Innovation

📈 Grand Metropolitan Hotels is ending its joint venture with Berlin's dentists’ pension fund, VZB, due to deadlock over financial decisions. The Smura Family Holding owns 70% of the venture, while VZB owns 30%. Failed negotiations included a blocked capital increase and rejected buyout offers. Grand Metropolitan will focus on hotel management, franchising, and digital solutions, proceeding with independent development. Legal advisers are handling the separation, and the group will not comment further on legal matters.

📱 Digital mobile ordering boosts hotel F&B operations by enhancing service efficiency and increasing revenue. Guests spend an average of 30% more per order with digital menus, accessing QR codes for seamless ordering anywhere in the hotel. This integrated system minimizes order errors, ensures menu accuracy, and offers multi-lingual options, improving guest satisfaction and loyalty. By reducing friction, hotels can better compete with third-party apps and maintain brand consistency across multiple properties.

"Cloudbeds became the epicentre of everything we built. It gave us the flexibility to design the guest journey exactly how we envisioned it." Nicole Sideris, Founder & CEO, X Hospitality The Blue Hotel Bondi is a non-traditional 33-room hotel located in the centre of Bondi Beach, surrounded by some of the best bars, restaurants, and cafes in Sydney. Long before contactless hospitality became the industry standard, its owners envisioned a fully digital, front desk-free guest journey. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when much of the industry was focused on short-term survival, they saw an opportunity to build something entirely different: a seamless, mobile-first hotel experience that removed friction from every stage of the guest journey. To bring that vision to life, they partnered with X Hospitality, challenging the hospitality management company to create a truly digital-first guest experience from the ground up. “There wasn’t really a roadmap for what we wanted to achieve,” explains X Hospitality Founder & CEO Nicole Sideris. “We had to reverse engineer the entire guest journey.” Rather than adapting traditional hotel operations to digital tools, X Hospitality started with the ideal guest experience and worked backwards — mapping every touchpoint, identifying every potential pain point, and designing technology around the guest instead of the other way around. Built to bend, not break Having previously worked with legacy PMS platforms, the X Hospitality team understood their strengths — but also their limitations. “They were robust systems,” Nicole explains. “But they weren’t built for the kind of digital operation we wanted to create.” More than simply another PMS , they needed a platform flexible enough to become the operational foundation of an entirely new hospitality model. Cloudbeds stood out immediately. I found Cloudbeds to be a light, easy-to-navigate system that wasn't overly layered. The direct integrations were important, but what really mattered was the Open API. That allowed us to engineer our own guest and operational journey. – Nicole Sideris Instead of forcing their vision to fit existing software, the Cloudbeds API gave them the flexibility to build the exact experience they imagined. The shortest distance between booking and beach Every step of The Blue Hotel’s guest experience was carefully engineered. The team mapped dozens of booking scenarios, from OTA reservations and travel agents to international guests, and designed communication flows that felt personal rather than automated. Guests receive carefully timed SMS and WhatsApp messages that guide them through a simple four-step pre-arrival journey: Upload identification Complete payment pre-authorisation Confirm estimated arrival time Accept terms and conditions Rather than requiring guests to download an app or navigate a complicated portal, everything happens through familiar messaging channels with secure links when needed. “The foundations are still the same today,” explains Nicole. “The goal was never to bombard guests with messages. It was to make everything feel simple.” As Cloudbeds evolved, X Hospitality transitioned from its own internally developed messaging platform to Cloudbeds Guest Experience and its Unified Inbox, allowing them to simplify operations even further while maintaining

This post was originally published on this site. AI search for hotels is changing how travellers discover, compare and choose where to stay. Gone are the days when travellers simply…

