The most controversial news of the week went almost entirely unnoticed, covered under a plethora of COVID-19 articles: Donald Trump issued an order to block the sale of the cloud-based suite of hotel management solutions, StayNTouch, to Chinese Goliath, Shiji, on the ground of “national security.”
Still on Oracle. Moving to the cloud made the company extremely agile. The downside is that Oracle today needs a fraction of the human workforce it used to, so it is planning to cut 1,300 jobs in Europe, mainly in the Dublin, Amsterdam, and Malaga offices, in order “to adapt the spending of the company to the revenue situation.”
In 2019, Expedia Group and Booking Holdings spent over $11B on marketing. Even though today is more a competitor than a partner, most of this budget went straight to Google. According to eMarketer, travel ads accounted for about 10.9% of total search ad spend in 2019 on Google, generating $10.7B out of the $98B total search-related Alphabet revenue.
Tech.
According to the AI-fueled advertising platform, AdsHotel, campaigns for Italian hotels showed a decrease of about 60% in clicks. UK, Spain, and Germany are decreasing approx 20%, while no significant reduction in clicks is registered on the US domestic market. Interestingly, conversion even increased.
ReviewPro launched Guest Experience Automation™, an “AI-powered solution for hotels that seamlessly provides the correct information to improve the guest experience while reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
“I was the first knowledge worker whose job was threatened by a machine,” said chess GrandMaster, and personal hero of mine, Garry Kasparov. 23 years after he was defeated by IBM’s Deep(er) Blue, Kasparov came back to New York to discuss AI with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Meliá Hotels International is pioneering the adoption of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) technology n the hospitality industry, automatizing most repetitive processes that, so far, had to be performed manually by humans. The company is implementing RPA in several areas, from Credit and Insurance to HR.
Amazon opened Amazon Go Grocery, its first cashier-less grocery store. The grocery industry is worth $800B, so it’s a very interesting one for Bezos. How does it work? You enter the store by scanning your app, then cameras and sensors record what you take from the shelves. When you leave, you’re charged on your Amazon account.
Hotel.
“The ability of hotel companies to remove (or at least reduce) the transactional friction from the guest experience relies in large part on the capacity to make payments as “invisible” as possible,” wrote James Montague, Shiji Group, on an interesting piece on payments accessible here.
ITB launched its virtual convention platform. You can access the on-demand videos here, or watch my session here below:
Welcome to Digital., your weekly recap of the best travel news of the week: day in, day out. Everything you need to know about hotel distribution, digital economy, travel, tourism, hospitality, startups, market stocks, reports, staff movements, industry events, innovation, and more. Hosted by best-selling author, journalist, futurist, founder of Travel Singularity, toy collector and retired punk rocker, Simone Puorto.