EDITION #62
Welcome to RemoteHotelier!
I hope you like the new design 🙂
In today’s newsletter:
🚗 Uber goes inside the PMS and picks Mews
🛒 Rakuten (also) wants to sell hotel rooms in the US
🤖 Expedia wants partners to build on top of it
🏨 Marriott turns hotel design into an online store
💰 Airbnb spends $58M to get closer to hotels
🚀 + 8 new product updates
🚗 Uber goes inside the PMS and picks Mews
Mews is partnering with Uber to integrate ride booking, tracking and billing directly into its PMS.
Hotels will be able to arrange, track and bill guest rides without leaving the Mews platform.
Ride charges go straight to the guest folio through Mews Payments, so front desk staff don't have to handle cash or vouchers for taxis.
Hotels will also be able to use the service for employee transportation, including arranging rides for staff on late or overnight shifts.
The integration is currently in development, with a pilot expected to launch later this year.
Uber keeps smashing knocking on hospitality's door. Taxis are one of those things hotels have managed manually forever. I’m surprised they picked Mews over Opera Cloud though. You'd think the world's most installed PMS would be the first in line for a deal like this.
Having said that, if you ever have to deal with Oracle's integration documentation, you probably understand why Uber's engineering team might have taken a hard pass on them.
🛒 Rakuten (also) wants to sell hotel rooms in the US
Rakuten Travel targets the US hotel market, starting with the West Coast and Hawaii.
And you might be thinking "let me guess, they're going to use Expedia's inventory, right?" But the answer is no because it actually looks like they might try to build their own.
Rakuten already has millions of American users through its cashback platform, which gives them a distribution channel most OTAs would kill for.
Whether they can turn cashback shoppers into hotel bookers is a completely different story. But if they pull it off, it adds one more item to an already crowded distribution list, and that's never bad news for hotels.
🤖 Expedia wants partners to build on top of it
Speaking of the devil, Expedia presents their new B2B AI platform that will allow partners to build branded travel experiences with a single connection, covering everything from lodging and flights to car rentals, activities and trip protection.
Now we can see where the latest acquisitions (Tiqets and CarTrawler) were going to.
RESOURCES
📍 Next Event: Hotec Operations (8–10 June).
📅 See the full hotel tech event calendar.
💼 Check which hotel tech companies offer remote jobs.
🏨 Marriott turns hotel design into an online store
This is how the website looks
Marriott Bonvoy has launched an online design shop where you can buy hotel furniture, art and decor from its luxury brands.
The first two collections are inspired by W Hotels and Westin Hotels, with pieces designed in collaboration with Rockwell Group.
Prices range from $56 for a small tray to $7,580 for a wool rug.
Themed collections are coming next, starting with a French Riviera line in June and a JW Marriott Tokyo line in the fall.
The shop is live now at MarriottBonvoyBoutiques.com.
It's curious to see Marriott getting into ecommerce like this. Forget the tiny shampoo bottles, now you can take the whole room home. It's a smart brand extension that might turn hotel design into a revenue stream beyond the stay.
By the way, Marriott isn't the only traditional hotel name this week. Choice Hotels just swapped CEOs, replacing Patrick Pacious with Dominic Dragisich. I hope he likes AI, because he's going to hear that acronym a lot.
💰 Airbnb spends $58M to get closer to hotels
WeRoad, a group travel platform for solo travelers, just raised $58 million in a Series C round led by Airbnb.
WeRoad organizes group trips for millennials and Gen Z travelers who want to meet new people, with groups of eight to fifteen people matched by age and interests.
The company generated €130 million in revenue in 2025, a 30% increase year over year, and has organized trips for more than 300,000 customers since 2017.
Instead of traditional tour guides, WeRoad uses "group leaders" who are closer in age to travelers and act more like companions than experts.
WeRoad will start its US expansion in Austin and also plans to roll out WeMeet, a local events app with 150,000 downloads, across multiple American cities.
WeRoad is basically a social platform disguised as a travel company. You sign up, get matched with a group of people your age, and travel together for 10 to 12 days. WeRoad's CEO will reportedly join Airbnb's hotel team.
No offense, but why would you want a travel expert (WeRoad’s CEO) in your hotel division? (a friend told me once that when you start a sentence with “no offense” someone always gets offended… I hope this isn’t the case 🤓)
PRODUCT UPDATES
🆕 Duve launches Front Desk Upsell: a new feature that lets hotel staff book upsells on behalf of guests during in-person, phone, or WhatsApp interactions. It includes personalized offers, flexible discounts, staff performance tracking, and charges 0% commission on every sale.
It’s been a while since we heard from Duve, and it seems like for a good reason. This is a great tool for hotels to offer additional products to their guests and reduce the friction. Two birds, one stone.
🆕 Snapfix launches an AI housekeeping module: it generates optimized daily schedules in seconds and syncs with the PMS in real time.
💰 HBX Group acquires Bridgify: an experiences technology company, for €3 million upfront plus performance-based payments. Bridgify's tech gives HBX access to over a million experiences from global suppliers, letting partners integrate them through API connectivity.
That’s their fifth acquisition since 2017.
💰 Lighthouse acquires Hotelrank.ai: they add AI visibility intelligence to its Connect AI product. The move gives hotels a way to monitor how they rank inside AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.
🔌 iVvy partners with Lightwave: to connect event scheduling with smart energy controls in hotels and venues. The integration automatically powers up lighting, AV, and catering equipment before events and shuts them down after, cutting energy waste across meeting spaces and ballrooms.
Who’s going to bring an extra extension lead to the customers then 🙂?
🔌 hotelkit integrates with Horeca HERO: they bring training and employee management into daily hotel workflows. The integration syncs users between both platforms, delivers training notifications inside hotelkit, and lets employees complete courses and sign certificates without leaving the platform.
🔌 Shiji and dailypoint launch a new integration: it syncs guest check-in details, preferences, and profile updates between Daylight PMS and dailypoint's data platform.
🔌 Mews and SiteMinder partner: to embed SiteMinder's distribution engine natively into the PMS.
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