The Swedish Transport Agency recently granted the Swedish auto giant permission to begin real-world testing of its self-driving cars, boosting the company’s chances of meeting its stated goal of bringing the technology to market by 2021.

The self-driving cars will be allowed on motorways and streets in the Gothenburg area. The cars will not be allowed to exceed 60 kilometres per hour when the self-driving features are activated and drivers are required to keep at least one hand on the wheel at all times. Operators of the autonomous vehicles must also undergo training provided by Volvo.

Earlier this month, the Swedish company unveiled the futuristic concept car Volvo 360c, a fully autonomous, electric vehicle with no steering wheel that has been described as “a bedroom on wheels”, by a recent article on Verge.

The company will explore how autonomous vehicles can be used to shuttle people between cities, allowing them more time for rest, work and play instead of the hassle of flying. Air travel routes of around 300 kilometers (186 miles) are “prime candidates for disruption,” the company said. Such routes actually become more time-consuming by air than by car once you factor in travelling to and from the airport, going through security and boarding procedures. So, it would make sense to travel in a self-driven car that allows you to enjoy work and play, with premium comfort so that you wake up refreshed at your destination.

“The business will change in the coming years and Volvo should lead that change of our industry,” company president and CEO Håkan Samuelsson said in a press release announcing the 360c. “Autonomous drive will allow us to take the big next step in safety but also open up exciting new business models and allow consumers to spend time in the car doing what they want to do.”

Volvo concludes that the 360c is a mere starter for a conversation about the doors that autonomous driving might open up in the future. The company intends to advance that conversation as technology and infrastructure continue to evolve.

While this is definitely a great conversation starter, we can’t be sure if autonomous cars can actually completely replace flights. Moreover, with the advent of hyperloop and flying cars, the competition is quite tough. What would you choose?

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Hotel-booking startup Oyo is raising $1 billion to fund expansion into China and other global regions.

Existing investors including SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners have put in $800 million, with commitments for another $200 million, the company said.

About $600 million of the total will be plowed into China where Oyo began operations only 10 months ago. According to reports, the funding values the startup at $5 billion.

Ritesh Agarwal, founded Oyo five years after travelling around India on a shoestring budget. He discovered wildly unpredictable standards for hotels and guest houses, and decided to start an online service to bring more reliability to the travel experience. In the past two years, Oyo has expanded beyond India into China, Malaysia, Nepal and Britain.

OYO Founder Ritesh Agarwal

“With this additional funding, we plan to rapidly scale our business in these countries, while continuing to invest further in technology and talent,” Agarwal said in the statement. “We will also deploy fresh capital to take our unique model that enables small hotel owners to create quality living spaces, global.”

His startup, whose official name is Oravel Stays Pvt, signs on hotel owners and then gets them to upgrade everything from linen, toiletries and bathroom fittings to its specifications. It also equips hotels with staff training and standardized supplies. It then brings them on board its hotel website, and hotel owners pay Oyo a certain percent commission.

“Budget travellers are consistently shortchanged by the lack of trust, quality, and consistency,” said Bejul Somaia, managing director of Lightspeed India, explaining that Oyo can change that dynamic.

At a $5 billion valuation, Oyo would be India’s most-valuable startup after One97 Communications. The domestic hotel industry includes large chains with dependable hospitality experiences at the mid to top end. But the business also includes thousands of unbranded, ramshackle hotels and lodges with broken beds, yellowing linen and stinking bathrooms. Oyo is trying to make hotels easier to find through its site and more predictable as well.

Its criteria are exacting — from the thickness of the mattress to the placement of the light switches to the size of the showerhead in the bathroom. Agarwal has said that he wants the Oyo brand to convey a superior experience.

Oyo began with one hotel in Gurgaon and has grown to 1,25,000 rooms in India, where it says it’s tripling year-over-year in terms of transactions. In China, where it began operations last November, it has expanded to 171 cities with 87,000 rooms. It is now in over 350 cities with 2,11,000 rooms.

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Malaysia Airlines, together with Amadeus, has launched MHchat, a new feature which helps travellers book flights and pay through Facebook Messenger.

Jointly developed with Malaysia Airlines as its pilot customer, the Amadeus Chatbot for Airlines is a new solution designed to make it easier for travellers to book flights, retrieve bookings and ask questions through a social media messaging platform customers are already familiar with.

