ITB Berlin 2026

We just got back from ITB Berlin — the world's largest travel trade show. A hundred thousand people in one giant venue, all talking about tourism, business, and technology. We spent three days walking the halls, talking with business partners, hotel customers, PMS providers, and technology companies about what is happening with AI in hospitality.

The scale is hard to describe. You walk past the CEO of Mews in one aisle and bump into a potential integration partner in the next. It feels both enormous and surprisingly tight-knit — the hospitality technology world is smaller than you think, even when a hundred thousand people show up.

We came to ITB to understand how Opally fits into this landscape, to listen, and to learn. We left with deeper relationships, a full calendar of demos, and a clear picture of where the industry is heading.

If there was a single theme we heard over and over again at ITB, it was trust. How do you trust an AI tool with your guest data? How do you know it is not making things up? How do you stay in control?

It makes sense. AI solutions are popping up everywhere right now. There is a big abundance of tools, and it is easy to pick one off the shelf. But for hotels, the stakes are higher than for most industries — you are handling personal guest information, representing your brand in every reply, and one wrong answer can cost you a booking or a review.

The hotels we spoke with are not just looking for the fastest or cheapest AI. They are choosing the solutions that are building towards the future their hotel wants to go in. That means transparency about where data lives, honest answers about what the AI can and cannot do, and always keeping the human in control.

The biggest shift compared to a year ago: AI in hospitality is no longer a future concept. Hotels that adopted AI early are sharing real numbers — faster response times, higher conversion rates, and front desk teams that finally have time for the guests standing in front of them.

The hotels that have not started yet feel the pressure. When your competitor replies to a booking inquiry in 30 seconds and you take 6 hours, guests notice. When their chatbot answers availability questions at 2 AM and yours shows a contact form, you lose the booking.

The gap between AI-enabled hotels and the rest is widening fast, and ITB made that visible.

One theme kept surfacing in panels and hallway conversations alike: guest communication is where AI delivers the most immediate value. Not in back-office analytics or revenue management dashboards — but in the inbox, on the website, and on the phone.

This makes sense. Guest communication is high-volume, time-sensitive, and repetitive. A large share of all guest emails are questions that could be answered in seconds if the right information were pulled together automatically. That is exactly the kind of work AI was built for.

Hotels told us they are spending less time on routine emails and more time on the interactions that actually shape the guest experience — welcoming arrivals, handling special requests, and creating memorable moments.

Another clear message from ITB: standalone AI tools are not enough. Hotels need AI that connects to their existing systems — their PMS, their booking engine, their email platform.

An AI that does not know your rates, your availability, or your guest's reservation is just guessing. And guessing is not hospitality. The most impressive demos at ITB were not the ones with the flashiest interfaces — they were the ones where AI pulled live data and produced accurate, personalized responses that a receptionist could trust and send.

This is something we think about every day at Opally. Our integrations with systems like Mews, Apaleo, and BookVisit exist because AI without context is just noise.

GDPR came up in nearly every conversation. European hoteliers are increasingly aware that not all AI solutions handle guest data the same way. Where is the data processed? Where is it stored? How long is it kept? Can guests request deletion?

Hotels that can answer these questions confidently are winning trust — with guests and with corporate travel buyers who require strict data handling. Data privacy is no longer just a compliance checkbox. In Europe, it is becoming a genuine competitive advantage.

ITB is an international show, and so is the reality of running a hotel. A property in Berlin might receive inquiries in German, English, French, Spanish, and Japanese — all in the same morning. Hiring multilingual staff is expensive and difficult. Training new hires takes months.

AI solves this elegantly. It detects the guest's language and responds in kind, with the right level of formality and local conventions. Several hoteliers told us this alone justified their investment — the ability to reply professionally in any language, instantly, without needing a native speaker on shift.

We came to ITB at a research stage — to understand what this event is, how Opally fits in, and how we should engage with the market here. Next year, maybe a stand. But this year was about listening.

What we are leaving with: deeper relationships with PMS partners, demos booked for the weeks ahead, and a few potential partnerships that could shape what we build next. The conversations confirmed what we already believed — hotels want AI that integrates with their systems, respects their data, and gives their team the final word.

We are building Opally for exactly this moment. Because the best technology in hospitality does not replace the human touch — it creates more room for it.

If we met at ITB and you want to pick up where we left off — or if you missed the show and want to see what AI can do for your hotel — we would love to hear from you.

Start a free trial or book a demo, and experience what happens when your front desk gets an AI assistant that actually understands hospitality.