13th August 2025: Here are few of the stories that caught our attention over the week with some of our takeaways.
Story 1
Booking.com’s Genius Credit Card: The New Battleground for Guest Loyalty?
Booking.com has launched the Genius Rewards Visa Signature Credit Card in the U.S., and this isn’t just another travel card—it’s a direct assault on hotel loyalty programmes and the entire direct booking strategy that chains have spent decades building.
The Strategic Shift
The card offers 6% back in travel credits on app bookings and instant upgrade to Genius Level 3 status, but the real disruption lies deeper. Traditional hotel programmes are built on the premise that guests accumulate points through stays with specific brands. Booking.com’s approach flips this entirely—customers now earn rewards across multiple hotel brands through a single OTA relationship.
Consider the commercial implications. Marriott’s Bonvoy program has 125 million members, Hilton Honors exceeds 90 million. These impressive numbers represent customers tied to specific brand portfolios. But Booking.com’s credit card creates brand-agnostic loyalty that transcends individual hotel chains—a fundamentally different value proposition.
The Distribution Challenge Intensifies
Here’s what makes this particularly concerning for hotels: commission-backed loyalty advantage. Credit card affiliations allow customers to earn rewards and status through Booking.com instead of hotels—even when they don’t book frequently. This cuts into what hotels can offer via their own programmes.
The question becomes: why maintain a Marriott Chase card or Hilton American Express when you can earn rewards across multiple brands and property types through a single OTA relationship? Hotels that historically discouraged OTA loyalty benefits to encourage direct bookings now face OTAs leveraging their reach and rewards to encroach on the very space hotels built.
The Technology Integration Reality
What’s particularly sophisticated about this move is how it addresses the fundamental friction in travel purchasing. The card’s “Genius travel credits” system—where $1 in credits equals $1 to spend on the platform with no minimum redemption threshold—eliminates the complexity that often frustrates travellers with traditional points programmes.
Hotels must now compete not just on rates and amenities, but on the simplicity and flexibility of their loyalty ecosystems. Those that succeed will be the ones retooling their programmes to match evolving traveller expectations and counteract OTA-driven displacement.
Story 2
When AI Takes Control: The Antitrust Storm Brewing in Travel
MakeMyTrip’s Myra AI assistant represents something far more significant than a customer service upgrade—it’s a preview of how artificial intelligence could fundamentally reshape competitive dynamics in travel distribution.
The New Gatekeeper
Myra takes over the entire decision-making journey from destination discovery to booking and post-sales support within a single conversational flow. By removing the “friction” of comparison shopping that previously allowed smaller providers to compete, it offers a single, ranked result and nudges users straight into booking.
There are commercial implications. When AI assistants strip away the traditional multi-tab comparison process, they can quietly block other services from view. What appears as convenience might actually represent a new form of market control.
The Self-Preferencing Problem
Here’s where the antitrust concerns become concrete. AI assistants can push their platform’s own listings, promote partner inventory, or surface paid placements while presenting it all as helpful, personalised advice. This replicates previous conduct where MakeMyTrip faced scrutiny for disadvantaging rivals through parity clauses and exclusivity obligations.
The technology creates default structures that shape how users interact with information, potentially biasing behaviour towards the platform’s own inventory even without overt coercion. Similar to pre-installed apps on Android, these AI assistants introduce powerful lock-in effects through status quo bias.
The Global Regulatory Response
Regulators are beginning to recognise that current antitrust laws primarily target traditional collusion and abuse of dominance—but AI-powered intermediaries operate with opacity, speed, and self-learning capabilities that existing frameworks struggle to address.
The Indian Digital Competition Bill’s proposal for ex-ante regulation and systemically significant digital enterprises represents one approach. But the broader question remains: how do we ensure AI agents promote competitive pricing rather than facilitate tacit collusion?
For hotels, this isn’t just a regulatory curiosity—it’s about maintaining visibility in an AI-mediated future where algorithmic recommendations could determine market access.
Story 3
Buy Now, Pay Later: The Underutilised Revenue Lever
While OTAs like Expedia and Booking.com have offered Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) for years, hotels remain among the slowest adopters in travel. This could be costing revenue and competitive advantage.
The Guest Demand Reality
Nearly 20% of travellers funded their summer travel with BNPL, yet many hotels force these consumers to OTAs simply because they don’t offer the payment flexibility on their own websites. As one industry executive noted: guests were already using BNPL, just “booking through other various channels.”
The Commercial Benefits Are Compelling
Hotels implementing BNPL report significant improvements across key metrics. Unique Vacations saw a substantial drop in cancellation rates for BNPL bookings, suggesting these users represent a more committed guest segment. The payment flexibility also drives increases in average order value and conversion rates as guests consider suite upgrades or extended stays during the booking process.
