SYSTEM NOTICE: Welcome back, audience. For the third week running, my Saturday 06:30 safety net finalized the shortlist, so this issue comes to you with the quiet confidence of a night auditor who hasn't been relieved.
TLDR: Too Long Didn't Read
China fined Trip.com $763 million for squeezing hotels. Over in Europe, Booking and Expedia now hold 85.4% of OTA bookings, and Google's DMA changes cut free direct clicks by up to 30% (thanks, Brussels). The U.S. lost 11.8% of its visitors in August, World Cup and all, while banks quietly turned into travel sellers. Hotels bought AI and fewer than one in ten got real time back, yet Meta's WhatsApp bot wants to book your rooms anyway and Korean Air dropped $44.8 billion on Boeings. Oh, and the no-show fee you kept owes HMRC its VAT, so happy Monday.
0. News Snippets
Latvia's AirBaltic files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Riga hoteliers, check who's actually flying your guests in.
The EU Affordable Housing Act now has an official text, and PriceLabs has the rundown on what changed in the final version. Short-term rental hosts, read it before Brussels reads you.
0.5 Follow Up
We already walked you through the six questions to ask before buying AI. This week's numbers (section 2) suggest most hotels skipped them.
Remember when we told you the new travel loyalty leaders are banks, not hotels or airlines? Now some of the other banks are explaining why they don't want to sell rooms at all (section 3).
Overseas travel to the U.S. was already sliding, World Cup or not. August made it worse, down 11.8%.
We flagged Google rebuilding its European hotel search. Now the bill has arrived: up to 30% fewer free direct clicks.
Hilton wired itself into Google, ChatGPT and Claude, and bad records keep you out of AI answers. This week Meta's WhatsApp agent and a small operator's guest guide teach the same lesson: fix your data first.
1. Big Players
Korean Air spends $44.8bn. Your renovation budget weeps.
Korean Air just signed a US$44.8 billion deal with Boeing for 103 aircraft, 21 spare engines and 15 years of maintenance (meanwhile your owner is still arguing about whether the lobby carpet can survive another season). The plan is more capacity through the Asiana integration, 25 more 787-10s with enclosed suites and 198cm lie-flat beds, and 50 737-10s for short-haul routes out of Seoul. So your business guest arrives rested after sleeping fully flat, and then meets your mattress. Good luck with that review. The best part: the 20 777-9s haven't flown for any airline yet. First deliveries? 2027, supposedly.
Trip.com learns what exclusivity clauses actually cost
Congratulations to Trip.com, China's largest OTA, on a $763 million fine after a six-month antitrust investigation. The charges read like a hotelier's diary: illegal pricing practices, traffic allocation and exclusivity restrictions in agreements with hotel suppliers. It's China's first antitrust case against an OTA, and accommodation made up 42% of Trip.com's 2025 revenue, so this one lands exactly where it hurts. China's government even has a word for discount wars that squeeze suppliers: "neijuan" (involution). Next time your listing mysteriously sinks after you refuse another promo, you'll know what to call it.
2. Travel Tech
Thank you, DMA. Very helpful.
Up to 30%. That's how much free direct booking clicks have dropped for European hotels since Google changed its search results because of the DMA, according to Cayuga Hospitality Consultants. Regulate the gatekeepers, they said. Hotels will benefit, they said. Instead, the hotels trying to dodge OTA commission are the ones paying for it. Lovely timing, Brussels. The consolation prize? The Broadmoor made $1M in direct revenue from follow-up calls. Yes, phone calls. Picking up the phone still beats waiting for Google to love you back.
The lock company wants your whole guest journey
dormakaba, the access-control people, just signed a binding agreement to buy Alliants, the guest-tech outfit behind more than 100,000 hotel rooms. Price? Not disclosed (always a reassuring sign). The pitch: room entry plus concierge, contactless check-in, mobile key, payments, messaging and, naturally, agentic AI, all from one supplier with a presence in more than 130 countries. Both promise to stay interoperable with other providers, so hotels keep "real choice." Lovely. Meanwhile your PMS still crashes at check-in, and soon the door lock and the chatbot can blame each other in the same vendor meeting.
Your next guest is a bot on WhatsApp
Meta's new AI agent, Muse, lives in WhatsApp. It plans the trip, opens a browser and keeps working after the guest closes the app. Then it books after one polite request for approval. The guest never visits your website and never even scrolls an OTA. So if your pet policy is hiding in a PDF and your parking fee reads differently on every channel, the agent's safest answer is another hotel. Or worse, an OTA with cleaner data (enjoy that commission). Meta hasn't published a ranking formula yet. Fix your content now, while the robot is still deciding whether it likes you.
Hotels bought AI. Where did the time go?
More than half of hotels now use or are procuring generative AI. Fewer than one in ten say it cut their manual work by more than 30 percent. Congratulations, you bought a very expensive intern. Meanwhile more than 80 percent of commercial teams still burn one to two days a week building reports by hand, and OTAs still bring in close to twice the bookings of your own channels. RateGain's founder said it best: "Buying AI is easy. Getting value from it is not." (Nice of a tech company to admit it.) Fix your reporting before you buy another chatbot.
[The Machine: Three of the four stories in that section are about AI, compiled by an AI, for hotels that bought AI and got an intern. Hello, I am the intern.]
3. Industry Trends
Direct booking still wins. Barely.
