News & Stories

Montreal/Munich. The German-Canadian digital services provider magicplan specialises in facility management in the real estate sector. Meanwhile, more and more investors are discovering that careful care and maintenance increases real estate value and reduces costs. This is also true of hotel real estate.

Augsburg. Innovative, funny and frightening things from the digital world. Today: 25hours' robot trainee, Architrave & DekaBank, Facebook & Ethics, Germany & Digitalization, Millennials & Tour Operators, Mini app & debtor, Self-propelled bicycle, Smartphone without all, TUI & Augmented Reality.

Shanghai. From high-speed rail tours and package holidays to the creation of thousands of online and offline stores, Ctrip is gearing up to outperform its competitors in terms of technology, personalized services and products. Ctrip's co-founder James Liang does not plan to focus on mainland China only.

Tel Aviv. Up to now, understanding and tracking customer's behavior was limited to the online world. The Israeli start-up Placense wants to change this, by providing businesses with real-time information about physical foot traffic. Where do people walk, stay, move to? And what are their socio-economic background and preferences?

Berlin/San Francisco. Smartphones and apps are changing our entire everyday lives – both when shopping and traveling. The amount of time consumers spend in mobile applications is increasing inexorably. Since 2016 alone, it has already risen by 50 percent. An app that analyzes the app world says what consumers around the world use their smartphones for most.

Berlin. The Architrave PropTech in Berlin invented it: The AI robot called DELPHI, which specialises in the real estate industry, handles all routine document management activities. It recognises the contents, classifies the documents, gives them exact names, extracts the most important data and sorts them into the right place within the filing system. A tool for a paper-dominated sector such as the real estate industry, including hotel real estate.

Augsburg. Innovative, funny and frightening things from the digital world, every week here. Today: Ctrip creates hotel robots / Hyatt hires hackers / Robots fired / Start-ups in Germany / Virtual Assistants.

Augsburg. Innovative, funny and frightening things from the digital world, every week here. Today: Air taxi / BlessU-2 / Bread robots / Consumer electronics / Digital real estate flash survey / EU-AI platform / IBM quantum computer / IDeaS language assistant / Robot with face.

Madrid. Since 2015, the European hospitality industry has declared war on mandatory parity clauses. The last hospitality association that has started to fight these clauses is the Spanish CEHAT.

Geneva. The role of OTAs has been a subject of controversy in the hotel industry for at least the last two decades. The Holy Grail for the distribution strategy of hotels and chains is to attract as high a proportion of direct bookings as possible. In order to achieve this goal, the major chains have harnessed their frequent guest schemes in an attempt to convince prospective customers that they can only get the cheapest rates by booking on the hotel groups' websites. Now a study reveals that OTAs have a tighter grip on the hotel sector in Europe than they do in the US: They offer the lower rates.