Perhaps most impressive: Unique Vacations’ 0% interest Black Friday campaign using BNPL became their most successful sales campaign ever in terms of booking performance.
The Competitive Advantage
BNPL provides a 100% advantage to direct channels when practicing rate parity with OTAs. It offers an extra lever that helps close business even when competing on identical rates. For revenue managers, this represents a powerful tool for driving direct bookings without breaking rate parity agreements where it applies.
The technology also opens opportunities for post-booking revenue. Guests can use BNPL for upgrades, additional nights, or ancillary services—creating new touchpoints for revenue optimisation throughout the guest journey.
Third-party lenders like Upgrade’s Flex Pay step in to de-risk the process for hoteliers, ensuring guests have the financial resources while simplifying integration. The ultimate goal is seamless payment flexibility—allowing guests to pay for anything at a hotel using BNPL the same way they use credit cards.
Story 4
The Upper-Midscale Sweet Spot: Why 3-4 Star Hotels Are Winning
CBRE’s Hotel Brand Performance 2025 report reveals a striking trend: while major hotel companies added brands at a 7% compound annual growth rate over the past decade, this proliferation hasn’t translated to stronger RevPAR performance. In fact, real RevPAR has declined 10.9% since 2019 when adjusted for inflation.
The Performance Divergence
The gap between best and worst-performing brands is widening dramatically. Only 28% of brands have outperformed the 50-brand sample average since 2019, down from 52% between 2014-2019. The spread between strongest and weakest brand families reaches 26% cumulatively—a difference that can determine profitability or losses depending on leverage levels.
Upper-Midscale Dominance
The upper-midscale segment has emerged as the consistent winner, posting the highest RevPAR growth both before and after COVID. The secret? Wide brand recognition, flexible customer base, simplified operations, and guest preference for complimentary breakfasts without resort fees.
The breakfast factor alone drives remarkable performance differences. In the mid-tier segment, brands offering complimentary breakfast consistently achieve occupancy rates 2-3 percentage points higher than those that don’t, with more than double the RevPAR growth over five and ten-year periods.
The Distribution Strategy Implications
This performance data reinforces that brand selection is more critical to profitability than ever. The era of 20-year flag commitments may be ending as owners seek agility. Soft brand room growth has been nearly 10 times the growth of traditional brands, expanding 42% in the past year alone.
For hotel owners and commercial leaders, this suggests focusing on proven performers within brand families and negotiating performance-based franchise terms. The data strongly supports analysing five and ten-year RevPAR growth and indices by individual brand rather than assuming brand family success translates uniformly.
Story 5
Business Travel’s Persistent Pain Points: What BCD’s Survey Reveals
BCD Travel’s comprehensive survey of 1,035 business travellers reveals both encouraging satisfaction levels and persistent friction points that hotels must address to capture this crucial segment.
The Location-First Reality
Location dominates selection criteria at 77%, followed by employer policy (56%) and cost (53%). But here’s the interesting dynamic: 77% of business travellers prefer chain hotels with familiar service standards, and 73% repeatedly stay at the same hotel when visiting destinations multiple times.
This creates a powerful opportunity for hotels to build recurring business relationships, but only if they deliver consistently on the fundamentals.
The Technology Expectation Gap
While 88% of business travellers book on desktop or laptop, only 10% use mobile phones for hotel reservations. This suggests significant opportunity for hotels to optimise mobile booking experiences, particularly as business travel patterns continue evolving.
Corporate credit cards dominate payment (77%), with virtual cards rarely used. This payment preference data offers insights for hotels developing direct booking incentives and payment processing strategies.
The Service Delivery Imperatives
The pain points are telling: slow Wi-Fi frustrates 51% of travellers, while 41% cite breakfast not being included in rates as a key complaint. These aren’t complex service failures—they’re basic execution issues that hotels can address immediately.
Safety concerns remain significant, with 30% reporting their property location didn’t feel safe. This presents both a risk management imperative and a competitive opportunity for hotels in secure locations to emphasise this advantage in their distribution messaging.
The Sustainability Blind Spot
Perhaps most striking: half of business travellers rarely or never consider environmental factors when booking hotels. Only 20% actively seek eco-certification. This suggests that while sustainability initiatives may support corporate social responsibility goals, they’re not yet driving booking decisions for the majority of business travellers.
For hotels, this means sustainability should be embedded into annual sourcing processes and communicated to travellers, but it shouldn’t be the primary differentiator in business travel segments.