BARCELONA, Spain – Shiji, the global leader in hospitality technology, has announced the release of its Q2 2026 Guest Experience Benchmark , revealing continued progress in global guest satisfaction alongside meaningful improvements in review response performance and guest engagement. Drawing on millions of guest reviews and survey interactions from hotels worldwide, the report highlights how hospitality operators are successfully balancing growing guest expectations with ongoing operational challenges. The Q2 2026 findings show that global guest satisfaction remained resilient, supported by stronger review management practices, improving response times, and greater engagement across major review platforms. Hotels across multiple regions and market segments recorded positive performance trends, demonstrating the industry's continued focus on delivering consistent guest experiences. Key global findings from Q2 2026 Global Guest Review Index (GRI) reached 87.3% , an increase of 0.4 percentage points compared to Q2 2025 Global management response rates reached 67.2% Hotels reduced average response times to 3.7 days Global Net Promoter Score (NPS) reached 56.9 points Asia remained the highest-performing region with a GRI of 90.2% Global r eview volume declined 3.2% compared to Q2 2025, while satisfaction continued to improve Booking.com and Google generated more than 62% of global review volume , reinforcing their importance in reputation management strategies The benchmark also highlights the growing importance of reputation management as a competitive advantage. Hotels that maintain timely responses to guest feedback and actively engage with online reviews continue to outperform peers in overall satisfaction metrics. At the same time, shifts in review source share indicate that travelers are diversifying where they leave feedback, making multi-channel reputation management increasingly important. Today's guest journey is shaped by far more than the stay itself. Guests are sharing feedback across more channels and expecting faster, more personalized engagement from hotels. The Q2 2026 benchmark demonstrates that the industry is continuing to adapt, with many hotels improving both satisfaction scores and review management performance despite ongoing operational pressures. Jessica Kurtz, Director, Pre-Sales & Global Enablement for Reviewpro Reputation at Shiji The report also explores the relationship between guest sentiment, survey engagement, and review response performance. Hotels that consistently engage with guest feedback and monitor satisfaction trends across channels are better positioned to identify operational issues early and strengthen long-term loyalty. Beyond the global overview, the Q2 2026 Guest Experience Benchmark provides detailed analysis across Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Oceania, allowing hoteliers to compare performance across regions, hotel segments, review sources, and guest experience categories. The report serves as a practical benchmarking resource for hotel operators seeking to understand changing guest expectations, evaluate competitive performance, and prioritize the operational improvements that have the greatest impact on guest satisfaction. Download the full Q2 2026 Guest Experience Benchmark Report here.

Add the property, load the rates, wait for the bookings. Connectivity, for most of its life, was that simple — the neutral infrastructure that kept a hotel's rates and availability in sync across the channels it sold on. Plumbing. You noticed it when it broke. That definition closed in a single week in June. On the 22nd, two of the largest forces in hotel distribution — Expedia Group and RateHawk — published research recasting connectivity as something else entirely : the qualifying condition for an operating layer they intend to run. Not a place a hotel lists. The system it operates inside. What changed in one week Both moves landed on the same day, and both arrived wrapped in commissioned research — worth naming before anything else, because the framing is the companies' own. Expedia Group, with Censuswide, surveyed 1,500 hotel decision makers across six markets and drew a hard line between "basic" and "full" connectivity. Its conclusion, in its own words: connectivity is no longer just how hotels connect to channels, it is how they compete. Then it named where it is taking that idea — autonomous distribution. RateHawk, the B2B platform of Emerging Travel Group, paired with Phocuswright for a ten-trend report placed as sponsored content on PhocusWire that same week. Among the ten, one carried direct weight for hotels: agentic systems need supply consolidated into standardized, machine-readable formats before they can act on it. Machine-readability as the precondition for being booked at all. Two companies, two framings, one structural claim underneath: the hotel that wants to compete in what comes next has to connect deeper — and the deeper connection runs through them. From sync to operating layer Read Expedia's language and the shift sits in plain view. Connectivity is "a capability curve," not a checkbox. It is "becoming a growth decision, not just a technology decision." And the destination carries a tell: autonomous distribution, which Expedia describes as a software-driven way for properties to onboard, manage, and optimize their Expedia Group distribution. Their Expedia Group distribution. Three phases — onboarding, management, optimization — that together describe a hotel's commercial operation moving, piece by piece, into the platform's software. Onboarding comes first, framed as API capabilities to go live faster. Then the larger vision, again in Expedia's words: an operating model where hotels manage inventory, run day-to-day operations, and optimize performance directly through their software. The breadth is the point. The report counts rates, availability, length-of-stay restrictions, promotions, reservation changes, and reconciliation among the work that deepening connectivity pulls into software — and notes the runway still ahead. Even among fully connected properties, only half have their OTA tasks fully or mostly automated; among unconnected ones, 74% still do that work partly or entirely by hand (Expedia's figures, from its commissioned study). The phases are a map of how much of the hotel's commercial routine is still available to absorb. That is not plumbing. Plumbing carries water and stays out of the way. This is the channel

