June 2, 2026

The Department of Tourism at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich has honoured Dr. Michael Toedt, founder and CEO of dailypoint™ , with the Lifetime Achievement Award. The honour is one of the most significant personal awards within the department and is presented exclusively to individuals who have had a lasting impact on the university division, the industry, and the education of future hoteliers. The award underlines the exceptional role Michael Toedt has played for many years in the hospitality industry and in the academic education of future leaders. Emphasis was placed on his many years of teaching, his continuous commitment to the academic institution, his outstanding reputation, and his role model function for aspiring leaders in the hotel industry. The award was presented during the annual Graduation Gala at the Leonardo Hotel in Munich in front of more than 300 guests. The honour has only been awarded twice before. Prior to Michael Toedt, recipients included Prof. Dr. Felix Kolbeck for his outstanding work as Dean during the coronavirus period, as well as the late Prof. Dr. Theo Eberhard, who had a significant influence on the Department of Tourism over several decades. Presenting the award to a lecturer represents a special form of recognition. The decision was made by the organizing team in close consultation with the Dean of Student Affairs. In addition to the excellent evaluations by current and former students, the decision was based on Toedt’s lasting contribution to the further development of the department and his exceptional impact as an entrepreneur, visionary, and industry personality. Michael Toedt exemplifies innovation, entrepreneurship, and the successful transfer of knowledge between academia and practice. Over many years, he has not only shaped students professionally but has also given them valuable insights into the reality and future of the international hospitality industry Dr. Burkhard von Freyberg, Professor of Hospitality Management, Department of Tourism at the University of Applied Sciences, Munich This award means a great deal to me. The Faculty of Tourism has shaped our industry over several decades, and many top managers have it as their alma mater. Working with students and fostering the exchange between practice and teaching have always been close to my heart – especially as I graduated from the university and the foundation for my career was laid here. Dr Michael Toedt, Founder and CEO of dailypoint Tourism and Hospitality have shaped Dr. Michael Toedt’s professional career from the very beginning: first leading his family’s hotel business, and later as he moved to the Customer Relationship System (CRS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sectors. In 2005, he founded Toedt, Dr. Selk & Coll GmbH, now recognized as dailypoint, with aim of applying software innovation and his data management expertise to the hospitality industry. He regularly shares insights through articles in international and online media. In addition to lecturing at the University of Applied in Munich on CRM and Hotel Technology, he also teaches in the NDS Management Program at the Hotellerie Suisse.

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Jean-Jacques Morin, Deputy CEO of Accor. Morin came to hospitality late and from a long way off. He trained as an aeronautical engineer and spent three decades in fact-driven worlds, audit, semiconductors and finance, including as CFO of Alstom, before joining Accor in 2015. The move, he admitted, was a culture shock, and it taught him something an engineer does not expect to learn: in this business, the human factor beats the numbers. The full conversation is available to watch below. From the checklist to the human factor For thirty years, Morin said, everything he did was decided by checklist, every scenario examined and every decision made on the numbers. Hospitality runs the other way. The human factor is prevalent, and if you decide by numbers alone you will get branding, and your relationships with customers and owners, badly wrong. He put it as a sequence. You first fall in love, he said, and only then do you analyse the nature of the love you have fallen into. The rational work still matters, but it comes second. He used the image of the brain's two sides, the analytical one he had trained for thirty years and the emotional one he now had to develop. Simone offered a line he put to Edgar Allan Poe, that you cannot be a poet without first being a mathematician, and the two landed on Lewis Carroll, the mathematician who wrote Alice in Wonderland. What surprised Morin most was the pace. Coming from technology, he expected hotels to move slowly, and instead found that the guest of today behaves nothing like the guest of a few years ago. Covid sharpened that. The old idea of a hotel as a bed and a shower is gone. Novotel, a brand he describes as having been half asleep, is now building a story around longevity. Orient Express has put a hotel on the sea with its sailing yacht, the Corinthian. Across roughly six thousand hotels, his read is that the business keeps expanding because people's appetite keeps expanding with it. 300,000 people under one banner Accor serves millions of guests across every segment, and Morin likes a number, so he reached for one. Around three hundred thousand people work under the Accor banner worldwide. Many of them are not direct employees, but they work with the brand and, to a guest, they represent it. Holding that together is a real problem, and Accor's answer was to spend two years building what it calls its purpose, from the bottom up rather than handing it down from the top. It came out of a year of surveys, interviews and group sessions, some fifty thousand surveys in all, until the company arrived at a shared statement about pioneering responsible hospitality and connecting cultures. The purpose is not just a sentence, Morin stressed. It sits behind training on service and on how things should be done. His blunt version of