🧓 Spanish grandmas and overnight trains

Welcome to RemoteHotelier, and happy Workers Day everyone!

For what is worth, this edition goes out one day before… make of that what you will.

In today’s newsletter:

🧓 Remote workers are paying to live with Spanish grandmas

🛏️ A German startup wants to replace your hotel night with a train ride

🏨 A new tool will estimate what any hotel is actually worth

😤 80% of hotel tech users say their systems cause operational stress

🔄 Accor and Airbnb prove that cooperation beats competition in hospitality

🚀 + 5 new product updates

💼 + 4 new jobs in hotel tech

This week I'm bringing alternative hospitality stories that made me pause and reflect, starting with this one: Rooral is a rural coliving and coworking project in Spain that brings remote workers into the local community. And by local community, they mean local grandmas, among many other great things.

Also, this tackles a major problem in Spain where many rural areas get abandoned because of the gradual exodus to the cities. Which sadly leads older people to be isolated. I think this is a great initiative that combines technology, tradition and hospitality.

Sometimes the most valuable thing you can offer is something real.

One more story about alternative hospitality: Nox Mobility, a German startup, raised €2M to build an overnight rail service in Europe targeting leisure and business travelers.

I like the concept: you sleep on the train, and wake up in another city. Similar to an overnight flight, but without a dry throat and bloated legs when you wake up because of the pressure.

For routes that are too long to drive but too short to justify a flight, overnight trains make a lot of sense. The infrastructure already exists in most of Europe, which takes a big cost out of the equation.

That said, making trains profitable is notoriously hard, so I’m curious to know how this idea gets executed.

Peter Fabor, one of the most active voices on LinkedIn for hoteliers and alternative hospitality (who I highly recommend to follow), shared this week an internal tool that estimates the potential sale value of hotels.

You enter the hotel name and number of rooms, and the tool returns an estimated price. It's not public yet, but he says a version will likely appear on their website in the coming weeks. According to them, around 90% of sellers are asking more than the estimated fair value.

This tool relates very well to their other products, Buy That Hotel, which is the tool I use to browse hotels for sale daydreaming that I can afford one 😎.

Coming back to traditional hotels: a new joint report from RMS and RoomPriceGenie finds that disconnected systems are costing hospitality teams hours every week, and the problem isn't how many tools you use but how well they talk to each other.

These numbers aren’t surprising to anyone who's worked in hotel operations. The tech frustration people feel on operations is hardly ever about a single bad product. It's almost always about bad connections between products. Each manual fix takes a few minutes, but eventually it adds up.

What the report calls the "Hospitality Engineer mindset" is basically what good tech managers in hotels have been doing for years: understanding not just what the tools do, but how they break and why (and prevent it if possible 🤓).

The problem is that most properties don't have that person, and leadership often doesn't know they need one until something goes wrong at the worst possible time.

Reading Accor and Airbnb in the same news is hard to ignore. According to this article, one of the largest hotel groups in the world is now working alongside the platform that, for years, was seen as the industry's biggest threat.

As a personal random anecdote: when Airbnb was starting to become popular I was a trainee hotel receptionist. I remember how my colleagues (and their bosses) freaked out about Airbnb competing with hotels. Back then, I already thought that hotels and STR don't really compete for the same guest most of the time. And today, I don’t just think the same way, but I believe that they both benefit from each other.

The overlap exists, sure, but guests looking for STR or hotels have different needs, different budgets, and different expectations. The pie is big enough, and the enemy was never Airbnb.

Besides, if you ask me, using a PMS in 2026 that looks like this is a waaaay bigger enemy:

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