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Arbitrip We help brands turn hotel stays into a powerful growth and loyalty driver. Become a corporate travel champion! Join for free at www.arbitrip.com

We’re here to make travel managers lives easier by developing a set of free tools for travel management. Use our super simple tools to book your itinerary, manage travel requests, and keep tabs on your company’s travel budget.

Airlines invest heavily to acquire the traveller, then hand one of the largest purchases in the trip to another platform...
08/10/2026

Airlines invest heavily to acquire the traveller, then hand one of the largest purchases in the trip to another platform.

A flight booking creates a valuable set of intent signals: destination, dates, party size, loyalty status and travel history.

Yet the hotel journey often begins with a redirect.

The airline may receive an affiliate commission, but the external platform controls the booking experience and gains the richer view of what the traveller searched, compared and purchased.

This matters as airlines expand beyond the seat.
IdeaWorksCompany estimated global airline ancillary revenue at $157 billion in 2025, equal to 15.7% of total airline revenue. Hotels should be treated as a strategic part of that portfolio.

A native hotel proposition keeps more of the journey within the airline’s environment. It connects accommodation to loyalty, gives the airline greater visibility into hotel demand and creates another reason for the traveller to return.

Hotels should sit inside the airline’s retail strategy.

The prize is a larger share of travel spend, richer first-party data and a loyalty relationship that continues after landing.

Lisbon, here we come! ✈️We’re proud to be joining as a sponsor and taking part in one of the key events shaping the fu...
05/10/2026

Lisbon, here we come! ✈️

We’re proud to be joining as a sponsor and taking part in one of the key events shaping the future of aviation, travel, and technology.

As the industry evolves, we’re excited to be part of the conversation around what’s next for airlines and the future of the travel experience.

Our CEO, Benny Yonovich, will take the stage alongside Ofir Goldman from EL AL to share the story behind EL AL Travel and explore how airlines can go beyond the flight by using hotels to create more value for travelers, strengthen loyalty, and unlock new revenue opportunities, while keeping the customer relationship within their own ecosystem and creating a more seamless journey.

If you’re joining WAF, come say hello to our team: Assaf Haski, Jonathan Karsenti & Nir Yona at our booth 1-244C. 👋

See you in Lisbon! 🇵🇹

Hotel discovery may be where AI has the biggest opportunity to change corporate travel.It’s the highest-frequency, highe...
17/09/2026

Hotel discovery may be where AI has the biggest opportunity to change corporate travel.

It’s the highest-frequency, highest-margin line that many programmes still under-optimise.

And much of legacy hotel discovery still comes down to price and availability, when the better decision depends on far more: negotiated rates, policy, traveller preferences, location and the commercial priorities of the programme.

More than half of travel managers who deployed AI started with chatbots.

Yet users rated them just 3.52 out of 5 in BTN's 2026 report, below almost every other tool measured.

BTN also found 58% of buyers reporting little or no programme-level impact from AI.

Perhaps that isn't surprising.

Drafting, transcription and summarisation were relatively easy places to start. Useful, certainly, but they don't fundamentally change the travel transaction.

We are seeing progress closer to the booking process and servicing.

Some AI tools are reporting time savings of up to 90% on repetitive agent tasks, without changing headcount. Others are resolving a majority of traveller queries automatically.

And increasingly, AI agents can search, book and manage policy-compliant travel, rather than simply answer questions about it.

But there is an important trust boundary.

GBTA's 2026 research found that 95% of buyers are comfortable with AI making recommendations against negotiated rates, and 92% with AI producing reports.

That drops to 62% for executing a cancellation and 57% for autonomous rebooking.

In other words, buyers appear much more comfortable letting AI improve the decision than handing over the transaction completely.

We see a version of this at Arbitrip.

By tailoring hotel search results around individual preferences and company contracts, we've found that the vast majority of clients (over 80%) book 1 of the first 5 options shown.

That may be the more immediate opportunity for AI in corporate travel.

Not replacing the person making the booking.

Making the process of finding dramatically better.

Where do you think the most valuable use case for AI in business travel are at the moment?

A great day with the people shaping the future of travel. 🤝We were delighted to bring together the community of top Inde...
10/09/2026

A great day with the people shaping the future of travel. 🤝

We were delighted to bring together the community of top Independent Travel Consultants in Israel for a day of conversations, ideas and connections around the future of our industry.

