Innovation

📦 Lufthansa Group integrates Apple's AirTags into its baggage tracking systems to enhance transparency and efficiency for passengers. Following United Airlines, Lufthansa and its affiliates—SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and Eurowings—allow customers to privately and securely share their AirTag's location through the group's digital baggage tracing channels. Lufthansa's "Digital Hangar" team, led by board member and executive Dieter Vranckx, consists of 1,000 digital product experts committed to offering new digital services monthly, aiming at improving customer experience through innovation.

📝 Cocohop, launched in beta after co-development with travel industry professionals, leverages artificial intelligence and collaborative tools for personalized travel offerings. Entrepreneurs Vincent and Molina Paulin aim to end standardized packages. The platform connects travel agents, DMCs, and travel planners, facilitating collaboration, communication, and customization of trips using a database with millions of tourist interest points. Users can interact, vote, and select trip components, with AI automating planning, generating travel booklets and quotes, and a conversational agent assisting professionals. Cocohop is collaborative, allowing customization and direct client engagement, and utilizes Google's Gemini AI for data enrichment and multilingual translations. Subscription fees range from €29 to €99 per month during the beta phase until June 2025, with bespoke packages for larger tourism entities. Cocohop aims to become the default travel organization solution, promoting local and responsible tourism, and plans to expand its professional network and AI solutions to personalize travel further.

🏨 SomnOO manages over 60 hotels with more than 4,400 rooms, ranging from 2 to 4 stars, primarily in France and Germany. The company expects €100M in revenue by 2024 and conducts several acquisitions yearly, with a long-term goal of owning 100% of its establishments. Supported by financial partners, such as Crédit Mutuel Equity since 2024, SomnOO aims to be among Europe's top five hotel owners and operators. The company's growth strategy includes expanding its portfolio and converting minority hotel interests into majority ones, totaling approximately 45 managed and 20 majority-owned hotels.

📈 Histovery raised €4 million from MI3 and Bpifrance's Tech and Touch fund to enhance its U.S. team and develop a new Augmented Exhibition for the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. Founded in 2014, Histovery is known for its Histopad, which offers immersive 360-degree historical reconstructions using augmented reality. The company has partnered with 20 iconic sites and plans to accelerate international growth, particularly in the U.S., with this funding.

📰 Trivago leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) for its latest TV ad campaign in 2024, using large language models (LLM) to adapt a single ad for 20 different markets. The ad featured former German football player Jürgen Klopp and demonstrated the use of AI to translate speech into 20 languages, synchronize lip movements and tone for authenticity, and streamline marketing campaign management. Trivago's CEO, Johannes Thomas, highlighted the potential of AI in engaging users worldwide without traditional dubbing.

🎨 Maha Eddamouhny, Partnerships Manager at Atopia, discusses the potential of the metaverse platform Atopia to make museums virtually accessible. Eddamouhny emphasizes the metaverse's role in enhancing accessibility for those geographically distant or with mobility issues, its educational potential for younger generations, and its supplementary, not substitutive, nature to physical museum visits.

🎰 Groupe Partouche, a European leader in casinos, started offering cryptocurrency payments at its prestigious Casino Royal Palm in Cannes since early January 2025, with plans to expand this service to all its establishments by 2025. The innovative move comes as a response to the globally connected clientele and demonstrates Partouche's commitment to integrating blockchain technologies into its offerings, paving the way for a cutting-edge gaming experience. In 2022, Partouche announced the convergence of traditional casinos with blockchain technology through the Partouche Multiverse initiative.

🏨 Ariane Systems, with 20+ years of expertise and over 3,000 installations in 29 countries, has been acquired by Vertus Group, a division of Jonas Hospitality and Constellation Software Inc. This move consolidates Ariane's market leadership in hotel check-in and check-out technology solutions. CEO Laurent Cardot expresses confidence in continued innovation and premium solution delivery to the hospitality market under the new ownership.

💻 Maxime Vermeir of ABBYY discussed the concept of RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) introduced in 2020 by Meta's researchers, then known as Facebook AI Research (FAIR). RAG aims to improve the predictive nature of language models like Llama, ChatGPT, and Claude by incorporating up-to-date data from a knowledge base, enhancing response quality and accuracy. The process involves converting information into structured data and vectors, stored in a vector database. RAG can integrate with APIs, allowing access to external databases. It's used by enterprises, including ABBYY, to make internal knowledge accessible for problem-solving and has potential applications in the travel industry for personalized trip planning. RAG complements natural language processing (NLP) to improve the capabilities of AI personal assistants.

🚀 Boom Supersonic's XB-1 jet broke the sound barrier on January 28, 2025, during a 38-minute experimental flight above the Mojave Desert, California, reaching a speed of Mach 1.122 (1,373.328 km/h). This marks over 21 years since the last Concorde flight, with Boom looking to bring back commercial supersonic travel. Their goal is to develop the Overture, a supersonic airliner anticipated to cut London-New York travel time to 3h15 from the current 7 hours.