157 - OTAs Getting Disrupted at Google I/O?
Google aggregating OTAs? Airbnb has a chance? How ChatGPT ads work. AI features in PMS start releasing. And more.
Hello,
While I think a lot of AI updates in hotel operations will be incremental and not revolutionary, the opposite is true for hotel distribution. How fast will it happen, I can’t tell but there’s no doubt it will happen. But no spoilers - you’ll have to read that below.
Best, Martin
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Airbnb Moves Beyond Stays
Airbnb’s Summer 2026 release seems designed to push the company beyond accommodation into a broader travel-services layer. Car rentals and grocery delivery experiences. Airbnb is slowly turning the trip into a platform, not just the stay. See my column below.
AIRBNB SERVICES
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry. ChatGPT Ads Manager Walkthrough
There has been a lot of noise around ChatGPT ads, but practical walkthroughs are more useful than speculation. The interesting thing is not just whether ads appear in AI conversations, but how advertisers will understand intent inside a conversational interface. Search advertising was built around keywords; AI advertising may be built around context. That could be powerful, but also very easy to overdo.
AI ADVERTISING
Positioning in the Age of AI
April Dunford’s article is excellent advice for B2B tech companies. Positioning needs to move when customer behavior, competition, or technology changes enough that the old story no longer works. The danger is overreacting to every trend and rewriting the narrative too often. The better approach is to ask whether AI changes the buyer’s problem, the alternatives, or the value of your solution. But read the whole thing.
AI POSITIONING
AI in your PMS
Three of the main PMS vendors have announced AI functionality. Lots of incremental updates. Does it change everything? no. But these updates compound and with AI coding they will be coming faster and faster. The key problem all of this is encountering? Messy data. Which explains why many of the PMS are becoming broader solutions. The Operating System monicker or the Platform label or whichever name we use. The fact is that data is a real problem if we want to make these changes iterate faster.
CLOUDBEDS MEWS SHIJI⁺
Robots in Hotel Operations
Apparently some hotels are adopting robots in housekeeping to clean hallways after hours. I’ve seen this in Danish hospitals and airports. But hotels are still quite a long way from any meaningful robot work in housekeeping. With room configurations being different everywhere. Robots changing bedsheets is probably harder than catching cables. When it works, it will be amazing. But I’m not holding my breath.
ROBOTICS OPERATIONS
OTA “Loyalty” Programs Compared
OTA rewards are becoming more important because they influence where guests start their booking journey. Booking Genius, Expedia One Key, Trip Membership, MMTBLACK, and Airbnb all approach the problem differently. But the end goal is the same, convince people to stick with a platform. They haven’t gotten to the status systems yet. Maybe that would be the hack: add a membership fee to level up?
OTA LOYALTY
Designs and Luxury and hotels
Apparently design-led lifestyle luxury is moving away from opulence and toward cultural identity. I think a lot of people are trying to figure out “the new luxury”. Some things will change, the bar keeps rising. What was luxury before is normal now. 20 years ago, nobody would have paid $1200 for a phone, today millions do. Before we had one set of furniture for most of our lives, now we replace most of it with every move. The bar goes up but the need for luxury will not change.
HOTEL DESIGN
Stuffing Ads Inside AI Conversations
Ads appearing inside ChatGPT conversations raises the big tension of AI monetization. Google seems to be testing some ideas too. Unfortunately we’ll need to live with this idea. But how will it not become spam, I’m not sure.
CHATGPT GOOGLE GEMINI SPAM
Opinion
Google I/O, it changes OTA positions
Some of my takeaways from Google I/Os announcements last week. It is totally clear that travel search and inspiration is going to completely change in coming years. I can’t imagine a world where this doesn’t totally shift. And OTAs are going to be challenged in the process.
The biggest change I think is that travel research starts becoming assembled. What I mean is: inspiration, comparison, itinerary planning, reminders, (possibly even booking), travel delays and small decisions all start getting pulled into one flow.
Agents can research a full itinerary for a 5 day trip with the family in London. And it can be iterated on. Or it can propose 5 totally different itineraries and the family votes on one. Currently it will be full of errors (I tried a few times) but soon it wont. And in any case, the main structure of the travel plan is now settled, i.e. discovery is done.
Next the family organizer or the tech savvy kid can generate a small apps or widgets around that trip. A family itinerary that keeps track of flights, delays, weather, bookings, activities and changes in one place. High-end travel organizers do this already, and as with most technological innovation, it democratizes luxury lifestyle.
The universal shopping cart has a huge potential. Could it finally solve complete itinerary booking? I’m optimistic, but I also know this is a much harder problem to solve than online retail. Putting a hotel, flight, activity and spa treatment into one cart would be amazing but I realize it is also one of those problems where the last ten percent is actually ninety percent of the work.
Still, the direction is important. If the browser, Google account and AI assistant become the place where the itinerary inspiration and planning lives, which seems inevitable, then it changes how discovery happens completely. When I wrote about OTAs becoming the plumbing that was what I meant.
Yes, Expedia has flights, hotels, cars and they have lots of experience in this space. Probably more than any other major OTA. If they can build their own agent, adding activities they would have a pretty solid system.
Booking has a lot of the data, but fragmented in multiple areas, Kayak, RentalCars, and a lot of it is just meta-search which is painful to manage all the way to booking. They can build and scale as they’ve proven when their decided to take on Airbnb and build their own appartment rentals.
Speaking of Airbnb, they might have the strongest play in actually building the system they’ve clearly seen the problem with AI bookings and they know how to create great user experiences. But they don’t have near as much data as Expedia and Booking, and they’ve never shown a huge ability to API and partner with other industries, though they seem to be working on that.
None of this is settled yet. But in my view there’s no way that search continues to be what it currently is. Some have argued that there’s nothing wrong with Flight search today, so why use AI search. I guess the same could have been said 30 years ago when we could just call a travel agent.
• Filipines and the LinkedIn “thought leaders” - Link
• The Guide Competitors Hope You Miss - Link⁺
• Why St Tropez still works - Link
• “The Age of Average Design” iF Design Trends - Link
• Why America Has So Many Thai Restaurants - Link
Did you know: The word "loyalty" comes from the Old French word "loiauté," meaning faithfulness or fidelity. It developed from Latin "legalitas," from "lex," meaning law, so originally it implied being faithful to the law or to a lord. Over time, the meaning expanded to devotion and faithfulness in personal, social, and business relationships. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