Our CEO, Benny Yonovich, opened the day with his perspective on the changes reshaping travel - from AI and new technologies to the evolving role of travel consultants.

One question stood out: if travelers have more information and booking options than ever before, why are so many choosing to work with travel consultants again?

The opportunity ahead is to bring together the human expertise with technology that helps consultants work smarter and create even more value for their clients.

We also took a look behind the scenes at Arbitrip, with Shimi Hotoveli sharing what’s new in the product, and Liron Moshkovich sharing the story behind our service team - the people behind the technology who are there to support our partners every step of the way.

Yaniv Arad Arad joined us for a closer look at the world of AI, sharing key insights and practical tools every travel consultant should know.

And to close the day, Guy Arazi Cohen and Tal Kirshner kadosh led an engaging customer panel with the , sharing real experiences, success stories, and insights from the field.

Thank you to everyone who joined us - and see you at the next one! ✨

A €320 flight isn't always cheaper than a €360 flight.To consider the economics of the whole trip,let’s take a simplifie...
07/09/2026

A €320 flight isn't always cheaper than a €360 flight.

To consider the economics of the whole trip,

let’s take a simplified example:

Option A: flight + OTA hotel

→ Flight: €320
→ Hotel: €400

→ Total: €720

Option B: flight + hotel within the airline ecosystem

→ Flight: €360
→ Hotel with a 15% member rate: €340
→ €120 in additional value through points, status benefits, upgrades or late checkout

→ Effective total: €580

The loyalty proposition can change
the perceived price of the core product.

A member may be paying more for the seat
while receiving a lot more value across the entire trip.

Accommodation is usually the biggest line item on any trip.

And it’s stategic positioning goes beyond commissions from hotel attachement. The catgory has been evolving rapidly into a place to earn, redeem, progress status, receive recognition and experience the benefits of membership.

A few airlines are showing what deeper loyalty-based integration looks like:

→ El Al integrated hotel booking into its own platform, citing audits showing rates 14–31% below major OTAs and encouraging customers to compare.

→ JetBlue connects hotel stays to TrueBlue, with spend contributing points and Tiles towards Mosaic status.

→ Delta awards SkyMiles on qualifying Airbnb stays, bringing another category of accommodation spend into the earning ecosystem.

→ United and Marriott connect their programmes through reciprocal elite benefits, carrying recognition across the flight and hotel experience.

Accommodation can increase share of wallet, but its value to the programme is so much more than incremental revenue.

It creates another touchpoint between flights.

Another opportunity to demonstrate the value of status.
Another source of earn and burn.
Another reason to book direct.

And potentially, another data point for understanding the member's total travel behaviour.

If €40 more on the airfare creates €140 more value across the journey, the comparison with the “cheaper fare” is not as attractive as it used to be.

Airlines are zooming in on how to capture the share of total trip spend and how much of that spend strengthens the loyalty relationship.

How much of your customers' total trip spend currently stays inside your ecosystem?

The most loyal airline flyers are the least likely to say the loyalty programme adds value.Only 1 in 5 of the most loyal...
27/08/2026

The most loyal airline flyers are the least likely to say the loyalty programme adds value.

Only 1 in 5 of the most loyal flyers feel recognised.

Deloitte surveyed 5,564 US loyalty members last fall.

Value perception rises as flyers move into moderate loyalty (75-99% of spend). Then at 100%, it collapses to nearly the level of non-loyal flyers.

Non-loyal members feel more recognised than the ones giving the airline everything. And it's not because they've hit the top.

The most loyal are half as likely as
moderate members to chase the next tier.

Only 15% spend to maintain status.
Only 7% modify spend for the programme at all.

Deloitte points to why:
US load factors climbed from 72% (2000) to 82% (2025).

Fuller planes, fewer award seats, fewer free upgrades.

Benefits that used to feel like recognition now feel like products you buy, and that's less a choice airlines made than a squeeze they're under.

Fuller planes leave less room for the free upgrade or the surprise award seat that used to make status feel personal.

The next generation never felt the pull to begin with.

Gen Z and millennials are half of all travellers but just over a third of loyalty members.

Among Gen Z members, 65% send less than half their spend to their preferred carrier.

Hotels have an important part to play here.

That difference in touchpoints means hotels can make recognition feel immediate, a room upgrade, a late checkout, a free breakfast.

Deloitte's research shows hotels beating airlines on both value and recognition at every loyalty tier, and the gap gets wider the more loyal the customer becomes.

