DerbySoft preps a hotel chain for the AI search era
DerbySoft, a travel technology company, has completed a project to strengthen a major global hotel chain’s presence in Google’s AI-powered Search, led by its Digital Marketing Solutions team (referred to as “Project Gemini”). As travellers turn to conversational AI tools instead of scrolling through search results, hotel brands need their property data, content, and attributes structured so generative AI models can access and represent them accurately. By combining its hospitality data, connectivity, and marketing expertise, DerbySoft says it aims to help hotel chains stay visible and relevant as discovery shifts toward AI-driven platforms, and the company says it will keep working with customers and tech partners on quality data, scalable connectivity, and digital marketing.
dailypoint launches free AI readiness check as hotels want to prove AI’s ROI
Hotel technology provider dailypoint has launched a free, anonymous AI Readiness Check after its analysis of the h2c Global Study 2026 found that while 91% of hotel chains use AI, only 13% have achieved measurable ROI. The study also showed that 69% of AI-using hotels still manage guest preferences manually and just 42% have a central guest profile database, which dailypoint’s CEO Michael Toedt says points to fragmented data as the real barrier, not the technology itself. The five-minute, 18-question assessment covers six areas, including data foundations, governance, privacy, and security, and instantly delivers a score from 0 to 100 with practical next steps.
Apaleo’s AI Agent server use jumps 70% as hotels go live
Apaleo, an API-first property management platform, reports a 70% rise in use of its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server between July and September 2026, as hotels move AI agents from testing into live operations. Growth was spread evenly across segments, from independent hotels without engineering teams to enterprise operators, helped by chat interfaces that let non-coders describe tasks in plain language and by the freedom to connect any AI model. The h2c Hotel Chain Tech Report 2026 shows how early the market still is: 91% of chains use AI, but only 15% have a standardized AI data access layer like MCP. Early use cases focus on staff-facing work, such as Appenzeller Hotels saving about 2 hours weekly on revenue workflows and Smartments amending around 2,000 reservations in one action, a job that would have taken roughly 50 hours.
HTS and Serko.ai partner for no-questions-asked cancellations
HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions), the B2B arm of Hopper, and Serko have announced that HTS’s Cancel for Any Reason (CFAR) product and Lodging API are now available on Serko’s new personal travel assistant, Serko.ai. Branded as Stress-free Cancellation, the CFAR feature lets travellers cancel a flight up to 3 hours before departure or a hotel before check-in and get a refund to their original form of payment. Serko.ai is also using HTS’s single Lodging API, which provides access to more than 1.4 million hotels and vacation rentals along with search, mapping, and pricing technology. Executives from both companies say flexibility has become essential for modern business travel, especially when meetings change or trips are disrupted.
Tencent and Visa sign deal to smooth cross-border payments
Tencent and Visa have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to explore broader collaboration on payments and commerce across Tencent’s ecosystem, covering cross-border payments, agentic commerce, enterprise AI, and global business expansion. Building on their existing work serving international visitors to China, the companies plan to make payments easier for inbound and outbound travellers through TenPay Global, Visa Pay, and Weixin Pay merchants, and to expand remittances into the Weixin Pay ecosystem via Visa Direct. They will also extend their gaming-payments partnership through Midas to Tencent’s overseas AI businesses, and explore how Visa Intelligent Commerce could let AI agents help eligible users discover, select, and buy goods or services, all subject to regulatory and security requirements and with an emphasis on trust and consumer control.
