It might be that getting an MCP for hotels is actually a big deal. But who will make it and who will keep it maintained? Linkedin and Humans, Why hotel tech gets sidetracked and more.
Hello,
It is soon time for my annual media review. Of course I could spend my time tryign to predict the future – but honestly nobody really knows. I think if you understand the recent trends, you can extrapolate your own future trends.
Note: New Global OTA chart is coming soon.
Best, Martin
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Metasearch Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Mostly Google
The Kayak writedown and the “is metasearch dying?” chatter miss a key point: metasearch hasn’t disappeared; it’s consolidated, mainly around Google. For independent hotels, that means less spraying budget across multiple players and more going deep on Google Hotel Ads, rate parity, and smart retargeting. Kayak CEO is throwing AI under the bus (AI has become the favorite corporate punching bag), I don’t think that’s the case. Metasearch has been a Google dominated sector for many, many years. Historically the incumbents like Tripadvisor and Trivago figured they shouldn’t worry about new customers and Kayak didn’t want to bother with non-chain players. IMO this is a self-inflicted issue.
METASEARCH STRATEGY
Paymentification
“Paymentification” is a fun label for banks like Capital One that use their credit card relationships to own the entire travel transaction, from inspiration to booking. The idea could work, where banks move from being financial institutions to also offering marketplace for travel and other items. That you can redeem with your points + more. They have a whole much more data than OTAs on you. Interesting idea, I’m not holding my breath. Banks have not traditionally been very good at innovation.
TRAVEL PAYMENTS
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry. About Digital Delusion
Byron Sharp’s point about brands growing through light buyers, not superfans, still clashes with how much effort goes into “community” and engagement metrics that apparently don’t move market share as much. The Pepsi vs John Lewis examples underline how emotional campaigns still win over clever digital stunts. Not specific to the hotel industry or hotel tech, but interesting to see.
DIGITAL DELUSION
Travel Megatrends 2026
Skift’s Megatrends 2026 report (beautifully designed as usual) discusses an industry in a weird emotional mix of anticipation and fatigue. The “fil rouge” is that travel keeps reinventing itself, but not always along the lines we predicted. Trends reports are a fun thing, when written by a media company they are often quite remote from the actual industry. When written by industry experts, they’re often too much tunnel view. I just don’t think there’s a perfect angle – so you need to read both and make your own conclusions.
TRAVEL MEGATRENDS
LinkedIn Wants Humans Back
LinkedIn deprioritising AI-written posts is a hopeful twist. I don’t know how they will really implement it but we’ll see. I do find that more and more content is clearly AI generated, something that could be 2 sentences is being turned into a long post by AI. And plenty of plainly useless sensational posts being churned out. PSA: If everyone stopped clicking on clickbait titles, we’d get less of them.
HUMAN CONTENT
Branding Beats Performance (Again)
The discussion never end (brand vs performance). McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026 basically says the pendulum is swinging back: brand will outrank performance, martech, and even genAI in marketers’ priorities. Leaders are rediscovering that strong brands deliver more stable, long-term ROI. My take is that pendulums are always wrong. Good Brand lowers cost of Performance. Good Performance inspires better Brand.
EUROPEAN BRANDING
Tech in hotels, why it gets sidetracked
In the tech industry we don’t understand why hotels consider it expensive and a side-thing. I remember one hotelier bragging that they had spent $2 million on a chandelier but were haggling to spend a few thousand on a tech solution that would really help them. I think this story perfectly explains what is really on a hotelier’s mind.
TREEHOUSE INVESTMENT
Opinion
MCP: The Tech Switchboard Hotels Might Actually Need
There’s a new 3-letter acronym circling the hotel tech sphere (yay): MCP. And before you yawn hit delete, this one might actually be useful.
MCP stands for “Model Context Protocol” not “Middleware Control Platform” (at least for now). If the early vendors are right, this could be more than just another integration tool, it could become a direct revenue lever. That’s worth looking at.
The easiest way to describe MCP is to call it a switchboard. A single point of entry for AI agents or chatbots (or any other tool). They connect to the MCP server, and from there, they can tap into your booking engine – but actually it could also be to your PMS, CRS, CRM, website, reputation tools, spa systems, golf bookings, even your café’s menu, if you want. One in, everything out.
The MCP doesn’t store any of that data. So you don’t run into the usual problems with sync, cache, PCI or GDPR headaches. It just routes the request to where the data lives, grabs it, and returns it. No storage or memory, just a unified language, rules and routing. It’s like a real-time translator with a set of routing rules that you can bake in.
Latency will still be an issue, of course. Nothing magic here. But that’s a technical speed bump, not a structural one.
Now here’s why this matters for hotels: with MCP, hotels finally have a way to expose their full ecosystem to AI agents (or any external systems that uses the protocol) without relying on API-by-API integrations. Think about itinerary bookings: rooms, F&B, wellness, in-stay preferences, and loyalty. Plus one could imagine a whole bunch of additional data that could be used.
Theoretically if a hotel uses MCP it could unlock entirely new direct revenue streams. Because it would be a standard that AI Agents can use instead of individual connections, which will always go to OTAs first. An AI agent plugged into an MCP could book the room, the spa, the airport pickup, the family package, and the dog bed, all from the hotel’s own data, not from homogenized third party data.
We’re still early. There’s no dominant standard yet. But if MCPs succeed in simplifying access to fragmented hotel data, they may be the infrastructure piece we’ve all been waiting for.
But where does it sit? Is it attached to the PMS as that is the most accurate source of truth? Is it a third party vendor (yet another one) who manages all the APIs to the vendors? If it is with the PMS, then they might restrict or make connecting to it expensive (it been done), but then some CRSs are starting to change crazy API rates too.
Food for thought.
• The Scott Brinker MarTech report – Link
• The Ben Evans Presentation – Link
• The Global Hotel Supply in 2025 – Link⁺
Did you know?: “Holiday” The word “holiday” comes from the Old English “hāligdæg,” which means “holy day.” Originally, it referred to religious festivals or special sacred days. Over time, the meaning widened to include any day of celebration, rest, or vacation, whether religious or not. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺⁺ Note, articles that are published by companies or people I work with are tagged with the ⁺ symbol or Partner word. I’m adding this as a transparency. Previously I avoiding sharing content from partners to remain objective, but sometimes they have excellent articles that deserves being shared so to remain transparent, I’ll tag them.
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