Sean O'Neill

The U.S. Department of Commerce agency charged with forming voluntary cybersecurity standards for companies has released security guidance to hotels. The new report addresses a need for tighter security for property management systems, a core piece of software for hotels, at a time of reduced hotel staffing.

Suddenly the phrase "continuous pricing" is on the lips of airline executives worldwide. The reason is that price competition will be fierce once international air travel rebounds. The new pricing method promises to help airlines extract the most money possible from passengers based on their willingness to pay.

It's taken years for hotels to adopt an array of new technologies and business practices to improve selling travel online. The metaphor is like shaking a bottle of ketchup. Little appears until a lot suddenly comes out. Similarly, hotel digital innovation may come rapidly after a long wait.

Think of workplace communications tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Well, Beekeeper and Lua are versions of those tools built to help hourly workers without desktop computers. Many hotel groups use them to help housekeepers stay up-to-date in the workers' native languages.

The travel sector couldn't afford to lose money on efforts done merely to appear innovative for social media optics. So the companies and destinations rediscovered innovation's original spirit. They focused on lasting boosts to operational performance and traveler satisfaction.

This week, travel startups announced more than $20 million in funding. The startups target high-end B&Bs, group travel booking, destination planning, and other concepts.

American Express GBT's top boss Paul Abbott knows that having a distributed workforce can boost business travel spending. The travel management giant itself went 90 percent remote in the U.S. several years ago, and it saw its business travel expenses rise.

The pandemic has sped up airline testing of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other technologies to train workforces more cost-effectively. Expect a few travel companies to join KLM in having "extended reality" IT teams by 2025.

Recent investor bets include a German short-term rental brand (Cosi), a Finnish startup that builds chatbots for hotels (Hotelway), an Australian startup that offers rural cabins for urban dwellers (Unyoked), and a French revenue management company (Yieldin).

This deal cements Vacasa status as the largest full-service property manager for whole-home vacation rentals in the U.S. That makes it a rare pure-play bet on alternative accommodations for its private equity backers, which have prompted Vacasa to consolidate more of the sector.