News & Stories

Amsterdam. With exceptional times come exceptional measures. Around the world, governments are busy setting up rescue funds to help local businesses stay afloat. But when a successful company like Booking.com applies for state aid, taxpayers raise eyebrows and local politicians question the necessity to bail out one of the most profitable companies in the Netherlands. Also, a French platform is to by-pass Airbnb and Booking.com – initiated by the state.

Washington. Artificial intelligence must be useful. Corona helps here as well: The virus has already broken the hype in this field and exposes useless things. Unfortunately, however, AI tends to be the big opportunity for large companies rather than small ones, says Tom Seddon regretfully. Today he is one of the global thought leaders of AI. After 22 years in the hotel industry he studied Data Sciene. In an interview with hospitalityInside.com he explains which hotel activities executives should use AI for. Tom Seddon, CEO-in-residence of the software company Foundry in Washington, will enrich the virtual HospitalityInside Think Tank as a speaker on June 23, 2020.

Stuttgart. How does digitalisation help hotels in times of corona and afterwards? Quite a lot – across all areas of a hotel, from Smart Services to New Work and Digital Business to Smart Building.

Augsburg. Innovative, funny and scary things from the digital world. Today: Zoom continues to grow / Corona does not kill all startups / Millions for business travel start-up / Stingy tech giants for Corona / Human or bot on Twitter?

Frankfurt. In the battle against CoVid-19, the industry is turning to smart machine power. Robot specialists, assembly and manufacturing experts are currently retrofitting industrial production lines in a rapid process. For example, they are reducing shortages of protective breathing masks on their own, making test procedures safer or accelerating them. But existing technologies can also score points in the current situation...

Munich. Lufthansa City Center travel agencies and Fineway are cooperating: Anyone who has their dream holiday put together on the start-up's website will have their data forwarded to LCC travel consultants - without the user knowing anything about it. Consumer protection authorities have flagged this business model as concerning. LCC and Fineway play down the issue.

Dubai. The hotel world's first luggage-hauling robots made Yotel famous; in the meantime, CEO Hubert Viriot has been experimenting with a drone to fly food to the guest tables. The group is one of the major drivers of the world’s smarter hotels. Viriot hopes that its slim, sharply tailored concept of "people, technology and design" will also get it through the corona crisis. He is tech-savvy, is willing to try out crazy ideas, but at the same time is also profoundly critical: That's why he relies less on robots than on a new, smart revenue management system and CRM.

Zurich. Coronavirus is giving an unexpected boost to digitisation: Recent changes – allowing employees to work from home and the online schooling programmes – will positively reinforce the relationship between "man and machine". Such developments will also benefit tourism, the Swiss Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute is convinced, a research outfit headquartered in Rüschlikon/Zurich. Senior researcher Jakub Samochowiec, who also co-authored the study "On the road with smart assistants”, describes new travel process scenarios, the power of open data and possible opportunities in times of crisis such as those brought about by corona.

Dallas. The hotel is no longer a hotel, it is becoming a destination of personal experience and shopping. A third of the guests would pay up to 50 percent more on average if the hotel would meet their personal wishes already at the time of booking. According to its European study, the Sabre Corporation speaks of "golden retail times" for hoteliers.

Berlin. There was a small note on the net that drew attention to the Hackathon #WirVsVirus. This developed into a gigantic, joint programming competition against the Corona crisis with 27,000 volunteers – under the patronage of the German Chancellery.