Spain’s hospitality sector is getting its first real-world taste of Europe’s digital identity future. The industry response so far is a mix of optimism and operational caution, with a few growing pains.
Since April 2, hotels and other businesses in Spain are legally required to accept the country’s new MiDNI mobile identity app as a valid form of identification. It is part of the a broader move toward digital identity under Europe’s evolvingElectronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) 2.0 framework.
The rollout effectively makes Spain one of the first major live test cases for how digital identity could work in day-to-day hospitality operations. It comes ahead of the wider European Union Digital Identity Wallet rollout planned across the European Union by the end of 2026.
For Spain’s hoteliers, the transition to digital identity is reshaping guest registration, check-in operations and compliance, though adoption remains uneven and some are still proceeding cautiously.
The hospitality industry is rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI), yet hotels differ in, how they perceive its impact. This study examines whether these perceptions are, shaped more by structural resources or by managerial cognition. Survey data from 747, hotel managers across five European countries are used to analyze the effects of hotel, size, staff size, business evaluation scope, and cognitive flexibility. Business evaluation, scope reflects the breadth of performance indicators monitored, while cognitive, flexibility captures managers adaptive thinking. Results show that staff size, business, evaluation scope, and cognitive flexibility are positively associated with perceived AI, impact, whereas hotel size measured by number of rooms is not. The findings suggest, that managerial cognition plays a more important role than physical scale in shaping AI, awareness. This study advances hospitality digital transformation research by, highlighting cognitive readiness as a key driver of AI adoption.
As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes travel discovery and booking, the industry is learning to market to a new audience: AI agents.
Business-to-agent (B2A) marketing is becoming essential as companies adapt to a landscape undergoing tectonic shifts.
With Phocuswright research showing that travelers are increasingly willing to book with AI, marketers need to confront a changing trajectory—and determine how to show up in an AI-driven world.
“If we want to give great travelers wonderful experiences, then we need to make sure that these tools are guiding travelers to the right options,” Clayton Nelson, VP of enterprise alliances and AI for Expedia Group, said while moderating a panel titled “AI in Marketing: From Social Spark to Agentic Decision” at Expedia Group’s partner conference Explore.
“Do agents make the same decisions as humans? Do they care about price in the same way? Amenities in the same way? Do agents care about loyalty? Do agents care about the brands—things that we have invested decades in?”
Google hat auf seiner Entwicklerkonferenz Google I/O 2026 den weiteren Ausbau KI-gestützter Such- und Buchungsfunktionen angekündigt. Nach Angaben des Unternehmens sollen neue agentenbasierte Funktionen künftig direkt in die Suche integriert werden. Technologische Grundlage ist unter anderem das Modell Gemini 3.5 Flash, das laut Google künftig als Standardmodell im sogenannten „AI Mode“ eingesetzt wird. Marketing- und Digitalexperte Sven Häberlin (Tourismus-Consult) kennt die Hintergründe – und gibt Tipps.
La nouvelle étude de distribution d’HotellerieSuisse et de la HES-SO Valais-Wallis montre que la distribution hôtelière numérique en Suisse continue d’évoluer de manière dynamique, tout en restant fortement dépendante des plateformes de réservation en ligne (OTAs).
"Brand recognition, a cognitive shortcut for human buying decisions, means nothing to AI agents that can reason through every option every time. That's shifting travel's entire marketing apparatus.
Expedia Group is building a dedicated marketing function aimed not at travelers or business clients, but at AI agents — an emerging strategy often referred to as B2A, or business to agent.
The logic is simple: People use brand recognition or loyalty to streamline purchase decisions. AI agents don’t need shortcuts. They reason through every option, and the competitive edge shifts from name familiarity to whether an agent can find and evaluate what makes a property, route, or package different.
"Agents are becoming a new audience, in addition to businesses and consumers," Expedia Chief Marketing Officer Jochen Koedijk said at an Expedia Explore panel in Las Vegas this week. "This is not a transition from consumer to agent, but it's in parallel.""
This is another important signal that the traditional travel funnel is rapidly disappearing. For years, travel followed a relatively linear logic: inspiration → search → comparison → booking
Today, inspiration, discovery and transaction increasingly happen in the same digital environment — whether through AI assistants, social media platforms or integrated ecosystems.
