News & Stories

Amsterdam. Booking.com will be the accommodation booking engine on the Air France app and website. Both companies have recently come to an agreement, leaving AccorHotels in the starting blocks. The hotel company was considering buying stakes in Air France recently to enhance synergies but finally dropped the idea. Is it time for regrets?

Needham, Va.. Is TripAdvisor becoming a form of Facebook for travel? The review platform is now placing the community at the center of its new product. It will offer a personalized travel feed to its members and more. The platform already influences 10.3% of travel global expenditure according to Oxford Economics.

Rockville. Choice Hotels is launching a new virtual payment solution to ease corporate travelers' experiences when checking in and out of their hotels. For Choice franchisees, it means faster payment processes and higher cash flow. Rolled out in the US, the solution is not yet available in Europe.

Amsterdam. OTAs as well as Airbnb have invested serious money into tours and activities over the past years. The latest move comes from Booking.com whose "Experiences" are now available in the US where the firm has secured a partnership with super star DJ Khaled to promote the service. Tripadvisor, Expedia, Airbnb, Get Your Guide and even Asian new comer Klook, are neck on neck on that, as they all want a piece of this 183-billion-dollar market.

Paris. Louvre Hotels Group and Lucien Barrière Group signed a distribution agreement that will help both parties to showcase each other's luxury units online. The French family-owned chain aspires to welcome more Chinese customers and relies on Louvre's expertise to do so. For Louvre, it opens another door to the luxury segment and fits in with Pierre-Frédéric Roulot's strategy.

Bethesda. The Joint Venture of Alibaba Group and Marriott International announced the next news. Now it is spearheading Marriott's facial recognition check-in pilot with Fliggy, Alibaba's travel service platform. The test in two Chinese Marriott hotel has begun.

Paris. Personalization and direct bookings represent what hoteliers are focusing on today. Using machine learning, a Spanish hospitality tech company has come up with a new software able to increase website conversions predicting customers' behavior online.

London. For its first STX event in Europe, Sabre rolled out the red carpet for its American teams and 500 tourism professionals coming from all parts of the continent. To kick-off this "American-style" three-day gathering, Sean Menke, Sabre President and CEO since January 2017, took center stage to explain how the company was reconsidering the business of travel. It involves time and money. It is precisely Sabre that has developed a whole new portfolio of travel solutions for airlines, travel agencies and hotels. Sabre Hospitality is working on the "guest experience" by developing a sort of container with information about a guest which can create unique offers on a brand website on real-time basis. Sarah Douag joined the Sabre event in London last week.

Paris. Fastbooking, AccorHotels' software subsidiary was the victim of a data breach a few weeks ago. The hacker stole crucial data about guests, from names to credit card numbers. Fastbooking says it has fixed the issue. Hundreds of hotels in Japan were impacted, which leaves hundreds of thousands of potential guests victims of this malware.

Berlin/New York. Google is only a master in data collection, not in data analysis. If you want to use data sensibly and draw new ideas and inspiration from them, you have to curate them and see them in a specific context. Nobody has to be afraid of data, they are only the basis for a new quality of services in the hotel and/or for efficient communication with guests and employees. Digital assistants are wonderful helpers, "but it doesn't make sense to try to replicate the human mind," says Rob High, Vice President and Chief Technologist of IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, New York. He advises hoteliers who are just starting out with emerging technologies to start with machine learning. After the HospitalityInside Think Tank two weeks ago in Berlin, the top-class expert was available for a separate, exclusive interview.