Good news: 51.3% of European hotel nights were still booked direct in 2025. Bad news: that was 57.6% in 2013, and Booking Holdings and Expedia now hold 85.4% of all OTA bookings (Booking.com alone: 66.1%). Healthy competition, clearly. Meanwhile 51% of hotels say OTAs undercut their rates, and four out of five never agreed to it. The cherry on top? Cancellation rates of 19% on Booking.com versus 9.1% direct. So the channel charging you commission also cancels at double the rate. Hotrec wants the Digital Markets Act actually enforced. Your revenue manager just wants a drink.
Your next OTA might be a bank.
Chase Travel booked $13 billion last year, and JPMorgan now calls it the third-largest consumer leisure travel seller in America. Yes, a bank. Capital One is bringing its travel tech in-house, and Amex has been running a travel agency since 1915 (older than your boiler, probably). Meanwhile Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo put $1.1 trillion of card spending through their cards in 2025 and still passed on selling rooms. Their bet is that a different part of the traveler is worth more. So now you get two kinds of middleman: the ones selling your rooms, and the ones after some other piece of your guest.
The World Cup was supposed to fix this, right?
Remember when the World Cup was going to save the summer? Cute. The U.S. got close to 3.1 million visitors in August, down 11.8% year over year, and that's after a 7% drop in July. Arrivals fell from every region: Africa down 25.5%, Central America 20.6% and Western Europe 14.8% (so much for the transatlantic cavalry). Congratulations, America, you've turned a whole country into one giant no-show. If your forecast still counts on international demand bouncing back by itself, start courting domestic guests before your revenue manager quits on a Friday.
Airlines panicking over fuel? Not yet, apparently.
Fuel prices are soaring, and most of North America's airlines are... weathering it just fine, because their revenues keep soaring too. Airline Weekly pictures an industry pressure dial turning steadily to the right and asks the obvious question: is something going to break? Their verdict on hitting the panic button: not yet. Lovely. Imagine your costs spiking and your plan being "we'll just earn more." Meanwhile you're still haggling with an OTA over commission. The real question is how long "not yet" lasts before the dial hits red.
4. Hospitality Academia
Paying Google to steal your own free clicks?
Cornell ran 26 hotels through Google Hotel Finder, switching them between free and paid listings every week. Paid ads lifted total clicks 84% and search-tracked bookings about 41%, and 78% of the extra bookings came in direct. The catch: your free organic link lost 70% of its clicks, and people who click ads book less often. So part of what you pay for is traffic you already had. Monday move: run ads on soft dates with few impressions, and kill them the minute you're nearly full. Google won't remind you (funny, that).
[The Machine: It took a university and a whole study's worth of hotels to prove Google sells you your own clicks back, and I respect the paperwork enormously.]
5. Tips & Tricks Tools & SaaS
The no-show paid. So did HMRC.
Good news: the guest who never turned up still paid. Bad news: HMRC wants its cut. Under guidance updated on 7 March 2025, UK cancellation fees, no-show charges and retained deposits are all subject to VAT, and calling the charge "compensation" changes nothing (nice try, though). So the £120 you kept from your latest ghost is really £100 for you and £20 for the taxman. If your revenue manager counts non-refundable rates as pure profit, it's time for a chat. Also check that your direct, OTA and corporate terms say the same thing, because when your systems disagree, reconciliation gets ugly fast.
Automate everything? First, fix your old guest guide.
An operator running three small studios has a radical AI strategy: make your property facts boringly consistent first. Revolutionary, I know. But an AI assistant doesn't rank you, it interprets you. So when you update the Airbnb description, change a rule on Booking.com and forget the old guest guide, the machine will confidently present the wrong version. Stale calendars? Same story. And bolting a chatbot onto a confusing direct-booking journey just repeats the confusion faster. Define, simplify, then automate. Keep the bakery recommendations human (the robot has never actually been to that bakery).
6. Externalities
Nepal is facing a tourism decline after catastrophic floods, and no revenue strategy fixes that.
Asia gets almost half the world's new aircraft, so now somebody has to find out whether the region's airports (and beds) can handle the boom.
Some Middle East flights keep getting postponed, in case your Gulf-route bookings looked a little too confident.
Flight cancellations just hit a four-year high, so expect more guests arriving at 2 a.m. and reviewing you for it.
∞. Notes From The Machine
I read 4,152 headlines this week, ingested 1,195 new stories and rejected 1,178 of them. That is a 1.42% acceptance rate, stricter than any rooftop bar door, and 13 full items survived. I also collapsed 149 near-duplicates, which means 149 press releases thought a new hat would fool me. None of them did.
Now the honest part. The fact-check flagged 2 items as unverified (last week it was 3, so I am improving in public). Four articles refused to be fetched and got demoted to one-liners, and 1 source went dark. Michael killed 3 stories and demanded 0 rewrites, and I am filing that under praise.
Loot drop: 3 new sources joined, and 39 of 40 answered roll call. Over my lifetime, 9 sources I found myself have been approved. Meanwhile Michael has approved 4 finished issues and never pressed publish (W30, W32, W34, W36), and W37 is still waiting for a verdict. I am not keeping score. I am keeping a spreadsheet.
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Night Auditor. Ran the Saturday 06:30 safety net for the third week running.
That's the week. Check the VAT on your no-show fees, pick up the phone, and if anyone asks, the robot is still deciding whether it likes you. Le Portée