For hospitality, this raises major strategic questions:
Who controls visibility and customer relationships?
How dependent do suppliers become on intermediary ecosystems?
And how should hotels adapt their content, distribution and partnership strategies for these new “social commerce” environments?
TikTok is no longer just a marketing channel. It is progressively becoming a transactional travel interface.
Google has officially published its dedicated “UCP for Lodging” page — and one message is particularly important for hospitality:
- Google does not want to become the Merchant of Record for hotel bookings.
Instead, its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) aims to enable AI-driven hotel bookings directly within Google AI environments, while hotels keep control over transactions, customer data and post-booking relationships.
This could fundamentally reshape digital distribution.
AI agents may soon be able to:
search real-time hotel availability,
compare rates and policies,
and complete bookings seamlessly within AI conversations.
For hotels, this creates both opportunities and challenges: lower booking friction and potentially stronger direct bookings — but also a growing need for structured data, interoperable APIs and AI-ready commerce infrastructures.
The key question is no longer only: -> “Who ranks first on Google?”
But increasingly: -> “Which hotel can be best understood and transacted by AI agents?”
The hospitality industry is clearly entering the era of agentic commerce.
Google I/O 2026 confirms a major shift in digital distribution: search is becoming increasingly AI-driven, conversational and personalized. Platforms like Google are integrating AI agents directly into search, shopping and booking processes, allowing users to receive recommendations, compare products and complete transactions without leaving the platform.
For the travel industry, this means that visibility will depend less on traditional SEO and more on being “AI- and agent-discoverable.” Travel brands and hotels will need structured, real-time and machine-readable data to remain visible in these new recommendation ecosystems. The traditional booking funnel is increasingly collapsing into a seamless, AI-mediated journey where inspiration, search and booking merge into one integrated experience.
Google vient de publier un guide officiel dédié à l'optimisation pour ses fonctionnalités de recherche IA, comme les AI Overviews et l'AI Mode. Voici ce qu'il faut retenir.
"Google has been building toward agentic hotel booking in plain sight. Now it's said so out loud.
Google on Tuesday named hotel booking as the next vertical for its Universal Commerce Protocol, publicly committing to extending its agentic commerce infrastructure to travel.
The announcement came via a blog post by Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager of ads and commerce, alongside a wave of shopping updates at the company's annual I/O developer conference.
UCP, the system that lets AI agents handle purchases inside Google's search and chat interfaces, is expanding "to even more verticals, starting soon with hotel booking and local food delivery," "
KI spielt im Gastgewerbe keine Nebenrolle mehr. Eine neue Studie von Mews zeigt, dass 98 % der Hoteliers KI in den letzten sechs Monaten in ihren Betriebsabläufen eingesetzt haben. Im Schnitt ist sie an 11 der 19 häufigsten Aufgaben im Hotel beteiligt und übernimmt dabei mehr als die Hälfte des Arbeitsaufwandes. Die Akzeptanz erstreckt sich auf die Bereiche Empfang, Wirtschaft, Speisen und Getränke (F&B) und Führung, wobei sie in gehobenen und luxuriösen Unterkünften am höchsten ist.
Trotz dieser weit verbreiteten Akzeptanz sind 59 % der Hoteliers der Meinung, dass die Begrüßung an der Rezeption und der Check-in weiterhin von Menschen durchgeführt werden sollten. Das gilt vor allem für Unterkünfte, die KI bereits ausgiebig nutzen, was darauf hindeutet, dass praktische Erfahrungen mit KI das Gespür der Hoteliers dafür schärfen, wo die menschliche Note unersetzlich ist.
Viele Schweizer Hotels wissen kaum, wie Buchungsplattformen ihre Sichtbarkeit steuern. Die aktuelle Studie von HotellerieSuisse und der HES-SO Valais-Wallis zeigt, wie intransparent und komplex der digitale Hotelvertrieb geworden ist.
AI systems tend to prioritize visibility, scale, and formally sanctioned content; patterns that favor professionally marketed, highly reviewed, and digitally optimized experiences. Thus AI often recommends bucket-list attractions, standardized offerings, and businesses that already benefit from strong platform visibility and tourist traffic.
This protocol directs AI to prioritize locally-grounded and less prominent enterprises that are often closer to the authentic culture and everyday life of a place. We developed this protocol so that discerning travelers can use AI tools to plan more distinctive, meaningful and locally beneficial trips.
