Innovation

🏨 Das Aunhamer Suite & Spa in Bad Griesbach im Rottal, Bavaria, Germany, recovered its Canary Technologies platform costs within three weeks through guest upsells. Mobile Check-In lets guests register before arrival, reducing lobby paperwork, while customized AI Guest Messaging answers routine questions in 100+ languages. Dynamic Upsells promotes upgrades, spa services and bike rentals. Canary serves over 20,000 hotels across 125+ countries.

The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) announced the addition of 10 new companies to its Premier Partner program, which offers opportunities for hospitality industry suppliers and service providers to engage with AHLA members in areas of common interest. The latest additions include Silver Partners ADP, Docyt, Hot Shoppe Services International, Pinnacle Live, Uberall, and Walmart Business, and Associate Partners ConnexPay, Nowsta, Source, and US Foods. AHLA Premier Partners play a key role in advancing […] The post AHLA Adds 10 Companies to Its Premier Partner Program appeared first on LODGING Magazine.

Our market scanning and industry conversations reveal 25 promising robotics companies across five airport ground-operations categories. Der Beitrag The 25 hottest robotics companies in ground operations erschien zuerst auf TNMT.

📞 SuitePad GmbH has launched its Phone Dock worldwide, combining a guest tablet, charging dock and independent handset in one unit. Available in analog and IP versions, it works with existing hotel phone systems, reducing bedside clutter while retaining voice access to reception. Units are already shipping after months of development and customer feedback. SuitePad serves more than 800 hotels across 32 countries and won its seventh consecutive “Best Guest Room Tablet” HotelTechAward in January 2026.

✈ Expedia Group’s Fall 2026 release introduces 30+ updates across Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo, including AI itinerary planning, hotel comparisons and natural-language search. Vrbo will soon offer eligible rentals with $0 due at booking. Expedia Gold and Platinum members plus up to nine companions can receive lounge access for eligible flight delays of 90+ minutes, covering qualifying bookings through December 31, 2027. Several AI tools are available on U.S. websites and apps.

🤖 ChatGPT Plugins launched almost 3 years ago and are now discontinued. The author questions ChatGPT Apps’ value for travel booking through Booking.com, Expedia and Trip, arguing AI should work across distribution channels. GPTs are praised for internal use and context management. Skills, currently associated mainly with Claude Code, use reusable text documents to guide agents through tasks, tools and booking preferences—such as checking Kayak, Google Flights and airline websites.

🛒 Vlad’s Widgets, a hypothetical retailer with $100 million in revenue, $20 million in online sales and 30% margins, illustrates agentic shopping’s potential impact. Losing 10% of online sales, shifting 25% of remaining online sales to agents and cutting those sales’ margins by 10 percentage points would leave approximately $98 million in revenue and a 29.5% margin. Profit falls from $30 million to roughly $29 million—a setback, but not an existential threat.

🔍 OpenAI sampled 1 million ChatGPT messages monthly from July 2024 to September 2026. Information-seeking rose from 17% to 20% globally and 16% to 23% in the UK, while writing fell from 34% to 21%. Personal use accounts for 65% of messages, work 21%, and study 14%. Users aged 18–24 dropped from 39% to 31% of messages. Ahrefs estimates ChatGPT’s search volume at 12% of Google’s, sending 190 times less website traffic.