Innovation

💸 Verified My Booking Rewards agents will access MyAgentRates.com in early 2026, an exclusive B2B platform for FAM trips at discounted rates. Targeting UK and Ireland agents, it extends MyBookingRewards.com, connecting 150,000 agents with suppliers. Preferred partners include Royalton Hotels & Resorts and Temptation Resorts. The platform offers API connectivity for real-time bookings. In the past year, MBR generated $1.3 billion in supplier revenue and awarded $4 million in agent rewards.

🗺 Nov 21, 2025: Booking.com launches its largest-ever Black Friday promotion, offering discounts across six categories: accommodations, flights, car rentals, attractions, airport transfers, and cruises. With travel costs expected to rise in 2026, the campaign provides flexible options like free cancellation and book now, pay later. Emphasizing restorative travel, especially among Gen Z, and leveraging AI tools, the deals encourage early planning for trips through December 2026.

📸 Hotel websites leverage hero images on their homepage as the most-clicked call-to-action element, crucial for promotional messaging. Tambourine's native personalization tools enable dynamic content changes, such as tailored offers based on visitor intent. For example, low-intent visitors from a Facebook ad might see a “Stay Two Nights, Get One Free” package, while high-intent visitors might skip promotions. Personalization enhances the hero's impact, making it a targeted ad placement.

📰 November 20, 2025, Barcelona, Spain - Palacio Arriluce Hotel in Getxo near Bilbao adopts Shiji’s Daylight PMS for improved operations and guest experiences. Part of The Leading Hotels of the World, this luxury hotel embraces a cloud-based system to boost efficiency. Shiji, with over 5,000 employees and services to 91,000 hotels, delivers innovative hospitality technology globally. Palacio Arriluce, a historical palace since 1912, combines timeless elegance with cutting-edge solutions.

💻 HSMAI Foundation's report reveals that generative AI is revolutionizing executive hiring in hospitality. AI accelerates the search process by reducing workloads by 60–80% and cutting time-to-hire by up to 86%. It enhances insights, with 51% of organizations using AI for recruitment. Executive roles now demand analytics fluency, with 30–40% emphasizing this skill. AI identifies talent from diverse sectors like SaaS and retail, creating broader candidate pools. The report, supported by 2025 Corporate Talent Partners, is available at HSMAI's site.

🚀 Google introduced Agentic AI for travel, offering a seamless booking experience while sparking discussions about AI's impact on OTAs and marketing. The September 2025 update by Seer Interactive revealed that Google's AI Overviews can cause CTRs to drop over 60%, although being cited inside boosts clicks significantly. Hotel lobbies are evolving into retail spaces, and a major Cloudflare outage exposed internet centralization issues. Meanwhile, Mandarin Oriental emphasizes human touch over technology in luxury hospitality.