Image source: TTG Asia

On Facebook Messenger, Malaysia Airlines’ customers can use MHchat if they want to look up flights or ask a question related to a booking. The bot will search, locate and push offers or information using artificial intelligence.

Travellers can even complete a transaction, make a secure payment and receive the travel itinerary all within the same app.

The Amadeus Chatbot for Airlines can be customised for any airline, delivering customer satisfaction, more revenue opportunities as well as cost-savings around customer care, according to the launch partners.

Amadeus said it will continue to drive technology improvements and bolster the chatbot with new features including multi-language support, adding ancillary services to an existing booking, and integration with Amazon’s Alexa for voice capabilities.

Thanks to advancements in Big Data and Predictive analytics, Chatbots have been making big strides in travel. Just earlier this year, Sabre Corporation launched a pilot programme of an AI-powered chatbot that leverages Microsoft’s Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services, a set of tools that organisations can use to add intelligent and conversational features to their applications. Sabre is initially piloting the chatbot with the travel agency Travel Services International USA (TSI) and the travellers they serve.

In another case, Incheon International Airport added a talking robot that interacts with passengers, featuring a message programme that enables it to communicate information about the airport’s facilities to travellers.

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Imagine you’ve checked out of your hotel and now have a couple of hours to kill in a foreign city before you take the next flight out. But suddenly you realize that you have two heavy suitcases to lug around, and give up on the idea of exploring. Then there is also the hassle of carrying all that stuff for your month-long vacation. What about that extra baggage that you know airlines will charge you for?

Not anymore. A trolley-load of new luggage services have appeared in recent years, trying to disrupt a staid market with promises of revolutionary ways to carry, or not carry, that dreaded suitcase.

Dubz

Dubz is a luggage pickup, storage and delivery service in Dubai, offering travelers time and comfort by getting bags picked up or dropped off, stored, and even checked in! Through the DUBZ website, travellers can arrange a pick-up, and have their luggage checked in and collected by a dnata agent from their home or hotel anywhere in Dubai, allowing travelers to then enjoy their day baggage-free. Users can then save time by skipping baggage drop-off and check-in queues at the airport, with their boarding pass and baggage tags provided on the spot.

Airportr

Based in London since 2014, Airportr picks up luggage anywhere inside the M25, and drops it off at either Gatwick or Heathrow airports. In 2016 in London, they launched Bag Check-In with British Airways. They moved the bag drop desk online, allowing travellers to give luggage to their professional drivers at their front door. So now, when travellers fly with one of their partner airlines, they can check in bags on the doorstep. No time-wasting. No lugging. No stressing.

LugLess

The startup’s tag line “travel without the baggage” is appropriate. LugLess is a travel agent for luggage. They are a door-to-door luggage shipping service that picks up a traveller’s luggage from their home, office, or hotel and sends it directly to wherever they are going ahead of time anywhere in USA and over 200 countries worldwide. They allow customers to bypass baggage fees, waiting in check-in lines, help them go through security faster, and help them avoid baggage claim and prospect of lost luggage. They are also sometimes less expensive that what airlines charge on the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th bag for baggage fees.

Bagshuttle

This German startup picks up a traveller’s luggage from their desired address and has it delivered wherever they want. Simply enter your destination, make the payment
and you´ll receive your personal Bagshuttle confirmation. Upon arrival, they pick up your luggage personally or store it at their partners´ storage locations. When departing, they pick up your luggage from the desired address. Travellers can then go on bag-free to a business meeting or on a sightseeing tour. Meanwhile, Bagshuttle picks up your luggage and delivers it to your desired destination.

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Alibaba AI Labs is all set to introduce a robot designed specifically for the hospitality sector, in October this year.

“Alibaba AI Labs’ robot is the next step in the evolution towards smart hotels,” said Chen Lijuan, general manager of Alibaba AI Labs, adding that the development will help “bridge the gap between guest needs and the response time they expect”.

From its deployment in October, the new robot will be able to deliver food or laundry to guests, offering a glimpse into the future of hotel service. Guests can talk to the robot, using voice commands, touch and hand gestures. Its answers are powered by AliGenie, the software behind the Tmall Genie smart speaker made by Alibaba AI Labs.

