Hi {{ first name | there }},

This one took a little longer to put together - but I think you'll see why :)

This week I was in Amsterdam for Mews Unfold, and while I was there I joined a small lunch for a group of travel tech CEOs and founders. The level of conversation was amazing, but I'm still figuring out just how strong the travel tech scene there really is. Spoiler: stronger than I expected.

This edition has three stories I couldn't wait to get to you, and tbh, I was sitting with all three of them knowing they all had to fit in one newsletter 🫠

Mews had what they're calling their biggest product launch ever (and after being in the room, I'd have a hard time arguing with that), WeRoad closed a funding round with Airbnb leading, and they're heading to the U.S! And there's an acquisition from Lighthouse too.

A lot happened. Let's get into it.

Last year I showed up at Unfold curious. This year I showed up with expectations, which is a harder thing to carry.

Mews hinted many times that there would be a big product launch. And while that did give me some serious FOMO, it was in fact true. During the product announcements, the person sitting behind me said "wow" in a way that felt directly from their gut. A mix of surprise and relief, right under their breath. Just: wow. There was also clapping and at one point, something close to a cheer. From hoteliers? At a software demo? I absolutely love it, but also… what?

This is weird. Hospitality tech is quite exhausting right now. Everyone claims to be number one, every product promises to transform something. Hoteliers try to run away from someone scheduling a new demo. So when a room full of them reacts like that… I watched.

At a certain point in the announcements, you could almost picture vendors doing math in their heads about where their own product will stand now. It’s true that competition makes everyone sharper, but it doesn't make the moment any less uncomfortable if you're on the receiving end.

I spoke to Josef Starýchfojtů (Mews's CPTO, who everyone calls Pepa) about their “Biggest Product Launch Ever”. He was very excited, at a level that you can’t fake after a long day. I asked whether having access to AI tools made it possible to ship so much in one cycle. Yes, he said. Absolutely.

This didn't come from nowhere. Their CEO Matt Welle has been pushing teams to experiment with AI, build with AI, for a while now. The tools might be new, but the culture was already there. Most of the hospitality tech conversation has been treating AI as a product, something you sell to hoteliers. Mews gave it to their own people first. Instead of talking about what AI can do for hospitality, they showed it from the inside out.

I should say: I'm not a hotelier. Some launches clearly hit harder than others, but tbh I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly which ones or why. While I am a generally curious (and nerd) person, I wasn't there to evaluate features. But here is what I know: 5 new things in one day is fast, by any measure. Fast enough that not everything will land equally. That’s what shipping at that pace looks like from the outside. The millennial in me thinks this is a bit like Taylor Swift dropping a full album at once. You won't love every track, but there will still be one that goes straight to the top charts.

Every announcement pointed in the same direction: what does a guest feel when everything just works? Pepa put it to the audience as a question. His team spent the last year building the frames for that answer.

And then, right at the end, they did the "one more thing" Jobs-style: a native partnership with SiteMinder, embedding the world's largest hotel distribution network directly into the platform. So yes, now distribution (travel tech’s favorite topic) also lives on Mews.

Richard Valtr said on stage: "PMS, RMS, CRS, CRM, POS… these aren't real things. They're acronyms invented by software companies to sell more software." This is what makes Mews… Mews. And the Uber partnership is probably the most literal proof of that yet, because there is no acronym for what that is.

A hospitality player and a mobility player asked "what if?" and made it happen: transportation to and from the hotel is part of the travel experience. The lines are blurred on where the stay starts and where it ends. Not long ago the narrative was about how many beds are in the hotel. Now ride booking, tracking, and billing live inside the platform - guests spend an average of $50 per stay on transportation that never touched the hotel bill. For me, this is the most exciting thing: thinking beyond the hotel's walls. Travel tech, finally leaving the building. Music to my ears.

By the end of the day everyone was exhausted. But there is a particular kind of energy that founders get when the things they have been talking about for years finally show up at the scale they always meant. When I talked to Richard, it came across immediately. He still ended up on the dancefloor. That probably tells you everything you need to know about the people making it happen, and about what kind of day it had been…

The keynote speaker was Duncan Wardle, the former head of innovation and creativity at Disney. His argument: intuition, bravery, empathy, imagination, curiosity - the five human traits hardest to program into AI. A tech company using its biggest annual event to say to their customers that the advantage isn't (only) in their software, but in how you think about what's possible.

It felt like they were actually betting on the people in the room, way beyond any AI slap. The industry needs more of that. I'll keep showing up for it.

WeRoad, the Milan-founded adventure travel company, closed a $58 million Series C led by Airbnb, with existing investor H14 also participating. Total funding now stands at $100 million. The money goes toward WeRoad's first expansion outside Europe, with multiple US cities targeted for 2026.

One week before the deal was announced, Airbnb held its Summer Release event and told the world it was moving beyond accommodation. Car rentals, grocery delivery, airport pickups, boutique hotels, city experiences. The message from Brian Chesky: "Travel shouldn't just be convenient. It should be meaningful." Seven days later, Airbnb put $58 million behind a company whose entire model is built around belonging.

The Airbnb backing fits a company that spent May announcing it wants to own the full trip, not just the place you sleep. WeRoad operates in exactly that experiential layer, and the investment reads as much like product strategy as portfolio management.

WeRoad has been building that community layer since 2017: group travel for solo travelers, every trip led by a group leader who handles logistics while keeping things from feeling like a package tour. More than 300,000 travelers, 60% rebooking year on year, a third of bookings coming from word of mouth.

"Brian Chesky built Airbnb around belonging, around the idea that strangers can genuinely connect. That's not so different from what we've been building at WeRoad. So even before any formal collaboration, there's an alignment of values that shapes how we both think about where travel is heading." said Paolo de Nadai.

The original Airbnb bet, that you could open your home to a stranger and something real could come of it, is not far from the one WeRoad has been making since 2017: that you can put strangers in a trip together and they come back friends.

No European travel brand has entered the US quite this way. WeRoad's answer is to not lead with WeMeet - a platform for local social events open to anyone (not just WeRoad travelers). More than 50,000 people across 35 cities attended a WeMeet event last year. Build community city by city first, let the travel product follow. Someone comes to a WeMeet dinner in Austin, feels what WeRoad is, books a trip six months later.

Andrea D'Amico, WeRoad's CEO and a Booking veteran, is relocating to San Francisco to take on the role of VP of Hotels at Airbnb. He stays on WeRoad's board. De Nadai resumes day-to-day leadership alongside co-founders Fabio Bin and Erika De Santi.

For European travel tech, this is one of the more interesting bets of the year. A community model built in Italy, now backed by the company that redefined where people stay, going after a market that runs on exactly the kind of belonging WeRoad has spent eight years learning how to create.

Lighthouse acquires Hotelrank.ai. Hotels have spent years getting good at being found on Google, on OTAs, on metasearch. None of that tells them what happens when someone opens ChatGPT and asks for a hotel recommendation. Are they showing up? Is the AI sending travelers to book direct or through an OTA? Who is ranking above them?

Hotelrank.ai was built in 2025 to answer exactly that. Lighthouse just acquired them. The combined platform now covers 80,000 hotels across 185 countries. Most hotels currently have no visibility into how AI ranks or recommends them. It's a new channel - smeone had to figure out how to track it.

This has been a busy week. Time to organize a few things and tackle the inbox flood. We’ll get back to the usual format next week.

see you next week,
Ana

The content of this newsletter is curated and published by Ana Metz, an innovation expert, passionate about technology and excited about the future of travel.

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