News & Stories

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.

Amsterdam/Bethesda. After Hilton in 2015, Hyatt, Trump Hotels and even IHG last year, Marriott is the latest victim of a severe data breach. The largest data breach that ever occurred in the hospitality world and the second biggest in history of all industries combined, could cost Marriott not only a lot of money, but also the trust of their members.

Munich. The guest platform TrustYou presented its new live chat channel, which is part of TrustYou's guest messaging tool. The live chat helps hotels to respond to inquiries in real time and turn more website visitors into direct bookings. Also the communication with the guests on site shall be enhanced.