Hugo Pellegrin

🏖 Turin named European Capital of Smart Tourism for 2025. The European Commission is looking for the 2026 European Capital of Smart Tourism and Green Pioneer Smart Tourism City for destinations with 25,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. Selection involves a two-step process judged on sustainability, accessibility, digitization, and cultural heritage. Winners get marketing support, including a promotional video, a city sculpture, and increased visibility. Open to EU member states and Single Market countries, applications close on May 30, 2025, at 17h, with results announced in November 2025.

📷 Kleio, cofounded by ex-C3 AI colleagues Philippe Wellens (CEO), Adrien Mathieu (President), and Louis Poirier (CTO), aims to revolutionize travel interfaces with conversational AI. The startup plans to introduce a prototype in six months and further develop a sales team companion tool, Alex, by year-end. Kleio's platform uses OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models, offering modular and agnostic components for ease of technological replacement. The AI has already tripled qualified leads within days of use. Deployment for travel distributors, dealing with inventories up to 100 million lines, takes about three months, including one month of configuration and two months of testing. Their conversational AI has notably attracted users aged 40-70, mostly on mobile devices, seeking either budget or premium custom travel options, with 70% using Kleio outside agency hours.

🏩 Travel Compositor unveiled Dora, a travel vending machine with a conversational avatar, at ITB Berlin 2025. Linda Noskova, CCO, discussed its reception and utility for travel agencies and hoteliers. Dora streamlines services, offering tourism advice and handling busy reception times. It connects to over 300 suppliers, facilitating instant multi-destination searches and complex bookings, like a 320-day trip across 15 destinations. European deployment is planned, with potential expansion to South America. Initial installations are expected in the latter half of the year.

🛫 Lufthansa Innovation Hub's analysts reveal a methodology to assess the credibility of 7 aviation innovations by comparing Google Search popularity, patent volume, and academic articles. Key findings include a 3.5x increase in technical progress in electric aviation between 2019 and 2024, with a 200% rise in battery patents since 2021 and a 150% increase in electric propulsion system patents between 2021 and 2023. Despite the hype, the aviation industry faces challenges such as high operational costs, strict regulations, and environmental concerns for supersonic travel, while the hydrogen-powered aircraft lacks significant breakthroughs, reflected by the abandonment of Airbus's ZEROe project and Universal Hydrogen's bankruptcy in 2024.

📱 Atout France launched its AI travel assistant, MarIAnne, in February 2024 to offer personalized services and insights on visitor preferences for France.fr. Since its launch, MarIAnne has registered over 15,000 selections in 15 languages, generated over 7,000 itineraries, and featured more than 73,000 tourist points of interest, with a user satisfaction rate of 92%. The top-searched themes by international travelers were gastronomy, culture, and heritage, with Paris and regions like Bordeaux and Provence being the most popular destinations. The upcoming version of MarIAnne will focus on accessibility by integrating the Tourisme & Handicap database. Atout France aims to use AI for data qualification, personalization, and to encourage niche tourism development. Sophie Mandrillon and Eve Le Gall of Atout France emphasize the transformative potential of AI, paralleling the digital revolution of the early 2000s, and envision more personalized AI travel assistants that accompany travelers throughout their journey in multiple languages.

📅 On March 13, 2025, the Future of Travel Distribution (FTD25) will take place at the Cloud Business Center in Paris. Organized by Eventiz, the event aims to prepare industry players for changes in travel distribution in the age of AI. Key speakers such as Antoine Walter from Expedia, Julien Lechat from Travel Meta, André-Louis Rochet from Tw3 Partners, Cyril Guiraud from Theta, Cédric Lefort from Sabre, Charles Tandonnet from Travelsoft, Moncef Khanfir from Wondermiles, and Hervé Kozar from Air France will discuss various topics including AI's impact on traveler experience, its integration into distribution tools, content fragmentation, airline transition with AI, and dynamic packaging.