ITB Berlin 2026, Day One: Ten Things That Actually Stood Out

Berlin was sunny and busy, which already puts it ahead of most trade shows. ITB turned 60 this year, the halls were packed, and we ran into a lot of friends, partners and long-time clients we had not seen since last year.

For the second year running, Simone Puorto was with us doing back-to-back interviews with some of the most interesting voices on the floor. Nine conversations across nine companies: Trybe, Cendyn, Access Hospitality, Aven Hospitality, Stripe, Journey, RoomPriceGenie, and TrustYou.

A lot came up. Here are the ten things that stuck with us.

1. Hoteliers are paying a tax nobody is measuring
   Every time a front desk employee switches between systems, logging in, logging out, reconciling screens, they lose something. Not just time. The human moment that check-in is supposed to be. One executive called it the "toggle tax." Hoteliers talk endlessly about OTA commissions. Almost none of them have tried to quantify what they lose every time their staff has their head buried in software instead of talking to a guest.

2. "Ancillary" is the wrong word
   Calling spa bookings, dining, and activities "ancillary revenue" encodes their secondary status before anyone has even looked at the numbers. Some properties already generate fifty percent of their revenue from non-room sources. Thinking about experiences as inventory, bookable and manageable the same way rooms have been for decades, changes how you run them. The language has not caught up with the reality.

3. Social media is now a conversion channel
   The shift was confirmed from both a technology and an operator perspective. Meta channels and TikTok are no longer just brand-building tools. They are genuine conversion channels now, and the numbers are significant enough to change how marketing budgets should be structured. Younger travellers are not browser-first. If a property is not on Instagram or TikTok, it simply does not exist for them.

4. The booking journey is about to look very different
   For two decades, OTAs trained travellers to fill in boxes. The conversation now is about intent, expressing what you want in natural language and expecting the right answer back. One framing that stuck: this is not a feature update. It is a different relationship between a traveller and a destination.

5. Contactless check-in works best when it is optional
   The technology is live at several properties and the results are measurable: shorter queues, less manual admin, more in-property spend. But the more interesting point was about choice. Some guests want human contact at every step. Others want to check in, lock their phone away, and disappear for three hours. The best version of this technology serves both at the same time.

6. The real fragmentation problem is people, not systems
   Tech silos get most of the attention. But people silos may be doing more damage. One example from the floor: a hotel's digital marketing team spending budget to drive demand during a period when the revenue manager already knows occupancy is high, because the two teams are simply not talking. The tools are getting better. The habits are not changing at the same speed.

7. Your guest exists as three different people in your system
   A guest who books through an OTA once, directly a second time, and at a sister property a third time typically exists as three separate records. Merging those into a single profile, combining transactional history, preferences, sentiment data and loyalty signals, is technically possible today. The downstream effect is significant: a front desk that already knows you stayed before, an agent that can make a personalised pricing decision in real time, a pre-arrival message that references actual history. The infrastructure challenge is real, but it is a solved problem for properties willing to invest in it.

8. Hotels need to control their own narrative before AI does it for them
   In previous iterations of online travel, a lot of hotel information was cached and filtered through intermediaries who were not necessarily representing what a property would want to say about itself on any given day. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is emerging as a way for hotels to structure and control how they appear in AI-enabled search. The properties that feed their own structured data into that process will show up differently from those that leave it to someone else.

9. Bad data foundations make AI worse, not better
   AI is only as useful as the data it learns from. If the underlying systems are fragmented, the AI on top can only learn from one fragment at a time. Some vendors compensate by pulling in external data, weather, local events. The counter-argument made on the floor: hotels are already sitting on enormous amounts of their own data. The problem is that it lives in systems that do not speak to each other. Fix that first.

10. Revenue management is leaving the back office
    Revenue management decisions have historically been made by a specialist in a separate system, largely invisible to the rest of the property. Embedding that intelligence directly inside the PMS changes who can act on it and how fast. The vision is revenue awareness becoming part of the daily workflow for everyone who touches the system, not a separate discipline behind a separate login.

Almost every conversation touched on AI. The honest consensus: the technology is moving faster than the industry's ability to absorb it, and putting AI on top of broken processes mostly just accelerates the breakage. But the potential, once the foundations are solid, came through clearly in every single conversation.

We will be sharing the full video interviews starting early next week, two per day. Nine conversations, nine perspectives.