Vrbo has triggered a backlash from hosts after raising commissions and plans to relax price parity rules. Skift points out that from a competitive perspective, Vrbo is following Booking.com and Airbnb by shifting the cost burden onto hosts; eliminating or significantly reducing guest fees may look good optically, but travelers will ultimately bear these costs in the form of higher room rates.
During the National Day holiday, Jilin's hospitality industry used the "accommodation+" model to link sightseeing, health and wellness, and cultural experiences, turning hotels and homestays into tourist destinations. The average occupancy rate of the hotel cluster in the Changbaishan Huamei Resort reached 75%; the average occupancy rate of Shanghu Shang Homestay from the 1st to the 5th was 87%, with out-of-province tourists accounting for 90%. Yanji Dinosaur Hot Spring Hotel, relying on the dinosaur culture IP, launched a combination of hot spring health and wellness and parent-child amusement.
Accor's luxury collection brand Emblems Collection has opened its first North American property, Rimrock Banff, in Canada's Banff National Park. This is the brand's second hotel globally, following the UK's Lucknam Park Hotel & Spa. The hotel has 320 rooms (including 57 suites) and features Banff's first luxury spa, Bathhouse, offering more than 50 seasonal activities.
Royal Orchid Hotels launched its branded residences platform Iconiqa Living in North Goa on Wednesday, with an initial 130 units, extending its one-year-old high-end lifestyle brand Iconiqa from hotel rooms to residences.
Tujia data shows that during this year's National Day holiday, homestay bookings in hidden gem small cities such as Ili, Qianxinan, Zhongwei, Nyingchi, and Jiuzhaigou all increased by more than 20% year-on-year, while Qingdao, Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Nanjing ranked in the top five nationwide. Among travelers combining leave with the holiday, more than one-fifth booked homestays in two or more cities, and orders for the same homestay with stays of 3 days or more increased by more than 50% year-on-year.
IHG Hotels & Resorts has signed an agreement with developer PT Raka Eka Makmur to open Hotel Indigo Yogyakarta, which will be IHG's first entry into Yogyakarta, with the hotel planned to open in 2029.
Hilton has appointed Jeff Moore as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, effective October 26, 2026. Moore previously served as Vice President of Software Engineering at Uber, managing 2,500 engineers globally and supporting products including Uber Eats and Uber for Business; earlier he was responsible for engineering teams related to Kindle, Fire TV and Alexa at Amazon.
Hospitality technology provider Reeco announced it has received a strategic investment from Dallas Venture Capital to accelerate the enterprise-level expansion of its AI-driven procure-to-pay platform across North American hotel portfolios.
BGL's Jason Myler analyzes that private equity and strategic buyer M&A in hotel technology is accelerating, with standalone point solutions gradually being consolidated into platform bundles, which will affect hotel CTOs' vendor choices over the next 12 to 18 months.
IHG Hotels & Resorts has appointed Leanne Harwood, who has more than 20 years of company tenure, as Senior Vice President, Global Sales, effective immediately. She previously served as Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Luxury & Lifestyle, Americas, and will be responsible for driving customer engagement and growth across global corporate, group, and meetings and events businesses. She will continue to oversee her former division until a successor is announced.
Hilton has appointed former Uber Vice President of Software Engineering Jeff Moore as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. He will report directly to President and CEO Christopher Nassetta, becoming Hilton's first CTO.
Hilton announced the appointment of Jeff Moore as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, effective October 26, 2026, reporting directly to President and CEO Chris Nassetta and joining the executive committee.
Toast released the workforce management suite Toast IQ Team, combining forecasting, agentic scheduling and gamification features with payroll and tip management, while adding SEO, Reviews and Offers agents to the Toast IQ Grow marketing platform, all based on merchants' own Toast data.
Skift reviewed Mews' company registrations and investor disclosures in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic to break down the business behind its $2.5 billion valuation. In 2025, Mews' revenue grew 39% to 291 million euros ($329 million), of which about three-quarters came from transactions rather than software subscriptions, with platform transaction volume reaching 17 billion euros ($19.2 billion) for the year.
