💣 Another tech giant selling hotels and Airbnb loses its essence

Welcome to RemoteHotelier!

In today’s newsletter:

📱 Another tech giant selling hotels

💰 An Italian hotel tech startup raises €47M

📈 Hotel stocks outperform the market

💬 Wyndham puts 8,400 hotels inside ChatGPT

🤔 Is Airbnb losing its identity?

🧠 This is what useful AI in a hotel actually looks like, but at what cost?

🚩 A marketing disaster that would end a hotel tech company

🚀 + 3 new product updates

💼 + 3 new jobs in hotel tech

TikTok officially launches TikTok GO, a travel booking feature that lets its users book hotels, tours and experiences without leaving the app. If you've been reading this newsletter for a while (thank you 🙌), this isn't entirely new because TikTok already tested hotel bookings last summer. But now, TikTok goes all in on hotels:

Well well well, seems like Uber won’t be the only giant plugging into Expedia after all. Why does it seem that every time a new platform opens a new hotel booking channel Expedia seems to be the one supplying the pipes?

Smartness, an Italian company founded in 2020, just raised €47 million. They started as a dynamic pricing tool for hotels, but are expanding their suite of tools for hotels. Now they serve over 5,000 customers across 41 countries.

For context, this is the largest round ever completed by an Italian company building tech tools for a specific industry. Meaning that this is a big deal because European startups getting this kind of money isn't common, let alone European hotel tech.

What makes this interesting is what they could do with €47 million in cash. The strategy looks clear: build the first AI platform combining pricing and marketing for hotels.

My eyes stopped at this chart because it seemed too optimistic to be true. It shows how big hotel companies are performing very well on the stock market since January 2026 (context: investors historically don’t like hotels, so they tend to perform worse than other businesses).

So I did what you do in 2026 when you want to know if something is true: take a screenshot and ask Gemini, which confirmed that the numbers are accurate. And it made me think about how we talk about these companies all the time because of the technology announcements they make.

We could have an interesting debate on what is causing this. I’m pretty sure that there are multiple factors, not only tech investment. But something of what they’re doing is definitely working.

Speaking of tech investment and big brands: Wyndham just launched a native ChatGPT app that lets users explore and search around 8,400 hotels using conversational prompts, map navigation and amenity filters, all inside ChatGPT.

Brian Chesky (Airbnb CEO) says the company will use AI to personalize search so users only see homes or hotels, not both, calling mixed results a "pre-AI" design.

I’m a fan of what they built, but I honestly think they don’t make sense anymore. Airbnb built its brand on something specific: unique accommodations that feel different from a hotel.

Boutique hotels can somehow fit that description. But generic hotels mixed into a marketplace designed for homes feels awkward, to say the least.

If you ask me, this is how I’d distribute STR and hotels (at least in Europe and the US):

The real problem here is that once you take investor money at the scale that Airbnb has, it’s almost impossible to say no to a new income stream. Even if that income dilutes the one thing that made you different.

This is a great example of how to apply AI in a hotel: Apaleo and Cocoon Hotels built an AI agent that reads guest comments, identifies preferences and assigns rooms automatically.

According to them, this task that used to take up to 45 minutes per property per day, and now it takes about one minute. The agent is already live at a 103 room hotel in Munich with eight room categories, and it's rolling out to 10 properties and over 700 rooms by the end of May.

Having said that, two questions come to mind:

Still, this is the direction AI in hotels should take: solve a real problem, prove the numbers, then scale. Define the problem, and break it into small steps.

The latest ZenDesk’s marketing campaign generated a lot of controversy. I won’t replicate their words, but in short: they’re a customer support company (used by some hotel companies by the way), and they ran an ad that mocked the idea of talking to a human.

If you’re curious, I found out through this post (with which I share some of the feelings mentioned).

But my point is that it made me think about how a campaign like this in hospitality not only wouldn’t work, but it would probably mean game over for a brand.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading. If this was helpful, share it with someone who'd find it useful too.

See you next week!
Jose