Duff on Hospitality Law

Good Sunday evening from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, December 5, 2025, is below. With last week’s Thanksgiving holiday break, our list of stories this week is longer than usual. Enjoy.

• • Otto Introduces AI Assistant for Business Travel. Seattle-based Otto’s release this past week of its new AI-enabled business travel assistant, Otto the Agent, garnered many of the industry’s headlines, including headlines by Seattle’s own Geekwire. If you are a regular reader of our Updates, you know that Geekwire is Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Focused technology news service. Those behind the new startup include a who’s who of travel industry veterans, including Spotnana’s Steve Singh, Orbitz’s Barney Harford and Expedia’s Michael Gulmann. The platform, which has been in beta tests since August 2024, is designed to learn travelers’ travel habits and then apply those learnings to planning and booking (without leaving the platform) travel – for now, flights and hotels. For the next 12 months, the platform will be free to individual users and small businesses. 

• • Personalized Pricing in Legislative and Regulatory Crosshairs. Given the number of questions we’ve fielded over the past few weeks regarding personalized pricing and now New York’s recently enacted legislation, I think it time to put personalized pricing on our distribution radar and list of “distribution” related topics that we monitor daily. This week, we feature two stories on the growing calls to regulate so-called “surveillance” pricing, including New York’s October passage of surveillance legislation that requires New York businesses to notify consumers whenever personal information is used when setting pricing. New York is not alone is considering steps to combat this allegedly abusive practice as several states considered similar (often bipartisan) legislation this past year. Much of this legislation activity is built on earlier efforts by the FTC that were abandoned with the change in administrations. How these state-level efforts might fair in light of the Trump Administration’s threatened Executive Order limiting state-level regulation of artificial intelligence remains to be seen. How these rules might affect the travel industry, including the use of personalized offers and promotions (think targeted loyalty program promotions) also remains to be seen. We plan to cover all of these topics and more in future Updates.

• • Confusing Headline Calls into Question Hopper’s Long Term Travel Plans. On November 24, Skift ran a story stating that Capital One (one of the largest known users of Hopper’s B2B booking platform and Hopper investor) was “buying” (not licensing, as it already likely does) Hopper’s software that powers Capital One’s cardholder travel platform and hiring several members of Hopper’s hotel and engineering teams.  What this change might mean for Hopper’s declining B2C and remaining B2B distribution business is unclear. 

• • Power of Event Based Travel Leads Trip.com to Add Tickets to Its Online Inventory. Trip.com recently announced a new partnership with Ireland-based ticketing company, Coras, that will provide the traditional OTA and its users with access to tickets for major concerts, sports and theater events. Users of Trip.com will now be able to see real time availability and pricing for events “in path” without being re-directed to another booking website. According to Coras CEO, Mark McLaughlin, events (thank Taylor Swift and her recent Eras tour) have become a huge motivator for travel and event tickets are often the first product that a user purchases. Combining event tickets with other travel products provides travel suppliers an opportunity to upsell flights, hotels and transfers (and not vice versa). From what we’ve learned recently, event ticket sales and distribution can be very different than the distribution of traditional travel products.

• • ARC Shuts Down Program Selling Traveler Data to Department of Homeland Security. This hopefully brings an end to the controversial practice by the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) that several of you brought to my attention over the past few weeks.    

Have a great week.