Innovation

📱 Co-founders Zak Longo and Mayur Patil launched Travly, a travel platform, in 2022 aiming to revolutionize travel booking. Longo's European trip highlighted the reliance on social media for travel advice, especially among Gen Z. Travly merges user-generated content with bookings, offering transparency against "travel catfishing." With over 25 million followers and 1 billion monthly views, Travly's app and website feature "Dupes" for cost-effective booking. Since its OTA app launch, it has achieved 13,000 registrations and 500 video submissions. Hotels benefit from Travly’s 1000-influencer network, enhancing visibility and bookings. Through a partnership with Booking.com, Travly earns commissions, integrating monetization with user experience. A campaign with Omni Hotels & Resorts and Southwest Airlines generated nearly 7 million views and 500,000 likes.

🏨 Cloudbeds announced its ambition to create the first property management system (PMS) that unifies hotel operations on October 23 at the Passport User Conference. Cloudbeds Intelligence, a ‘smart hospitality engine’ leveraging causal and multimodal AI, aims to offer real-time insights and actionable recommendations, potentially increasing RevPAR by 15% and occupancy rates by 10%. CEO Adam Harris emphasizes the platform's ability to guide hoteliers in dynamic decision-making across revenue management, marketing, operations, and guest experience. Head of Machine Learning at Cloudbeds, Amit Popat, highlights the platform's advanced capabilities, including predicting marketing strategies to mitigate cancellations and personalizing guest experiences. Cloudbeds Intelligence will enable hotels to optimize rates, tailor marketing campaigns, and enhance guest satisfaction using comprehensive datasets.

📌 STR forecasts a 6 percent decline in U.S. hotels' real RevPAR for 2024 compared to 2019. Revenue management technology plays a crucial role in hotel budgeting, aiding in forecasting and strategic resource allocation. It enables "what-if" scenarios, testing business mix shifts and staffing needs, and informs decisions on rates and packages. Collaborative tech fosters a team-oriented approach, crucial for responding to market changes. Financial forecasting tools are essential for 2025 planning, influencing operations, staff scheduling, and profitability strategies, including potential property shutdowns for utility savings.

💻 Anthropic introduces upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and new Claude 3.5 Haiku, enhancing coding capabilities and offering computer use in public beta. Claude 3.5 Sonnet improves SWE-bench Verified coding performance from 33.4% to 49.0%, and TAU-bench performance in the retail domain from 62.6% to 69.2%, and in the airline domain from 36.0% to 46.0%. Claude 3.5 Haiku surpasses Claude 3 Opus, scoring 40.6% on SWE-bench Verified. The computer use feature enables Claude to perform complex tasks, with the public API now available on Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. Companies like Asana, Canva, and DoorDash are already utilizing these capabilities. Claude 3.5 Sonnet's API is available for all users, and Claude 3.5 Haiku will be released later this month.

🎧 Yobe, a voice technology provider, launched VIENNA for intelligent voice data capture and analysis, even in noisy environments. Utilizing AI and signal processing, VIENNA integrates seamlessly across healthcare, retail, transportation, and customer service sectors. It's deployable on the edge, hosted on servers, or via an API call. VIENNA distinguishes speech, captures emotional cues, and supports real-time customer sentiment analysis, driving business efficiency and innovation. Yobe has partnered with a major airline, demonstrating VIENNA's value in busy airport settings.

📣 Yobe announced the launch of their new product, VIENNA, a voice extraction solution designed to capture and analyze voice data in noisy environments. VIENNA builds on Yobe's AI technology, allowing integration with just raw voice input, and can be deployed on the edge, hosted on a server, or via an API call. It isolates speech, captures emotional cues, and provides insights for industries like healthcare, retail, and customer service. Yobe has already partnered with a major airline, proving VIenna's effectiveness in a busy airport. Ken Sutton, CEO, emphasizes VIENNA's potential for businesses to gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiment and drive growth.

🏆 HT awarded the 2024 MURTEC Breakthrough Awards to Dine Brands and Wingstop in the Enterprise Category, and Dave & Buster's with Teriyaki Madness in the Mid-Sized Restaurant Category. District Taco received an honorable mention. Innovations featured at MURTEC included IHOP's AI-powered food recommendation engine, Wingstop's custom e-commerce platform, and Dave & Buster's unified commerce platform. The award-winning restaurants will share their tech advancements on October 23 at the MURTEC Executive Summit and will be profiled on hospitalitytech.com.