HalalTrip wants to be every Muslim’s handy travel guide

Source: techinasia.com

By: Enricko Lukman

The Muslim tourism industry is huge. A study estimates that the “global Muslim tourism market in 2011 was US $126.1 billion in outbound expenditure 1” or 12.3 percent of the global outbound tourism expenditure in that year. It’s estimated that the Muslim tourism market will grow an average of 4.79 percent year-on-year until 2020.

This explains why Crescent Rating, a ratings company for halal friendly travel services behind that study, decided to launch a B2C Muslim tourism service called HalalTrip.

Launched in December 2013, HalalTrip will sell three travel services to Muslims online: the booking of flight tickets, hotels, and tour packages (to be launched this week). All three are offered in cooperation with travel companies Wego (flights), Booking.com (hotels), and Kuoni (travel packages).

What makes the site special however is that it offers travel recommendations based on the halal friendliness of each product 2. The “halal friendliness level” is derived from the parent company’s database of halal tourism ratings. The website also carries a directory of halal friendly restaurants and mosques.

Israel’s attacks on Gaza are leading to Coca-Cola boycotts

Coca-Cola’s sales may suffer.

By: Heather Timmons

Source: http://qz.com/

Turkish businesses have started removing Coca-Cola from shelves, more than a hundred Mumbai hotels are not selling any of its products, and Malaysian pro-Palestinian groups are calling for a boycott in response to the continued Israeli attacks on Gaza, which have killed more than 700 people.

The well-organized “Boycott Israel” movement has been around for many years, and generally ebbs and flows with the intensity of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, part of the larger “BDS” (for boycott, divestment & sanctions) campaign started in 2005. The huge civilian death toll in Gaza, which has been documented by quickly-circulated photographs, and the unrelenting nature of Israel’s missile attacks could make this boycott particularly tough on Coca-Cola, judging from growing support from social media: