Hopper

If you plan on traveling for Thanksgiving, you'll want to book your trip before Halloween.

Online booking site Hopper says the domestic round-trip fare for Thanksgiving is about $402, up 31% from last year.

Book a hotel and you can expect to pay $170 a night.

Walmart is trying to ease concerns that its new electronic price tags may mean constantly changing prices.

I'm a huge believer i- i- in the financialization of travel, um, something I've been writing about for almost a decade now.

Hopper is, of course, the poster child of these kinds of solutions, you know, the leave for any reason, the price lock, those kinds of things that are effectively our financial instruments.

These are puts and options and insurance contracts that are being built for the travel industry, and I love them because they actually, they actually solve real problems, right? So if you think about the Hopper solutions, it's like we've all been concerned about booking a hotel and the price goes down.

We've all been concerned about booking a hotel and the photos are not exactly what we imagine.

We've all had these little concerns.

And there were plenty of critics.

Notorious gossip columnist Hedda Hopper had been after Chaplin for years.

She had helped turn the Joan Barry case into a national spectacle and had long argued that Chaplin's private life, the young women, the paternity case, the fact that he had never become an American citizen, made him unfit to stay in the country.

Now, she had politics to add to the list.

Her column ran nationwide and reached millions of readers.

There, Hopper mounted a full-fledged campaign against Chaplin, tying his politics to the moral turpitude she had been accusing him of for years.

It was a campaign that had the complete, if quiet, backing of the FBI.

The Bureau had been keeping a file on Chaplin for years.

Now, for travel, this matters.

Uber has been expanding into flights through Hopper, hotels through Expedia, and trains through Omeo.

The company says its product lineup isn't changing, though.

But when you cut 3,300 people and refocus on core businesses, the travel side, which isn't material to Uber's bottom line, is unlikely to get more attention.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says resources are shifting hard into ride-sharing, delivery and robo-taxis, resulting in a 20% cut to management roles.

Uber's travel play isn't going anywhere officially, but flights from Hopper, hotels from Expedia Group and trains and buses from Omeo aren't material to Uber's financials.

When a company says it's refocusing on its call, and looking at an autonomous future, the stuff at the margin tends to get squeezed first.

The bottom line? Uber's travel ambitions were never the point.