News & Stories

Berlin. a&o is part of a segment on the up – the hostel segment. As founder Oliver Winter reported last week in the hospitalityInside interview, the group nonetheless spends around EUR 6 million per year on visibility for its brand online, for instance on Google and Facebook. In the background, it also shells out six-figure sums for digitisation – for AI and algorithms, for Voice Search and Google Home. "We are ahead of our rivals," management says. The details.

Augsburg. Innovative, funny and frightening things from the digital world. Today: Amazon Go supermarket, Ctrip & hotel business, Digital university, HR administration, Hololens 2, Smartphone sales.

Paris. In the world of full-service hospitality technology providers, Accor believes it can make a difference. The French group merged Availpro and Fastbooking to create D-EDGE to make its mark in an industry where concentration has left little room for external players. Competition is fierce in this sector dominated by Sabre Hospitality, Amadeus/TravelClick, Oracle, Travel Tripper/Pegasus, Siteminder, and the like which are all scaling internationally.

Eschborn/Frankfurt. Within the context of the current acquisition of Worldhotels, it is said, among other things, that the members of the cooperation should "profit from Best Western's strong e-commerce presence". In the course of our interview with Marcus Smola, which we prepared anyway, we asked the CEO Best Western Hotels Central Europe also about digitalisation. However, it did not sound so progressive.

Frankfurt. Hotels as sales areas, co-working and digitalisation in all areas – from sales to guest experience: these are the trends that will shape the hotel and tourism industry in 2019 and beyond. Technology provider Sabre and the global consumer trends and insights experts TrendWatching have taken a closer look at these developments in a joint study.

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.