The robot, slightly under one metre in height, moves at a speed of up to one metre per second. It is cased in aluminium and features multi-sense data functionality, along with parallel computing, for fast responses.

Onboard are a semantic map, autonomous navigation system to identify and dodge obstacles, a communications system to control elevators and facial-recognition technology for ID verification.

The global market for service robots is on the rise. Citing the International Federation of Robotics, Alibaba says there the market is growing between 20 and 25 per cent from 2018 and 2020, with sales during that period totaling around US$27 billion for the professional service segment.

After a trial of the service robot at hotels, AI Labs will determine whether it’s suitable for use in hospitals, restaurants and offices.

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Skyscanner has developed a one-stop flight search service with Yahoo search that will enable Hong Kongers to simultaneously view flight details as they research a destination, introducing greater ease to their itinerary planning and budgeting.

The new service, currently only available in traditional Chinese, has been launched in Yahoo’s desktop and mobile website in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and is expected to be gradually rolled out across other regions.

Image source: Skift

The partnership will see Skyscanner flight search features embedded into Yahoo search pages on desktop and mobile devices. When users search with designated keywords on the page, flight search bars powered by Skyscanner will appear.

Users can then adjust a series of filters, such as round-trip or one-way flights, number of passengers, cabin class, origin city and destination, and trip dates.

Upon pressing the Search Flights button, they will be redirected to the Skyscanner website, where they can proceed with the booking.

Lorraine Cheung, head of audience at Yahoo, said the search engine will continue to explore adding more features to support travellers in different aspects of their trip planning.

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OYO Hotels plans to invest € 40 million in the United Kingdom to expand its presence in 10 cities in the county during the next 18 months, marking its first foray beyond Asian markets.

It will start operations with four properties in London that offer more than 80 rooms and by 2020, OYO plans to hire 100 people in cities across the UK and host guests in over 5,000 rooms. The cities include Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

“The UK has been the topmost international travel destination for several years and last year hosted over 19 million tourists from around the world,” said Ritesh Agarwal, founder CEO of OYO.

“Driven by its booming domestic and international travel and budget hospitality needs, the UK presents a multi-billion dollar opportunity for OYO,” he said.

The UK business will be led by British entrepreneur Jeremy Sanders, who co-founded the British restaurant chain, Coco di Mama. “Over the next year, they will aim to build out the team by hiring an additional 100,” people across the country, he said.

OYO will offer guests the OYO Townhouse experience — suited for the needs of millennial travellers, aspiring for high-quality accommodations.

OYO is backed by leading investors, including the SoftBank Group, Greenoak Capital, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Hero Enterprise and China Lodging Group.

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Tourism Authority of Thailand’s (TAT) governor Yuthasak Supasorn and Expedia Group’s director of market management Pimpawee Nopakitgumjorn, yesterday signed an MoU to boost tourism to secondary cities in the country, aligned with the TAT’s direction.

As part of the MOU, the collaboration will include the sharing of traveller-centric insights and trends that will boost TAT’s capabilities to plan effective promotional campaigns to attract more travellers and encourage longer stays in Thailand.

From left: Yuthasak Supasorn (TAT) and Pimpawee Nopakitgumjorn (Expedia)

Both parties are also expected to embark on joint destination marketing campaigns to spotlight Thailand’s hidden and unique tourist attractions in its secondary cities, promoting the variety of lodgings to Expedia Group’s 675-plus million monthly visitors globally.

Expedia Group will also launch key programmes in destination marketing and skills transfer to the local hospitality industry in secondary cities. Workshops for local hotel partners will include ways to leverage Expedia Group’s Partner Central platform to accelerate skills development and build revenue and hotel management capabilities among local SME hotels.

Other aspects of the cooperation include a joint corporate social responsibility campaign aimed at enhancing environmental consciousness among hotels in Thailand and reducing the use of single-use and general plastic items in their properties. This is targeted at reducing the environmental pollution and damage resulting from tourism growth.

Pimpawee said, “A large majority of accommodations in secondary cities are still primarily offline which means international travellers cannot find or book them easily. This results in missed opportunities for hoteliers, as they are not capitalising on the growth of inbound travellers.