Hospitality technology provider TrustYou has launched Ask TrustYou, a conversational AI analyst embedded in its customer experience platform CXP, covering all packages from entry-level to enterprise. The tool replaces static BI dashboards and filterable tables with a natural-language chat interface, supports multi-turn follow-up questions, and drills down from portfolio-level sentiment shifts to specific hotels, shifts, menu items or guest verbatims.
Mews announced the expansion of its POS system to more than 850 Accor hotels, an initiative led by Accor Chief Distribution Officer Jean Noel Lau Keng Lun. Accor's F&B Technology Program, after integrating CRS, PMS and RMS, is standardizing its food and beverage technology stack around cloud-native, open-API platforms such as Mews, and is establishing a preferred vendor list.
Hilton has signed an agreement with Bengaluru's Kalyani Group to develop Conrad Bengaluru Airport and Hilton Bengaluru Airport at the KIADB Hi-Tech Defence and Aerospace Park, each with 300 rooms, totaling 600. The project includes over 72,000 square feet of event space, is about a 20-minute drive from Kempegowda International Airport, and is expected to open in 2030. This is Hilton's second Conrad and fourth Hilton hotel in Bengaluru.
Hilton announced that Jeff Moore will become Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, starting October 26, reporting directly to President and CEO Chris Nassetta and joining the executive committee.
Signia Hilton Indianapolis has announced seven food and beverage and bar concepts ahead of its December opening, including the 38th-floor rooftop lounge Torchlight and the lobby bar Rosewater's.
IHG Hotels & Resorts has appointed Leanne Harwood as Senior Vice President, Global Sales, based in Atlanta, leading the global sales organization, responsible for strategy, performance and customer engagement. Harwood has more than 30 years of hospitality experience, including more than 20 years at IHG, and has served as Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Luxury, Lifestyle and Managed Hotels, Americas since March 2024. She will be responsible for driving customer engagement and growth for global corporate, group and meetings and events business.
Hilton has integrated hotel details, photos and real-time room rates into Google AI Mode, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, allowing users to query Hilton Honors points redemption room availability within conversations, but clicking to book redirects them back to Hilton.com or the Hilton Honors app to complete the transaction.
Accor has appointed former Hilton executive Kara Randall as Chief Development Officer for Luxury Brands in North America, effective October 1, responsible for brands including Raffles, Fairmont, Sofitel Legend, Sofitel, Emblems Collection and MGallery Collection, reporting directly to Agnès Roquefort, Chief Development Officer for Luxury and Lifestyle.
Airbnb plans to restart the Luxe program or a similar program for high-end accommodations, CEO Brian Chesky made related remarks at the company's second Host Summit last month. Two listing managers who attended the invitation-only San Francisco event relayed this statement to Skift. The program was first launched in June 2019 and was interrupted in 2020 due to the pandemic.
IHG has signed a management agreement with Vrindam Developers to develop voco Vrindavan in the pilgrimage site of Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh, India. The hotel will have 130 rooms (including 13 suites) and is expected to open in the first quarter of 2031.
Travel + Leisure Co. has reached a partnership with Wyndham to develop Sports Illustrated Resorts into a hotel brand, the two companies announced on Monday. The brand had previously relied mainly on timeshares and branded residences, with slow progress in implementation.
Pavilion officially launches as a national vacation rental company, integrating 20 local operators and managing 5,000 homes in the United States, with local businesses retaining their original leadership and brands and gaining shared technology, data and operational resources.
Waldorf Astoria Kuala Lumpur has announced its Waldorf Astoria Spa, spanning over 2,275 square meters across two floors, integrating a La Prairie spa collaboration, AI-driven Technogym Checkup fitness assessments, and MECOTEC cryotherapy and other recovery technologies, built around the two concepts of "recovery science" and "the art of longevity." The wellness center will officially debut ahead of the hotel's opening on October 30, 2026, and will offer private wellness memberships and in-residence expert programs.
Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and Travel + Leisure Co. have entered into a development partnership to build, operate and expand hotels under the Sports Illustrated Resorts brand in U.S. college towns and major city markets.