If only airlines could give more value to their members with immediate hotel perks instead..

More hotel inventory doesn't fix corporate travel.Business travellers already spend 22-45 minutes on a single routine bo...
19/08/2026

More hotel inventory doesn't fix corporate travel.

Business travellers already spend 22-45 minutes on a single routine booking.

Travel agents spend 18-31 minutes per offline request.

And 82% of travel managers still deal with hotel leakage because frustrated travellers abandon corporate tools for consumer ones.

The problem is too many options with no context.

58% of business travellers feel overwhelmed during booking.
71% have post-booking anxiety.
Only 16% of corporate travel programs hit full policy compliance.

More inventory for the sake of it is not helpful.
It's much more effective to narrow thousands of properties down to the top 5 that fit three criteria:
1. Corporate policy and rate caps
2. The traveller's role and trip objective
3. Past booking behaviour and preferences

When the system knows all three,
search time can drop from 45 minutes to under 3.

Agents can skip toggling across 15 browser tabs.

And compliance tends to go up because
compliant options are the only ones shown.

Across the Arbitrip client base,
85% of bookers select one of the top five hotels surfaced by our engine.

How many browser tabs are your travellers opening before they give up and book off-policy?

Customers called their bank to reactivate dormant credit cards.Because it was the only way to access discounted hotel ra...
11/08/2026

Customers called their bank to reactivate dormant credit cards.

Because it was the only way to access discounted hotel rates.

Bank Hapoalim in Israel partnered with Arbitrip to embed a hotel booking engine inside their loyalty app, Poalim Wonder.

The idea: you could only pay with a Hapoalim credit card.

The wholesale pricing was so attractive that people dug out cards they hadn't touched in months to complete a booking.

This is something card portfolio managers spend entire careers on.

Card reactivations at scale if you like.

Legacy hotel chains spent years optimising for high-volume corporate accounts. In doing so, they priced out a massive segment: the independent consultant, the digital nomad, the frequent traveller who doesn't stay 50 nights at the same brand.

Fintechs gradually filled that space, seemingly more by following their users' spending patterns than by consciously targeting travel.

Revolut converts grocery spend into Marriott Bonvoy points.

Monzo deposits cash directly from Booking . com stays.

Apple Card settles rewards the same day you check in.

They've grown into something closer to travel operating systems. Whether that's intentional product strategy or where the incentives led them, it's hard to say.

But if fintech apps embed enough utility into a single interface,
switching costs disappear naturally.

Which fintech loyalty play do you think has the strongest long-term retention model?

Airlines have been giving away their best customers for baseline commissions.For decades, the standard aviation playbook...
30/07/2026

Airlines have been giving away their best customers for baseline commissions.

For decades, the standard aviation playbook followed a highly repetitive pattern: sell the flight, immediately hand the traveller off to dominant online travel agencies (OTAs) for their hotel and car rental needs, and collect a small referral fee on the way out.

EL AL just decided to stop doing that.

They built a physical pop-up inside Israeli shopping malls, directly challenging OTAs on hotel pricing.

Independent audits by major media outlets quickly validated the strategy, revealing that EL AL’s platform undercut the leading tech giants by 14% to 31% on popular routes.

Instead of jumping between disconnected platforms, travellers are now actively choosing to book their entire journey within a single, unified carrier ecosystem.

The underlying economics of this shift are worth breaking down.

In 2020, United Airlines had its MileagePlus loyalty program independently appraised. It came in at $21.9B. United's entire market cap at that moment was under $10B. The loyalty program was worth more than twice the airline itself.

Despite controlling these multi-billion-dollar closed loops of financial value, airlines historically treated their points programs as marketing cost centers, passing high-intent spend over to OTAs for pennies on the dollar.

Global ancillary revenue is a $157B sector.
Yet only 2-5% of that comes from third-party travel like hotels and car rentals.
The rest stays inside airline-controlled streams.

El Al fixed this by embedding Arbitrip's AI hotel infrastructure directly into their loyalty stack. Members now get:
→ AI-curated recommendations based on travel patterns
→ Closed-group rates across 1.5M properties
→ Flexible points/cash combos that make sense
→ 24/7 concierge inside their ecosystem

Perhaps the flight is an acquisition channel.
The other 95% of the trip is the new business model.

Would you invest in an airline?
Or would you invest in their loyalty program?

The largest TMCs are running on
16/07/2026

The largest TMCs are running on

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