for a day, a weekend or a week for healthy lifestyle education."

Call it a spa, resort or "healthy lifestyle education center," it's planned to open in the brand's Austin, Texas, hometown within three years—a pilot project that could catapult the company into the lucrative market pioneered by Canyon Ranch or Pritikin, or it could be another failure along the lines of the five education-focused Wellness Clubs that Whole Foods tested in 2006, including a location in Dallas.Continue reading...

Describing something that is oversized may soon involve a lawyer. The terms “titanic” and “gigantic” are both being considered for trademarking.

The man behind the plan, Clive Palmer, is an Australian billionaire who is having the Titanic completely re-created by a Chinese shipyard so it can set sail from England for North America in 2016. Palmer’s Blue Star Line, named after White Star Line, the company that owned the original Titanic, has filed a trademark request for a number of terms, including "Titanic," "Titanic II," "Titanic III," "Blue Star Line," and "Gigantic", although he's already promoting "Titanic II" on his website.

Palmer, a mining tycoon, believes that White Star Line had thought about naming one of its ships Gigantic, but never got around to it after its Titanic liner famously slammed into an iceberg near Newfoundland and sank, taking more than 1,500 lives along with it. “I think [the trademark application] will be OK,” Palmer said, according to Australia’s Boorowa News. “We'll just see how we go. I think there is a report back on it already, saying it is OK for a ship.”

However, there is some debate as to what he'll be able to trademark.Continue reading...

Ship happens #CarnivalTriumph twitter.com/OGSergi0/statu…

— Sergio™ (@OGSergi0) February 15, 2013

News of the Carnival Triumph’s ‘cruise from hell’ was nearly exhausted as the limping, stinking ship arrived by tug boat in Mobile, Alabama, thanks to wall-to-wall social media coverage and CNN’s helicopter suspended overhead. 

All that remains now is a report card on how Carnival is handling the crisis, and what the impact will be on the industry. "You have 3,100 people on that ship telling their family and friends they're never going on a cruise again, you have tweets and photos coming out now, and you have a freakin' CNN helicopter overhead. You think that's not going to resonate?" commented travel expert Jason Clampet, co-founder of travel website Skift.com.  

Stranded at sea for five days following a fire in the ship's engine room, Carnival launched a dedicated news page on its website, continually updated its Facebook page (with two million likes) and used two Twitter feeds (@CarnivalCruise and @CarnivalPR) with tweets such as: "We've taken more than 7,000 calls from family & friends & have been in regular contact with our guests' designated on-shore contacts."Continue reading...

There’s one in Denmark, and there’s one in England. And now there will be one in Carlsbad, California: a Legoland Hotel. Don’t worry, the place won’t be built out of Legos – at least not the whole thing.

The hotel – complete with a dragon-guarded entrance -- is slated to open in early April of next year right outside the Legoland theme park and will feature “interactive Lego features, themed play areas, family pool and kid's entertainment,” according to Lego's website. The 250 rooms at California's Legoland Hotel will all have a theme: Pirate, Kingdom, or Adventure.  

Since the hotel is aimed at housing families who are in town to visit the Legoland theme park (and not to those harboring pirate fantasies of one sort or another), each room has two sleeping areas, one with a queen-sized bed and the other with sleeping spaces for up to three kids. After all, it's hard to beat a brand extension you can sleep in.

No wonder Lego is rolling in dough right now.Continue reading...