More than three months after its launch, Hilton's college-town brand Undergraduate is advancing a new-build prototype and attracting developer interest; the first hotel is expected to open in 2027, but the location has not been announced. Positioned in the upper-midscale segment, the brand offers a more flexible model with lower construction costs than Graduate, and targets more than 500 hotels open in the next 10 to 15 years. Of Hilton's hotels opened in 2025, 40% are conversions, and more than half of lifestyle brand openings come from conversions.
Hospitality Technology announced the finalists for the 2026 Hotel Visionary Awards, sponsored by Canary Technologies, now in its 21st year.
Pavilion has consolidated 20 vacation rental property management companies, adopting a business model variant. Whether its model can scale remains to be verified: private equity investors demand returns, majority equity holders want to retain autonomy, and at the same time the efficiency of operating more than a dozen software systems will also be tested.
The US-Iran conflict has not forced Gulf hotel owners to sell assets, but buyers and sellers cannot agree on prices because pre-war valuations no longer hold, leaving transactions stalled. James Wrenn, head of hotel and leisure at Knight Frank, said hotels listed before the conflict remain unsold due to price disagreements rather than owners' financial difficulties, and sellers are becoming more pragmatic about pricing expectations.
Ruby has opened its first hotel in France, Ruby Lilou, in Marseille, with 237 rooms, with rates for a single room including breakfast starting at 130 euros. The simultaneously opened Ruby Yani introduces Ruby Workspaces to France for the first time, offering more than 126 flexible workspaces, with membership starting at 60 euros per month and day passes starting at 30 euros. The hotel is located between Vieux Port and La Joliette, and features a 300-square-metre rooftop terrace and a 24-hour bar café.
IHG's Hotel Indigo has reached 200 open hotels worldwide, doubling from 100 in 2019, with 134 more currently under construction. The brand has covered more than 30 countries, entered the Caribbean, Portugal and Peru markets in the past two years, and will open its first hotel in Saudi Arabia next year.
In a roundtable session at the Global Travel News Accommodation Industry Summit, Hilton's Xia Nong, IHG's Sun Jian, Shangri-La's Xu Haochun, and VariFlight's Xia Yi discussed the localization of international hotel brands. Sun Jian said HUALUXE, launched in 2012, has 28 hotels open and 19 under construction; Xia Nong said a lifestyle brand, Tanbo Hotel, was released this year, and stated that localization can change expression but must not lower brand promises and delivery certainty.
Hilton said it has not blocked Meta's personal agent Muse or any mainstream agent assistant, and said it is accepting bookings from a variety of agents including Muse. BTIG analyst Jake Fuller said in a note to clients on Friday that his research team, after testing a large number of hotel searches with Muse, concluded that "Hilton has blocked Muse," but did not provide details. Skift itself also encountered similar obstacles when searching Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt websites through Muse.
Red Roof announced at its Ignite brand conference in Hollywood, Florida, that revenue generated by its app increased 44% year over year. The economy hotel franchisor attributed the growth to its cloud PMS partnership with HotelKey, standardizing property management systems across more than 715 hotels, and to its collaboration with digital agency Milestone to build an AI-native digital platform to optimize hotel visibility in generative search.
Hilton announced the signing of the 199-room Tempo by Hilton Munich Airport Arena, set to open in 2029 at the MUNICH ARENA campus, marking the Tempo by Hilton brand's first entry into Germany. The hotel will feature Get Ready Zone rooms, a fitness center with cardio and strength areas, a ground-floor café and a rooftop bar, under a management agreement signed by Hilton with Allresto, a subsidiary of Munich Airport.
Nobu Hospitality will open its first hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, featuring 50 rooms and a restaurant, expected to open in 2028. Accor will adopt Mews' POS system to unify F&B technology across its luxury, midscale, and economy portfolio; the system is currently running in 850 Accor hotels across more than 20 countries.
Hilton has opened its first DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Singapore, with 344 rooms located along the Robertson Quay riverfront on Havelock Road, about a five-minute walk from Havelock MRT station. The hotel features two dining concepts, SAUS and Brew:33, seven meeting rooms, an outdoor pool, a wellness studio and a 24-hour fitness center, with guest rooms ranging from 24 to 50 square meters, and more than 200 rooms overlooking the Singapore River.