"Ten years after Hilton, Marriott, and other chains began coaxing travelers to book directly, online travel agencies still control roughly the same slice of the pie. Yet the chains have won the economics: lower commissions, better contract terms, and stronger loyalty programs.
Mark Vondrasek, Hyatt's chief commercial officer, had half his stock-based award riding on one number: the share of bookings flowing through Hyatt's own site and app. Between 2023 and 2025, he missed the target. He didn't get that part of the payout. The incentive captured how much a decade of fighting online travel agencies still consumes the major hotel groups.
It’s been 10 years since Hilton launched the "Stop Clicking Around" ad campaign. It spent nearly $100 million, and ads appeared in 18 countries. Staff wrapped elevators and key cards with a message for guests: book directly.
Each OTA booking carries a commission, dollars that come straight off operating margins. Guests who book directly with hotels are cheaper to acquire, hand over the data that fuels personalization, and tend to spend more over their lifetimes."
Any organisation running AI in any serious way is doing so across three groups with different relationships to the work.
The board oversees and carries fiduciary accountability. Its instinct runs toward caution, because the exposure of getting it wrong is high and the cost of moving slightly later is usually tolerable from where the board sits.
The company runs the operating model. Its instinct runs toward movement, because the cost of not adapting is felt in margin, capability and competitive position, week by week. This is also where AI lands in people's actual work, reshaping roles, judgement and how teams are structured, long before any of that reaches a register. Standing still has a price the board does not pay directly.
External entities enforce compliance (regulators, auditors, standards bodies, large customers) against frames that are themselves shifting. Their instinct runs toward demonstrability. They care less about whether the organisation is moving at the right pace than whether it can evidence what it has done.
Google verändert nicht einfach nur die Suche. Der Konzern baut gerade die Infrastruktur für die vollständige Kontrolle über digitale Reiseentscheidungen. Hotels, Destinationen und Reiseanbieter stehen vor einer tektonischen Machtverschiebung.
Spain’s hospitality sector is getting its first real-world taste of Europe’s digital identity future. The industry response so far is a mix of optimism and operational caution, with a few growing pains.
Since April 2, hotels and other businesses in Spain are legally required to accept the country’s new MiDNI mobile identity app as a valid form of identification. It is part of the a broader move toward digital identity under Europe’s evolvingElectronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) 2.0 framework.
The rollout effectively makes Spain one of the first major live test cases for how digital identity could work in day-to-day hospitality operations. It comes ahead of the wider European Union Digital Identity Wallet rollout planned across the European Union by the end of 2026.
For Spain’s hoteliers, the transition to digital identity is reshaping guest registration, check-in operations and compliance, though adoption remains uneven and some are still proceeding cautiously.
A new study from the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research based on 1,029 U.S. travelers shows that AI usage in travel planning varies significantly across spending segments.
One particularly interesting insight: - travelers are comfortable using AI for discovery tasks (activities, attractions, factual information), - but much more hesitant when it comes to complex, subjective or high-stakes decisions.
The study identifies very different AI expectations depending on traveler profiles:
Budget travelers use AI mainly to identify value and compare prices,
Premium travelers see AI as a discovery and optimization tool,
Aspirational travelers look for curated and personalized recommendations,
Luxury travelers still value human advisors for final decision-making.
Another key takeaway: - more than 60% of respondents cite accuracy concerns as the main barrier to broader AI adoption in travel planning. Transparency and overly generic recommendations are also major issues.
For hospitality and destinations, this is important: - the future of AI in tourism may not be about replacing human interaction, but about designing hybrid systems adapted to - different traveler expectations, trust levels and spending behaviors.
The era of the “one AI assistant for everyone” may already be over.
With its 2026 Summer Release, Airbnb is moving far beyond accommodation and positioning itself as an integrated travel platform.
New services now include: - car rentals - grocery delivery - airport pickups - luggage storage - FIFA World Cup 2026 experiences - boutique and independent hotels
This strategy strongly resembles the evolution of platforms like Uber: expanding from a single service into a broader ecosystem designed to capture more moments of the traveler journey.
For hospitality, this matters for several reasons.
