Hugo Pellegrin

🎭 To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Palais Garnier, Opéra national de Paris partners with Backlight and Vive Arts for a virtual reality experience named "Magie Opéra." This multi-user, geo-located immersive journey features dreamlike scenes from legendary operas, guiding visitors alongside a young singer named Céleste through famous arias and the history and future of opera. Equipped with the Vive Focus 3 headset, the public can enjoy this 25-minute VR experience in French and English until August 31, 2025. Highlights include arias by Renée Fleming, Martina Serafin, and Elīna Garanča.

🏨 Hotiday secures €5.5 million funding for its digital hotel room platform expansion in Europe. Led by P101 SGR with 40Jemz and business angels' participation, this round follows a 500% revenue increase since 2023. Founded in 2022 and accelerated by B4i – Bocconi for Innovation, Hotiday digitalizes the hospitality industry with data-driven solutions, adding services like loyalty programs and AI assistance via WhatsApp. Currently in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France, with 65 hotel partnerships including TH Resorts, it plans for further European market penetration and service enhancement.

🏠 In April 2025, OpenAI's ChatGPT Search surpassed one billion queries, while travel-related searches via LLM accounted for 2.6% of SEO traffic. Jérémy Lacoste of Eskimoz discussed the impact of conversational search engines on online searches. By February 2024, LLM searches were under 1% of online traffic, but within a year, LLM traffic grew 29 times. The travel industry is among the top three impacted by conversational search engines. AI Overviews are now active in 120 countries, potentially pushing down sponsored results and organic rankings. Google's search volume increased by 21% from 2023 to 2024, and for every ChatGPT query, Google registers 337. Eskimoz has a dedicated GEO team of four to integrate these practices into global SEO strategies.

📱 TNMT analyzes the potential of extended reality (XR)—including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality—for the airline industry, drawing inspiration from cruise ship innovation strategies. Princess Cruises and Royal Caribbean use XR for immersive dining and destination exploration, while Lufthansa offers VR headsets for in-flight entertainment. Manchester Airport has a VR gaming lounge, Samsonite showcases luggage through VR, and Perfect Corp provides virtual cosmetic try-ons. Despite these advancements, TNMT notes a lack of cooperation in creating a cohesive XR ecosystem, with the industry awaiting more socially acceptable and comfortable devices like those from Meta and Ray-Ban, Rayneo, and potentially Apple.

📈 Anthropic launched the open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024, offering a new standard for AI assistants to access enterprise data. The MCP quickly became an industry standard, with major players like OpenAI and Google Deepmind adopting it. The protocol allows AI models like ChatGPT to interact with an enterprise's data for tasks, enhancing AI precision. In the travel industry, MCP can enable hotels to make their catalogs accessible to AI, potentially changing how travelers book rooms and interact with offers. Experts suggest businesses develop their own AI agents to maintain control over customer relationships and data.

✈ Kayak's study reveals that in 2024, 36% of flights were delayed, up 6% from 2023. The most delayed French airports are Nice – Côte d'Azur with 46% of flights delayed, averaging 34 minutes, Paris-Charles de Gaulle at 32 minutes, and Marseille at 27 minutes. Regional airports such as Pau, Montpellier, and Toulon reported fewer delays than the national average. Pau, despite being the most punctual, had a 2.1% flight cancellation rate, the second highest nationally. Tips to avoid flight delays include flying before 8 am, avoiding post-3 pm flights, choosing Tuesday and Wednesday over weekends and Fridays, staying clear of July and August, and opting for regional airports.