Booking anxiety surges in Northeast Asia
New research from Web in Travel and Phocuswright, powered by Protect Group, finds that geopolitical instability and travel uncertainty are driving a significant shift in booking behaviour across China, Japan, and South Korea. 42% of regional travellers now actively seek flexible or refundable options — rising to 67% among Chinese travellers — while awareness of refund protection products stands at 73% in China, 75% in South Korea, and 62% in Japan. Purchase intent is especially strong in China at 88%. With 50% of travellers having experienced recent disruptions, flight cancellations and political instability rank as the top anxiety triggers, and concerns about future pandemics continue to weigh heavily on Chinese consumers.
You can read an op-ed by Stephen Joyce, Global Strategy Lead – Travel, Tours & OTAs at Protect Group, on booking anxiety here.
The uncertainty is also reshaping booking timing: nearly 30% of regional travellers are delaying bookings to closer to their departure dates, with that figure approaching 50% in China. In response, Protect Group highlights its Refund Protect product — integrated into OTA, airline, hotel, and ticketing checkouts — which offers a 100% refund on non-refundable bookings in the event of unforeseen disruptions.
Avelo Airlines launches disruption assistance
Avelo Airlines has introduced Disruption Assistance, a new rebooking benefit powered by HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions), now available for purchase on AveloAir.com and its mobile app. The product activates during eligible disruptions — typically same-day delays of two or more hours or cancellations — giving customers proactive notifications and self-serve tools to rebook on Avelo or any other airline, or receive a full 100% refund while retaining their original itinerary. The launch is timed ahead of the busy summer travel season and positions Avelo as a low-cost carrier doubling down on customer convenience and reliability.
OneReg hits 25 Australian airport customers in 18 months amid global expansion
Aviation compliance platform OneReg has reached 25 Australian airport customers just 18 months after signing its first, with recent additions including Melbourne, Albany, and Karratha, and Western Australia emerging as its fastest-growing region with 18 airports on the platform. The milestone is underpinned by a USD $4.5 million Series A round co-led by Altered Capital and Co:Act Capital, with additional UK and US investor participation. OneReg’s purpose-built platform replaces fragmented manual processes with automated workflows, real-time dashboards, and centralised compliance management — a proposition gaining traction in a market supporting nearly 3,000 daily flights and 44 million annual passenger movements. The company is now targeting international growth across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East, and has already added Dubai Airports to its portfolio.
dailypoint adds MCP and Zapier support to connect hotel guest data with AI tools
Hospitality CRM platform dailypoint has launched two new integration capabilities: Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, enabling hotel teams to access guest data through AI assistants including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini using natural language; and a Zapier integration connecting the platform to over 9,200 apps — from Cvent and Outlook to Google Sheets and Yelp — allowing hotels to automate cross-system workflows without manual development work. Both capabilities are designed to tackle hospitality’s persistent data fragmentation problem, giving teams faster access to guest intelligence across departments and systems. The features were unveiled at HITEC 2026 in San Antonio (June 15–18), where dailypoint is demoing live use cases including guest summary generation, contact creation, and workflow automation.
TikTok GO is a wake-up call for hotels
When TikTok launched its in-app booking feature GO in May 2026, the partner list — Booking.com, Expedia, Trip.com, Viator, GetYourGuide, and Tiqets — reflected years of deliberate infrastructure investment. According to a new op-ed by Boštjan Koželj on Phocuswire, Booking.com’s inclusion was no accident; it had been testing hotel sales within TikTok since August 2025, validating an inventory pipeline built for seamless interoperability across any new channel. Airbnb’s absence, by contrast, was strategic — the company is betting on building a superior interface altogether, not plugging into a competitor’s infrastructure. The deeper issue, Koželj argues, is that most hotels are asking the wrong question. The French experience post-2014 — when the removal of price parity clauses failed to shift bookings back to direct channels — showed that guests use OTAs for architecture, not price. Independent hotels’ OTA share has since climbed to 63.4% of bookings in 2025, up from 61.3% in 2024.
The article identifies three infrastructure gaps hotels must urgently address. First, JSON-LD structured data, which makes hotel inventory legible to AI systems and platforms like TikTok GO — without it, properties are simply invisible to machine-driven search. Second, Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows AI agents to query live inventory and complete bookings without visiting a hotel website at all — a channel HomeToGo has already built for. Third, internal knowledge infrastructure: SOPs, rate plans, and service protocols currently buried in PDFs and shared drives need to be indexed in vector databases to be actionable by AI tools.