Airbnb is no longer only competing with hotels or vacation rentals — it is increasingly competing for the entire travel relationship. The platform aims to become the central interface where travelers discover, plan, book and manage experiences in one seamless environment.
At the same time, the integration of thousands of boutique and independent hotels shows how platform boundaries between “hotels” and “alternative accommodation” continue to blur.
The key strategic question for the industry becomes: How can hotels and destinations remain visible, differentiated and connected to guests in an increasingly platform-centric and AI-driven travel ecosystem?
Google’s latest announcements at Google I/O ’26 may represent a major turning point for hotel distribution and digital commerce.
With the expansion of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) into lodging, Google is laying the foundations for a future where AI agents can not only search for hotels, but also compare offers, apply loyalty benefits, complete bookings and manage transactions directly within AI environments such as Gemini or AI Mode.
The most strategic element behind this evolution is probably the development of agentic payment protocols (AP2), allowing AI assistants to securely transact on behalf of users within predefined guardrails (budget, preferred brands, policies, etc.), while hotels remain Merchant of Record and retain ownership of customer relationships and data.
For hospitality, this raises several fundamental questions:
🔹 What happens to traditional search and booking funnels when AI agents become the interface? 🔹 How should hotels structure and expose their data so AI systems can understand availability, policies and product attributes?
Neue KI-Funktionen verändern Buchungs- und Rechercheprozesse im Reisebereich Zusätzlich kündigte Google neue Funktionen für automatisierte Kauf- und Buchungsvorgänge an. Nach Angaben des Unternehmens soll das sogenannte Universal Commerce Protocol auf weitere Bereiche ausgeweitet werden, darunter Hotels und Essenslieferdienste.
Wie PhocusWire berichtet, sollen Nutzer Produkte und Dienstleistungen künftig plattformübergreifend auswählen und buchen können. Genannt werden dabei unter anderem die Google-Suche, Gmail, die Gemini-Anwendung sowie künftig auch YouTube.
Darüber hinaus stellte Google Erweiterungen des sogenannten Agents Payments Protocols vor. Laut Vidhya Srinivasan, Vizepräsidentin und General Manager Ads & Commerce bei Google, sollen Nutzer Preisgrenzen oder bevorzugte Marken direkt im Gespräch mit dem System festlegen können.
Sérieusement concurrencé par ChatGPT, Google va doper davantage encore son moteur de recherche avec de l’intelligence artificielle, proposant même des agents persistants à ses utilisateurs
AI is no longer a side project in hospitality. New research from Mews shows that 98% of hoteliers have used AI across their operations in the last six months. On average, it is involved in 11 of the 19 most common hotel tasks and handles more than half the workload in those tasks. Adoption spans front office, commercial, F&B and leadership, and is highest in upper-midscale, upscale and luxury properties.
Despite this widespread adoption, 59% of hoteliers say the front desk welcome and check-in should stay human-led. The finding is most pronounced among properties already using AI extensively, suggesting that hands-on experience with AI sharpens hoteliers’ instinct for where the human touch is irreplaceable.
The Mews Hotelier Survey 2026, conducted between December 2025 and March 2026 across more than 500 properties globally, gives a clear picture of where the hospitality industry currently stands on AI, and where it is drawing the line.
Künstliche Intelligenz gehört laut einer aktuellen Studie von Mews inzwischen zum Alltag vieler Hotels. Nach Angaben des Unternehmens haben 98 Prozent der befragten Hoteliers in den vergangenen sechs Monaten KI in ihren Betriebsabläufen eingesetzt. Gleichzeitig sehen viele Betriebe persönliche Kontakte weiterhin als Aufgabe von Mitarbeitern.
Die Ergebnisse stammen aus einer internationalen Umfrage unter mehr als 500 Unterkünften, die laut Mews zwischen Dezember 2025 und März 2026 durchgeführt wurde. Die Untersuchung befasst sich mit dem Einsatz von KI in verschiedenen Bereichen des Hotelbetriebs.
Une plateforme conversationnelle pour rechercher et réserver des vols
Alors que l’intelligence artificielle poursuit son intégration dans l’industrie du voyage, la plateforme Mindtrip dévoile une nouvelle expérience de réservation aérienne conversationnelle. Développée avec Sabre et PayPal, cette solution permet de rechercher, comparer et réserver des vols directement via une interface alimentée par l’IA agentique.
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