Extended stay accommodation platform AltoVita is planning to move into offering shorter stays as it looks to “consolidate” both parts of the market.
Vivi Cahyadi Himmel, CEO and co-founder of AltoVita, said that combining short and extended stay accommodation would be a “brilliant mission over the next few years” for the company.
“We want to consolidate extended stay and short stay, and remove the GDSs entirely from the equation,” she added during AltoVita’s Smart, Safe, Sustainable Summit held in London last week.
Meanwhile, co-founder and chief operating officer Karolina Saviova said AltoVita would be looking to introduce “quite extreme levels of personalisation” to its platform by offering a range of "augmented" content, including amenities, safety and security, preferred inventory list, environmental stats and DEI information, as well as neighbourhood details.
The company also unveiled its new Alto360 intelligence platform at the summit, which is being soft launched ahead of its release in the first quarter of 2025.
Alto360 has been designed to allow travel buyers and global mobility managers to benchmark their policies against market data for cities across the world. This includes breakdowns of average daily rates by location, length of stay, property type and travel dates.
The tool features predictive data and rate forecasting for the extended-stay market, including the ability to analyse historic data to compare corporate clients’ average daily rates and budgets.
Carol Fergus, director of global travel, meetings and ground transportation at Fidelity International, described Alto360 as an “amazing tool” following demonstrations of its capabilities at the summit.
“They [AltoVita] can build something that nobody else has and they can customise it,” added Fergus. “Having rate forecasting will allow us to look at the budget and the costs – forecasting for the future.”
The summit also looked at the emergence of artificial intelligence within the accommodation and business travel sector.
Jenny Thornton, director of technology solutions at travel management company ATPI, said they were “leaning into AI with caution”, with AI mostly being utilised for specified “if and when tasks”.
She added they were also using natural language translation for non-English speaking staff, which automatically translates the original text in emails into other languages to help its consultants.