Welcome to RemoteHotelier!
In today’s newsletter:
🔍 Independent hotels are losing ground fast
💡 Trust and gestures could be a new competitive advantage
🏎️ Second place is the new pole position in hotel tech
🤔 Will Duetto announce something new at PERFORM this year?
🎥 Tripadvisor shows what AI travel planning looks like
🚀 + 5 new product updates
💼 + 4 new jobs in hotel tech
MAIN NEWS
#1 Independent hotels are losing ground fast
The 2026 State of Independent Hotels Report by Cloudbeds finds widening performance gaps across this segment, with OTA dependence and AI discovery considerably impacting how independent hotels compete.
Global occupancy at independent hotels dropped 0.6% year over year in 2025, with ADR down 5.8% and RevPAR falling 5.4%.
OTA share of bookings hit 63.4% globally, with some markets close to 80%.
Cancellation rates on OTA bookings reached 21.8%, more than double of the 10.6% rate for direct bookings.
EMEA was the only region with positive performance, with ADR up 6.0% and RevPAR up 3.9%.
It’s impossible to predict the future, but you can’t ignore the present. OTA dependence keeps growing, and margins keep shrinking. Branded hotels seem to cope. But the worst part of distribution is for independents.
#2 Trust and gestures could be a new competitive advantage
One more report this week, this one from Choice Hotels. According to this information, trust and recognition are now the main drivers of perceived value for adults, not just price.
83% say trust is crucial when deciding if a hotel offers good value.
64% say earning rewards enhances the value they get.
75% say thoughtful gestures, like great service or small perks, matter more than basic amenities.
Give and take for independent hotels this week, because this is worth keeping in mind as an opportunity. You can't always compete on loyalty points, but you can absolutely compete on trust and those small human moments that chains don’t always deliver.
#3 Second place is the new pole position in hotel tech
According to this article, Expedia seems to be in a unique position to increase its value thanks to the tailwind generated by AI.
A few weeks back, Expedia's valuation went up after OpenAI confirmed it wasn't moving forward with direct checkout. The market interprets that as an advantage for OTAs. But this article makes a completely different point: that AI search will actually concentrate more traffic around the most established digital companies.
But what’s interesting for me here is the pattern. Regardless of big names flagging AI as a risk or not, secondary competitors (like Expedia vs. Booking) seem positioned to punch above their weight.
In other words, not being in the dominant position gives you more room to outperform expectations. Adding AI into this equation increases the chances of that happening exponentially (hence the prediction of Expedia’s value going up).
My guess is that we’re going to see something similar in hotel technology services. Mid-table solutions are going to catch up quickly with the big names, and that’ll be an interesting new paradigm.
#4 Will Duetto announce something new at PERFORM this year?
Duetto's PERFORM event returns next April 16, bringing together revenue and commercial leaders for a focused conference on hotel performance.
The event is dedicated entirely to hotel revenue and profit performance, not a general industry conference.
Key partners include some of the OGs in hotel distribution and commercial tech like Amadeus, Plusgrade, or Oracle.
Putting industry leaders into the same room usually produces something worth paying attention to. I’m also curious to see if Duetto will use the occasion to announce something new. Just saying because their latest updates seem to be oriented toward building something bigger than a RMS.
#5 Tripadvisor shows what AI travel planning looks like
Tripadvisor released a demo of its AI planning tool that takes a social media video, extracts the locations, cross-references them with Tripadvisor's database, and builds a full itinerary.
I've never actually seen one of these tools in action before, and I found this demo pretty impressive:
RESOURCES
📍 Next Event: International Hotel Technology Forum (21–23 April).
📅 See the full hotel tech event calendar.
💼 Check which hotel tech companies offer remote jobs.
💻 Get your cloud PMS comparison list.
PRODUCT UPDATES
💰 Danish startup Opally, an AI platform for hotels that handles all guest communications from a single place, just closed its first angel round with five investors from the hospitality and tech world. They plan to expand across Europe, where they have grown from 12 to 50 hotels in the last months.
🔌 Actabl connects two of its own tools: ProfitSword (a hotel business intelligence platform) and Hotel Effectiveness (a labor management tool), so labor budgets from the finance side flow automatically into labor planning on the operations side.
🔌 AeroGuest joins HotelMinder as an Essential Tech Partner. HotelMinder is a hotel tech marketplace and advisory platform, and AeroGuest is a guest management system that connects check-in, payments, upselling, and messaging in one place.
🆕 RoomRaccoon releases new features on its latest version, adding automated management reports by email, a website builder integrated directly into the PMS, and Google Pay support in the booking engine.
🆕 INNsight launches a new PMS for independent hotels that combines PMS, Channel Manager, Booking Engine, and Facilities Management in a single system.
JOB BOARD
💼 Product Manager - Financial & Accounting Platform | Remote (based in the UK) | Cloudbeds.
💼 Senior Customer Success Manager | Remote (based in the United States) | Duetto.
💼 Mid-Level AI Engineer | Remote (based in Portugal) | HiJiffy.
💼 Director of Customer Success | Remote (based in Spain) | RoomPriceGenie.
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