AI travel recommendations now include paid offers. Google announced this as part of the release of its Q2 results. IHG is the first partner in the Direct Offers programme.
On Thursday, 23 July 2026, the European Commission took two decisions finding non-compliance by Google with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and issued a fine of 460 million euros and a fine of 430 million euros respectively.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) has been fully in force across the EU since February 2024. It also has a significant impact on the hospitality industry. The European Consumer Centre (ECC) Germany has published an online guide explaining the key provisions.
The AI session at this year's HospitalityInside Think Tank (HITT) in May did not feel like a technology showcase. It felt like a reckoning. Operators, startup founders, a global distribution giant and a representative from the European AI Office sat in the same room and tried, not always successfully, to agree on what AI actually means for this industry right now.
The People's Republic is preparing to launch its first robot hotel. It is situated on the man-made West Artificial Island and is essentially intended as a showroom and experiment to demonstrate to the world just how advanced China is.
Phishing campaigns are on the rise, particularly around the peak travel season. WhatsApp is becoming a new attack vector, and cybercriminals – who exploit data leaks at Booking, for example – can use reservation data for even longer once they have obtained it.
From guest experience to revenue strategy, from finance automation to channel distribution, Mews Unfold 2026 set out a vision for a hospitality industry in which AI does not merely accelerate operations but fundamentally changes what is possible. The manual workflows is over.
People in Germany are switching off – at least some of the time. After years of steady growth and constant digital activity, internet usage in Germany is falling noticeably for the first time.
Mews CEO Matt Welle and former Disney Innovation Chief Duncan Wardle made the same argument from two different directions. The industry's most urgent problem is not its technology. It's the lack of courage to use their people differently. A wake-up call for many hoteliers, who still think and act in silos, something that no longer makes much sense in the era of AI.
"Technology is not the enemy of the hospitality industry. The point of technology is not simply to blindly replace jobs or destroy other aspects of what makes hospitality what it is." Richard Valtr, the founder of Mews, still looks into the fearful eyes of those he is speaking to: This industry seems to have preserved conservatism right down to its very core. Change it!
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