“We will be launching a series of initiatives to educate them on the value of online distribution. They will also have access to our partner-facing tool, which allows them to effectively manage their rates and availability, online content and guest satisfaction. By improving the digital skills of the hospitality sector, we will play a pivotal role in boosting the local economy.”

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Travel review and booking site TripAdvisor wants to become more social when it launches a new site and mobile experience later this year, enabling members to post photos and videos and get travel recommendations and inspiration from friends, brands and travel experts they follow.

Currently in beta format, the new-style TripAdvisor will look to expand its community beyond travellers leaving reviews to include publishers, such as National Geographic, as well as brands and social media influencers. Travellers will be able to follow and connect with individuals or content creators who share information that is relevant to their interests and travel plans.

Image source: Skift

TripAdvisor said over 500 launch partners have signed up for the new website – currently in beta test – including the Travel Channel, Business Insider, GoPro, PopSugar, Daniel Food Diary, Have Halal Will Travel, Denise Keller and Melissa C Koh.

In addition to the many content creators joining the platform, TripAdvisor’s team of destination experts and TripAdvisor Media Group brands, including Smarter Travel, Cruise Critic and TheFork.com, will also contribute to the site experience through unique profiles and travel content.

TripAdvisor members will be able to create and view new forms of content including photos, videos and articles. Members will also have the ability to create “Trips,” which can be in-depth travel guides, itineraries or simple wish lists of things to do while traveling. Trips can be made private and saved for personal use or shared with the community to inspire and help others.

A “travel feed” will enable TripAdvisor members to discover more relevant information faster when planning travel. Assisted throughout the entire travel planning process, members can draw advice and inspiration from their friends, family and trusted experts.

When a member logs onto the TripAdvisor app or site, their homepage transforms into a personalised feed of information. When searching a particular destination, the feed automatically narrows the scope of the information displayed to that particular geographic location.

Stephen Kaufer, CEO & co-founder of TripAdvisor, said in a statement: “The new TripAdvisor is the one travel site that brings together social-assistive tools, amazing content and our existing booking capabilities to merge the joy of planning and discovery together into a single experience. We are assisting our members at each step of their journey as we become a more personalised, inspirational and useful TripAdvisor.”

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TripFactory, a customized holiday platform, is in talks to raise $100 million in Series-B or second round of institutional funding, a senior executive of the company told Mint India, a leading financial newspaper. TripFactory was co-founded by Vinay Gupta, Amit Aggarwal and Varun Gupta in 2015. Vinay Gupta and Amit Aggarwal had earlier co-found and sold Via.com to Ebix.

“We are looking to raise a $100 million or even more, depending on the kind of investors we can attract,” said Vinay Gupta, co-founder of the online holiday company. Vinay Gupta added that TripFactory is in talks with various funds based out of the Silicon Valley, China and Japan. The online travel marketplace founders will also be engaging with investors who backed their previous startup Via.com.

“We will obviously go back to engage with investors that had shown confidence in us as founders, when we were fundraising for our previous venture via.com, namely Kaalari, Sequoia, Expedia, Priceline, Naspers, Temasek, Premji and new ones like Google, Microsoft, and others,” said Vinay Gupta.

In 2015, the company had raised around $10 million in a Series A Funding from Aarin Capital Partners led by former Infosys Ltd board member T.V. Mohandas Pai and Manipal Group chairman Dr. Ranjan Pai.

“It’s ironic. Travel is an information industry with Zero-IT, it’s just oceans of people everywhere, misinformation in short. All it has seen is a little bit of software automation, more like old car rental companies using software, before Uber came,” said Vinay Gupta.

“We questioned why there is no large holiday company globally. You have to go a few 100 years back and say where did it all start, and then we can innovate. You cannot try making the frying pan better, like the rest, to come up with a microwave. It meant redefining everything; building the world’s First Full stack holiday company. The tech platform we built, like AWS, to sell holidays world over creating the first truly integrated global holiday company with network effects worth 100’s of billions of dollars,” he added.

TripFactory is looking to scale up using an omni-channel; goal is to sell 60k-100k holidays a day. The company is looking to hire around 400 people and set up offices in various cities across the globe. New offices in Dubai, Singapore, Manila, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong later this year as part of its global expansion plans.

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