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BCD Travel and SQUAKE co-hosted a webinar providing a practical framework for corporate travel programs on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), covering understanding SAF, evaluating credibility (evidence, documentation, chain-of-custody), and communicating progress safely. Inga Bösl of Siemens Switzerland shared real-world experience implementing SAF in corporate travel.
Thibault Masson, Head of Product Marketing at PriceLabs, argues that the traditional siloed revenue management model is no longer suitable for scaled hotel and short-term rental operations. Revenue decisions are distributed across marketing, operations, finance, and other departments, causing data misalignment, slow response, and profit leakage. The article suggests integrating revenue management systems across the business and using AI to expand analytical capacity and make revenue insights accessible to more teams.
Fintech company Rain acquired Ansa, a provider of branded stored-value wallets and closed-loop payment infrastructure. Ansa founder Sophia Goldberg joins Rain as Head of Payments. The acquisition enables Rain to extend stored balances beyond single merchants, accepted on Visa and Mastercard rails at participating businesses, and plans to support agentic payments.
PREHOST released a Hotel Website Infrastructure Resilience Checklist, based on Google CrUX data from 17 million websites, to help independent hotel and PMC tech leads evaluate web hosting performance, backup protocols, and vendor SLAs. The checklist covers seven areas including real-world server responsiveness, security edge, disaster recovery, SLAs and redundancy, and vendor transparency.
The article explores AI agents as new decision-makers entering the hotel booking journey. Voyagier founder Daniel Gardner argues that hotels need to optimize structured data rather than just human-facing marketing, and the GDS may become more valuable for providing standardized data. He advises hotel tech teams to use AI to describe their hotel to identify data gaps.
Airbnb has partnered with Tripadvisor Group to bring a selection of Tripadvisor experiences to the Airbnb platform, with certain tours and activities bookable later this year. The move aligns with Airbnb's strategy to scale Experiences, as CEO Brian Chesky noted on the Q2 earnings call that they added 1,000 new experiences, increasing supply by nearly 80% year over year.
Marriott International CEO Anthony Capuano said in a Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute interview that autonomous AI booking agents pose a real threat to OTA market share, but less so to big hospitality brands. He argued OTAs spent billions marketing the 'myth' that consumers must use third-party platforms to find lowest rates, while AI agents can interact directly with hotel reservation systems, removing the intermediary. Capuano emphasized hotels control the stay, a 'wide and deep moat.' Marriott is undergoing a multi-billion-dollar tech transformation replacing three legacy platforms, enabling dynamic merchandising and potentially AI-agent bookings.
Fenbeitong's research indicates that as enterprises expand overseas, the proportion of overseas travel increases, but directly choosing a traditional TMC is not always the best solution. While traditional TMCs have rich global resources, they have large-client service thresholds (typically annual travel spend over 50 million RMB), and enterprises below the threshold only access public customer service. Their native expense control capabilities are weak, making unified domestic and overseas control difficult. Integrated travel-expense platforms provide dedicated service groups and 24/7 bilingual customer service without thresholds, use the same control logic for domestic and overseas, and su…
As travelers increasingly use generative AI agents to research and book hotels, traditional loyalty frameworks face a major test. Amperity research shows 60% of consumers have selected a new travel brand based on AI recommendations. Legacy hotel infrastructure suffers from siloed guest data across PMS, CRS, and POS. Amperity co-CEO Derek Slager advises hotels to build an identity resolution layer across systems, combining deterministic and probabilistic signals, continuously updating profiles; provide external LLM engines with minimal, current, and consented context via APIs, not raw data; and adopt a hybrid architecture that reduces data movement while maintaining governance.
HotelMinder founder Benjamin Verot asked several hospitality consultants to share ways to optimize operations without buying new technology. Recommendations include: audit existing systems, clean data and ask vendors about new features; simplify rate architecture and review regularly; ensure website and booking data tracking is correct; map information flows to identify bottlenecks; experience the guest journey yourself; audit OTA extranets; regularly compare key metrics and watch for unofficial systems. Emphasizes that technology matters, but people identifying problems and asking the right questions are key to improvement.
Cendyn has launched a unified payment framework within the Cendyn CRS, integrating Flex Pay, FreedomPay, Stripe, and Gr4vy, introducing BNPL, regional payment gateways, and intelligent routing to reduce payment friction at direct booking checkout and lower cart abandonment. The feature is included as a standard part of the existing CRS subscription at no additional platform fee.
