Innovation

💸 SuiteOp, a Guest Operations Platform, announced a $3 million seed funding round on April 7, 2025, in New York. The investment, led by ScOp with Dream Capital and strategic angels, will be used for product innovation, team expansion, and market growth. Co-founders Jean-Emmanuel Losi and Simon Seroussi created SuiteOp to address operational challenges in hospitality, such as high costs and labor shortages. The platform connects hospitality teams and guests, integrates IoT, guest portals, and analytics, and has seen a 5x increase in run rate and 15% monthly growth with zero customer churn. SuiteOp, founded in 2023, targets efficiency and premium guest experiences for property managers.

✈ Outpayce and Amadeus co-created the first travel-dedicated payments marketplace, collaborating with leading airlines. The marketplace supports payment orchestration, offering an interactive catalog to help airlines select the right connections to improve payments performance. It provides information on countries, currencies, services, and live data on transaction volumes. Outpayce's Xchange Payments Platform (XPP) reduces review and decision-making time, simplifies integration with APIs, and speeds up adding new payment capabilities. AEGEAN contributed to the creation of the Marketplace Catalog, enhancing payment options and passenger experiences. Outpayce's marketplace displays hundreds of payment partners worldwide and will expand its offerings in the coming months.

🚃 In a pioneering trial for future passenger service, 250 volunteers participated in a test event on Great Western Railway's battery train, assessing energy consumption for the Department for Transport (DfT). The trial, which started in March of the previous year, involved two return trips between West Ealing and Greenford on a Class 230 train, utilizing fast-charge technology with a charging time of 3½ minutes. With over 900 return trips completed in various conditions, the data will inform GWR's decarbonization strategy and potential railway industry applications.

🚀 SITA, alongside NEC Corporation, has forged a partnership aimed at advancing digital identity technology within the travel industry. This alliance introduces NEC into SITA's Digital Travel Ecosystem, enhancing real-time digital identity verification. The system, designed with privacy in mind, features the Trust Network for secure credential sharing. With 28% of airlines and 43% of airports planning to adopt biometric solutions within a year, and SITA and NEC's combined expertise, the collaboration is set to streamline the travel experience, addressing standardization hurdles and promoting global adoption of digital identities.