Distribución y Revenue Management

📍 Booking flight and hotel on the same platform offers convenience, time savings, exclusive deals, personalized experiences, and consumer protection. With Oceanflights, travelers can compare flights quickly and efficiently. Benefits include easier reservation management, payment flexibility, local insights, and support for sustainable consumption by enabling hotels to sell packages directly on their websites. This model empowers hotels with valuable data, autonomy, and intelligence, supporting the local environment.

🏠 Online travel agencies (OTAs) now account for 18% of global bookings for tourist attractions, doubling their market share since 2019, as reported by Arival. Fundación Unicaja has acquired a 35% stake in Alma Cruceros, which will begin operations in April with an inaugural cruise from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to Málaga, focusing on exclusive trips for the Spanish-speaking community. Mallorca introduces Spain's first Dual Vocational Training (FP Dual) in Hotel Circular Economy, offering 645 hours of coursework and practical experience in 15 companies, starting June with 19 students.

🏠 Mercer Hoteles, a luxury 5-star hotel chain, expands its presence in Barcelona at the 18th-century Palau Moxó, now offering five high-end residences for long stays in the Gothic Quarter. The historic Palau Moxó, a baroque palace and family residence of the Moxó lineage until 2017, provides unique accommodations ranging from 140 to 260 square meters with duplex layouts, up to three bedrooms, designed by TDB Arquitectura and Il·lacions Design Gallery. Along with gym facilities, concierge and maintenance services, guests have access to amenities at the nearby Mercer Barcelona hotel. The brand's growth is set to include Mercer Hotel Madrid in 2023, and expansions to Córdoba and Alella by 2026.

✈️ Maarlab and Paraty Tech introduced Oceanflights, a one-click vacation booking solution integrating flight and accommodation, at Fitur 2025. Oceanflights aims to boost direct hotel sales by attracting new traveler segments and dramatically reducing cancellation rates—by 94%. For hoteliers, it increases direct sales by 10-15%, offers real-time data on air routes, pricing freedom, and reduces reliance on OTAs. For travelers, it simplifies booking, enhances trust with hotel brand protection, offers better prices, and improves overall service. Oceanflights is a win-win, transforming the way tourism experiences are marketed.

💰 EBITDA, a financial term, stands for Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It's used to measure a company's gross profit excluding taxes, loan interests, accounting amortizations, or financial leverage. Calculating EBITDA is crucial for analyzing a company's core profitability and cash-generating ability. The calculation involves a simple formula: EBITDA = Net Profit + Interest + Taxes + Depreciation + Amortization. An example provided shows a company with a net profit of €2 million, interest payments of €250,000, taxes of €1 million, depreciation of €60,000, and amortization of €400,000, resulting in an EBITDA of €3.71 million. A high EBITDA is favorable, indicating the company's efficiency and potential for growth. The EBITDA margin, calculated as (EBITDA / Total Revenues) * 100, reflects profitability relative to total revenues; a margin over 20% is generally positive.

🏨 Young Hotels, a Dutch investment group based in Valencia, is entering the Spanish hotel sector with two properties in La Vall de Laguar and Ibiza, set to open in spring. The investment includes a rural hotel, La Casa del Pantano, in Marina Alta with seven rooms, two new villas with private jacuzzis, and plans to build up to 12 villas. Additionally, Ibiza Lodge, a renovated farm with six exclusive rooms on an 80,000-square-meter property in Santa Gertrudis de Fruitera, offers a connection with nature. The company focuses on premium accommodations in key locations.

🚀 Binter, after its first year operating the Madrid-Canarias route in 2024, saw a 25% market growth compared to the previous period. Without revealing occupancy rates, Binter offered 770,000 seats across 5,800 flights. The airline transported over 5.6 million passengers network-wide, a 13% increase, averaging 250 daily flights with 7.4 million seats. Binter plans for 2025 include reaching 8.1 million seats, operating 65 routes to 38 destinations, and expecting to carry six million passengers. New routes from April will connect Gran Canaria and Tenerife to various Spanish cities and Punta Delgada.

💸 Óscar Puente criticizes Ryanair during a government negotiation, accusing the airline of "blackmail". Ryanair proposed adding 800,000 seats across 14 regional airports in 2025-2026, demanding 50% discounts, a reversal of a 4% tariff increase approved in 2024, and up to €250,000 in public aid per new route. The offer was deemed "outrageous" by Puente. Ryanair responds by cutting over 800,000 seats, reducing capacity by 18% and eliminating 12 routes. Santiago Airport faces an 11.4% reduction (334,000 seats), Zaragoza loses 113,000 seats (18.5%), and Santander 88,000 seats (10%). Puente asserts Ryanair isn't cutting seats but redistributing them to major hubs and tourist airports, increasing by 1.2 million seats. Aena works on attracting other carriers to fill the gaps left by Ryanair. Volotea aims to increase its Spanish offer by 9% in the current year.

📊 Mirai Metasearch migrated existing features to a new platform on February 17, 2025, discontinuing access to the old dashboard. Users can log in with existing credentials to access enhanced usability and design, including more dashboards and customization options. The Business Intelligence area has been revamped for performance analysis of metasearch campaigns. Upcoming updates include the Beat Meet Lose section for competitive price analysis and a Funnel section for Google Hotel Ads conversion visualization. Additional dashboards for campaign optimization and a new Reporting section for PDF reports are also introduced. Users can continue accessing the Reservations section from the new platform, which will be integrated in the coming months.

📈 El nuevo estudio de Pilar Talón-Ballestero e Ismael Gómez-Talal de la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, con Mana Azizsoltani y Ashok Singhana Azizsoltani de la Universidad de Nevada, publicado en IEEE Xplore, propone un modelo de IA para predecir cancelaciones de reservas en hoteles. El segmento B2C transient puede superar el 30% de cancelaciones, mientras que Booking.com registra entre 30% y 50%. El estudio utiliza más de 79.000 registros de datos y alcanza un 96% de precisión mediante un enfoque de stacking meta-modeling combinando algoritmos como Random Forest, XGBoost y LightGBM, y utiliza SHAP para la interpretabilidad del modelo. El modelo es principalmente para investigación pero puede ser aplicado en cadenas hoteleras.