The industry is living two truths at once. Austria reports 157.3 million overnight stays for 2025, the third record year in a row, with Vienna passing the 20-million mark for the first time. And the same hospitality sector in Germany has risen to number two among all industries for insolvencies, at 108 per 10,000 companies, behind logistics and ahead of construction; in 2024 it was not even in the top three. Revenue sits 14.8 percent below 2019 in real terms, the sixth consecutive real loss year per the DEHOGA calculation. Full houses, empty margins.
A word of honesty on the staffing numbers, because the story flipped in 2025. "80 percent of businesses lack staff" dates from October 2021, the "65,000 missing workers" from 2022. Currently the employment agencies report 17,667 open hospitality positions, a post-Corona low, there are clearly more registered unemployed hospitality workers than openings, and the calculated KOFA skills gap has collapsed from over 19,000 (2022) to 2,703. Per the DEHOGA survey, the businesses' number-one worry is no longer the vacancy but personnel costs: 85.4 percent name them, with labor costs up 39.6 percent against 2019 and an 8.4 percent minimum-wage jump in January 2026. In Austria, 62 percent of businesses have open positions, the 2026 collective-agreement talks collapsed, and 90 percent expect further cost increases. The problem is no longer "we cannot find anyone." It is "we can no longer afford the manual work at the current level of productivity."
Where the manual work sits: in your own sales channel
The European distribution study by HOTREC (reference year 2023, German sample excluding chain data) breaks down where an independent hotel's nights come from, and the number is remarkable: phone 19.6 percent, email 17.4 percent, contact form 6.6 percent. Together around 44 percent of bookings, every single one processed by hand into an offer and confirmation, while the website's real-time booking engine carries only 11.9 percent.
The alternative to the manual work is Booking.com, and it has a price: base commission of 12 to 15 percent, often an effective 22 to 28 percent of the room rate once the Preferred program and Genius discounts are added. Booking Holdings holds 69.5 percent of OTA volume in Germany and 75.8 percent in Austria, and the dependence peaks exactly where this article looks: independent houses, small towns, alpine regions. Among hotels under 20 rooms, 27 percent source more than half their nights from portals.
Since November 2024 the math is new. With Booking.com's gatekeeper status under the Digital Markets Act, rate-parity clauses are banned EU-wide: a hotel may, for the first time, legally be cheaper on its own website than on the portal, everywhere. The Berlin regional court additionally ruled in December 2025 that Booking owes damages in principle to 1,099 businesses, not yet final, and a collective action with over 15,000 registered hotels has been filed in Amsterdam in January 2026. The direct channel may now be the cheapest. But it only pays if the inquiry-to-offer pipeline stops eating minute after minute of staff time that just became 8.4 percent more expensive.
What can concretely be automated
- Inquiry to offer: email, form and phone-captured inquiries are structured, checked against availability and pricing logic, and presented as a finished offer draft in the house's tone; a person approves. That is the 44-percent pipeline, and no dominant product on the market writes that offer end-to-end today.
- Reviews: for 68 percent of online bookers, other travelers' reviews are decisive per Bitkom. Draft replies per review, in the house's tone, for sign-off, turn a postponed duty into a ten-minute routine.
- No-shows and cancellations: 86.8 percent of North Rhine-Westphalian restaurateurs know no-shows from their own experience, and for hotels D-EDGE transaction data shows 42 percent of Booking.com booking volume gets cancelled, versus 18 percent for direct bookings. Automated confirmation and reminder sequences with deposit logic reduce both, and they are, incidentally, one more argument for the direct channel.
- Registration forms and guest data: since 2025 Germany has abolished the registration form for domestic guests; foreign guests must still sign, for which the law explicitly provides a digital path. In Austria the electronic guest register is permitted, with seven years' retention. The check-in paper stack is already settled in law; it just needs to disappear operationally.
In restaurants, phone AI is further along than in hotels: reservation assistants there are product-ready and self-serve, and the announced shutdown of the reservation platform Quandoo by the end of 2026 forces thousands of businesses to switch systems anyway, a good moment to rethink the phone pipeline too.
The guardrails
From 2 August 2026, a few weeks from now, the EU AI Act's disclosure duty applies: chat and voice assistants must identify themselves as AI at the latest at first interaction. Call recording requires consent in Germany anyway, and the AI provider belongs under a data processing agreement with EU processing, as described on our DPA page. None of this is a hurdle if built in from the start; all of it becomes a trap if the vendor stays silent about it.
The closing math: a house that automates its manual booking pipeline saves twice, once on the staff minutes per inquiry and once on the portal commission for every booking that moves to its own channel. At an effective 22 to 28 percent levy, that pays back faster than almost any other investment in the building. Whether it pays off for your business, the 60-second check will indicate; what such projects cost is in the pricing overview, with sources.
As of 10 July 2026, not legal advice. Sources: Statistik Austria (January 2026, preliminary), Destatis PD26_085 and PD26_054 (2026), DEHOGA quarterly figures IV/2025 and cost survey (September 2025), KOFA Kompakt 8/2025, ifo/KfW skilled-labor barometer (November 2025), Deloitte/ÖHV tourism barometer 2026, AMS tourism special report (June 2025), HOTREC/HES-SO distribution study 2024, D-EDGE Hotel Distribution Report 2024, DEHOGA NRW (December 2025), Bitkom (2024), EU Commission on the DMA gatekeeper designation (2024), Berlin regional court 61 O 60/24 Kart (December 2025), HOTREC on the Amsterdam collective action (January 2026), §§ 29-30 of the German registration act, EU AI Act Art. 50 (post Digital Omnibus).