There is a question I get asked more than almost any other right now, whether at an industry conference, in conversation with an ownership group, or across the table from my own executive team: Will AI replace the hospitality professional? My answer is the same every time. No. But it will redefine what exceptional hospitality professionals do — and how they spend their time doing it. I have spent more than two decades in luxury and lifestyle hotel management, from Arizona Biltmore to Conrad Miami and Fort Lauderdale to Waldorf Astoria Las Vegas and now my current role overseeing both Conrad New York Downtown and Tempo by Hilton Times Square. In that time, I have watched our industry absorb wave after wave of technological change — online booking, mobile check-in, keyless entry, connected rooms. Each one prompted the same anxiety. Each one ultimately made us better at what we do. AI is no different in kind. It is, however, different in scale. This article is not a technology primer. It is a hotelier’s perspective on what artificial intelligence is actually doing in our hotels today, where it is creating real value for guests, and why the leaders who will benefit most are those who understand AI not as a replacement for human judgment but as an amplifier of it. AI as an Amplifier, Not a Substitute The philosophical foundation is simple: hospitality is emotional, contextual, and human. The moments that define a guest’s stay — a warm recognition at check-in, a recovery conversation handled with grace, a small gesture that arrives at exactly the right moment — require empathy, judgment, and authenticity that no algorithm can replicate. AI does not change this. What it changes is how much time and mental bandwidth our team members have to deliver those moments. When AI is absorbing repetitive administrative tasks — answering FAQs, analyzing patterns in operational data, drafting first-pass responses, forecasting demand — it is giving our people back the capacity to do the work that only humans can do. That is the frame I bring to every AI conversation with my teams: this is not about doing more with less. It is about doing what matters most, more consistently and more intentionally. The General Manager’s role in this equation is also evolving. We are increasingly responsible for setting the guardrails — defining where AI belongs, where it should support human decision-making rather than replace it, and where the human must always lead. That is a leadership challenge as much as a technology challenge, and it requires clarity of values before clarity of process. Curated Discovery: Meeting The Guest Before They Arrive The guest experience does not begin at check-in. It begins at the moment of inspiration — when someone starts imagining a trip, comparing options, and trying to figure out which property is right for them. For decades, that discovery journey was a friction-filled exercise of tabs, filters, and reviews. AI is fundamentally rewriting that experience. Earlier this year, Hilton launched

💻 July 10, 2026, Lodi, Italy: Zucchetti, a major player in management systems, has acquired a controlling interest in Grupo Hive to boost its global hospitality technology platform. Grupo Hive’s brands, including Infotera, HSystem, Bee2Pay, Niara, and Omnibees, enhance Zucchetti's offerings in hotel technology and distribution. This strategic move marks a significant expansion for Zucchetti into the hospitality sector's tech landscape.

📈 Jul 15, 2026, Koddi launched Occupancy Insights to optimize hotel campaigns on platforms like Google and Expedia. Koddi argues traditional bid automation favors already-popular properties, pushing budgets towards these winners. The feature lets hotels adjust bids based on occupancy and other metrics to avoid overspending on high-demand dates. Koddi provides no evidence for their claim, urging hoteliers to analyze their data for effective spending rather than relying solely on automated systems.

AI is scaling content, automating outreach, and flooding every digital channel with noise. What it can't do is put someone in a room. That scarcity is the opportunity. Read this article from Cvent CEO, Reggie Agarwal, on our take on why in-person presence is becoming the highest-trust signal in modern marketing, and what it means for the future of your event strategy. https://www.cvent.com/en/blog/events/presence-premium