A new Hotel Yearbook, a moving interview, and ten things worth knowing: ITB Berlin 2026, Day Two

We are proud to share that on day two of ITB we launched The Hotel Yearbook 2026: The Regenerative Question. This year's edition explores what hospitality must become, moving from practices that simply minimise harm to ones that actively support communities and ecosystems. Twenty-five contributors from across the globe, brought together by editor Willy Legrand, debated, disagreed, and pushed each other's thinking to arrive at something genuinely worth reading. Willy, thank you for making this happen again!

The first interview of the day was with Willy himself, and it set a different tone from the tech conversations that followed. Later, Simone Puorto sat down with Infor, Apaleo, IDeaS, Paathz, Valpas, and VenueSuite. And one of those interviews happened on the move, in the back of a Trabi XXL cruising through Berlin. You will want to see that one. All nine interviews from day one and day two will start rolling out on Hospitality Net early next week.

Here are the things that stuck with us from day two.

1. Forty years of sustainability, and things are still getting worse
   The Hotel Yearbook 2026 does not start from an optimistic place. Forty years of sustainability frameworks, and biodiversity is declining, communities are still being displaced, and young people are questioning whether hospitality is an industry worth joining. The honest diagnosis from Willy: the frameworks were never the problem. The implementation was weak, progress was incremental, and the world moved faster than the industry did.

2. Regeneration is not a nicer word for sustainability
   This distinction matters and came through clearly in the opening interview. Sustainability, at its best, aims to stop making things worse. Regeneration asks whether hospitality can actively help ecosystems and communities recover. The roots of the word hospitality, that idea of reciprocity, of shelter and local knowledge and shared experience, are much closer to regeneration than to the growth-and-extraction model the industry built in the 20th century. The Yearbook does not resolve this tension. It puts it on the table.

3. Disagreement is a feature, not a problem
   Twenty-five contributors to the Yearbook do not agree on what regeneration means in practice. Some see it as an evolution from sustainability. Others see it as a completely different system. Some argue for strict measurement and accountability. Others say that focusing too much on measurement keeps you locked inside the same extractive model you are trying to leave. Willy's view: holding those tensions together without collapsing them is exactly the point. When experts agree on everything, that is when you should start worrying.

4. We saw a hotel booked entirely inside ChatGPT
   During the Apaleo interview we got to see a live reservation demo, and we have to say, it was exciting to watch. A guest types a request in natural language, the system reaches out in real time for availability and pricing, the guest sees a room photo and rate, confirms, enters their details, and completes a secure payment through a seamlessly integrated payment link, all without the experience ever feeling like you left ChatGPT. The reservation lands in the PMS. No separate website, no booking engine tab. This is not a demo or a future roadmap item. It is live with customers today.

5. The Trabi test: meetings away from the noise
   One of our conversations happened in the back of a Trabi XL, driving from the exhibition hall to the Olympic Stadium and back. VenueSuite arranged the car and invited us along for the ride, turning the journey into the interview. It worked surprisingly well. Away from the noise and the buzz of the show floor, the conversation felt more relaxed and more personal. We loved it. Watch out for that one when the interviews go live next week.

6. Agents are already running in production, not just on slides
   The agentic AI conversation shifted this year from theory to early reality. One company reported 15 to 20 hotel groups already deploying agents in live environments, with the speed of adoption unlike anything seen before in hotel technology. The smaller, more innovative operators are moving first. The large chains are slower. And what is being automated is not front-of-house experience but the back-office procedures, the boring, repetitive, rule-based work that consumes enormous amounts of staff time. That is where the first wave of agents is landing.

7. The hospitality industry does not have a labour shortage. It has a visibility problem.
   One conversation reframed the staffing challenge in a way that held up. The industry is not short of people who want to work in hospitality. It is short of infrastructure for those people to be found. Operational staff, the ones who would never open LinkedIn, are invisible to most recruitment tools. A dedicated platform built for hospitality, where a CV and a short video are enough to get matched with a role, addresses a different problem than the one most hiring software is built for.

8. AI hallucinations are manageable. Credible hallucinations are not.
   The trust gap around AI came up with IDeaS and the framing was sharp. It is not the obvious hallucinations that cause the most damage. It was the example of a client who received a recommendation for an Olympic-size swimming pool in each room that got a laugh. The real risk is the small, plausible, confident error, the one that sounds right, gets included in a strategy presentation, and shapes decisions for months before anyone notices. Building AI outputs that people can genuinely trust, not just use cautiously, is a harder problem than it looks.

9. Bedbugs are a distribution problem
   This one came from an unexpected direction. Valpas makes the case that bedbug prevention is now a hotel discovery issue, not just an operational one. Sixty percent of bookings apparently start in an AI system now. When travellers search on ChatGPT or Perplexity for a hotel in Berlin that is clean, safe, or sustainable, verified certifications surface above marketing copy and review aggregates. Hotels that have done the work, and can prove it, show up differently. The connection between pest prevention and AI-era distribution was not something we expected to be discussing at ITB. It made complete sense.

10. MICE is 26 years behind rooms. That changes now.
    The VenueSuite interview, which happened in the Trabi, confirmed something that came up in several conversations: meetings and events have been treated as an afterthought for decades because the revenue-per-effort ratio favoured rooms. But as that equation shifts, the pressure to bring the same logic that modernised room distribution to event and meeting bookings is building. Right now, an RFP can take days to turn around. With the right booking engine, 50 to 60 percent of clients are responding within half an hour. The gap between those two numbers is not a technology problem. It is a starting-point problem, and it is solvable.

Almost every conversation on day two touched on AI in some form. The honest consensus remains the same as day one: the technology is real and moving fast, but the foundations still need work. What was different today was the number of live examples, things running in production, not on roadmaps. That felt like a shift.

The full interviews start rolling out on Hospitality Net early next week.