The article argues that hotels lose direct bookings to OTAs because their websites fail to provide specific information to manage traveler expectations. By improving room, location, and offers pages, hotels can increase direct bookings and reduce OTA commissions.
PhocusWire rounds up earnings from major travel companies: Uber gross bookings up 24% to $58B; Amex GBT revenue up 35% with transactions up 41%; MakeMyTrip and Ixigo show mixed results in India; Lyft active riders exceed 30 million. AI adoption is key to improving efficiency and customer experience.
HOVR and Cloudbeds announced a strategic partnership to integrate interactive video technology into Cloudbeds' direct booking engine. Independent hotels can deploy video commerce and UGC with a single line of code, boosting conversion rates. The integration provides an analytics dashboard to track engagement and conversion lift.
Carnival Corporation announced an upgraded target to reduce GHG emissions intensity by 25% by 2029 versus 2019, after achieving its original 2030 goal of 20% five years early. Through fuel-efficiency hardware, smart routing software, and fleet modernization, the company projects approximately $650 million in fuel savings in 2026.
Airbnb highlighted that its hotel initiative is exceeding expectations during its Q2 earnings call, partnering with Lark to add over 75 boutique properties. Hotels account for a single-digit percentage of nights but are growing three times faster than homes. Revenue rose 17% to $3.6 billion, and AI reduced customer service costs by 16%.
Maycur published a comparison report on AI expense management systems, highlighting the prevalence of fake AI, with over 40% of self-proclaimed AI products only using OCR. Maycur leads with a full-process AI capability platform trained on 200M+ documents, achieving 99.8% receipt recognition accuracy and over 80% audit automation.
According to Brand Finance's 2026 Hotels 50 report, Hilton Hotels & Resorts ranks as the world's most valuable hotel brand for the 11th consecutive year, with a brand value of $19.2 billion, a 28% increase from 2025. Hilton has nine brands on the list, and Hilton Hotels & Resorts is one of only two hotel brands in the Global 500.
Hospitality middleware and CDP provider Ireckonu warns that the primary barrier to AI adoption is poor quality, fragmentation, and governance of guest data, not AI model capability. Legacy PMS architectures are room-centric, leading to fragmented profiles and duplicate records, and AI amplifies these flaws. Hotels should establish guest-centric data foundations, governance, and identity resolution before deploying AI.
Onyx CenterSource launched a new Commission Payment Status Tool, providing travel agencies, non-member agencies, and independent advisors with real-time tracking of hotel B2B commission payouts. The open-access tool allows advisors to input booking details to verify remittance, view processing stages, and identify bottlenecks, reducing administrative churn.
Expedia Group, in its Q2 2026 earnings call, said it is investing in two categories of AI: one for improving recommendations, ranking, and personalization, which is delivering immediate benefits; the other for conversational experiences like Vrbo's natural language search, which, while not yet driving conversion, provides over 60% more information about traveler intent, expected to yield compounding benefits over time. Q2 booked room nights grew 6% to 111.5 million, gross bookings up 12% to $33.9 billion.
Minor Hotels has successfully deployed Oracle OPERA Cloud across 106 hotels, resorts, and branded residences in 59 countries, and implemented OPERA Cloud Central to centralize reservation management and global distribution. This decommissions property-level servers, unifies multi-brand data layer, and enables rapid integration via OHIP. Next phase will expand to Australia and New Zealand.
HBX Group has entered a strategic distribution agreement with Sabre to make its accommodation portfolio available across Sabre's global travel agency network, integrating 250,000+ properties into Sabre Mosaic Marketplace via normalized GDS APIs. Travel agencies can query HBX inventory directly through Sabre APIs, eliminating custom integrations. This consolidates GDS and wholesale content, reducing technological friction.
A report by Arival and Phocuswright sizes the global travel experiences market at $253 billion in 2024, projected to grow to $342 billion by 2029. Experiences bookings grew 17% in 2024 vs. 6% for travel overall. However, distribution lags: only 33% of experiences were booked online in 2025 vs. 64% for travel overall. The report also analyzes consumer behavior, such as averaging 3.5 to 4.7 experience bookings per trip.
Booking Holdings, in its Q2 earnings call, said referral traffic from LLMs (paid and unpaid) represents less than 1% of total room nights, with no material change recently. However, third-party data shows its brands appear frequently in LLMs. The company is working with third-party frontier players to ensure proper placement and launched initiatives like Priceline's Penny and Agoda's gallery view. Q2 gross bookings grew 9%, revenue up 8% to $7.4 billion.