Loyalty programs are the biggest marketing avenues for the new-age Indian traveler, and ITC Hotels has decided to take things up a notch by incentivizing long-term loyalty.
India's ancient wellness remedies have evolved from being traditions to becoming major revenue generators, and hotel chains are leaning into this demand.
For football icon Lionel Messi, the partnership allows his hotel brand to scale without the burden of direct management. For Meliá, there's a potential to turn athlete branding into long-term global growth.
Airbnb's bid to vastly expand its hotel business will be labor intensive and a years-long effort. The job openings it is advertising are just the start.
Numa specializes in a stripped-down model of apartment-style hotels. That may work in the mid-market. But as it moves upscale with its new brand, Native by Numa, can it appeal to premium guests who may expect more?
Wyndham's got a side hustle in what you might call frontier markets. While rivals crowd familiar ground, it's planting flags in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and chasing gaps in branded residential.
Airbnb will launch some type of membership program to give guests a reason to book a hotel on Airbnb rather than earn points elsewhere. It certainly won't be a clone of hotel group loyalty programs — that's not Airbnb's style.