Everything that has moved on the Hotelminder shortlist.

2026

2026-07-14 — Rate Reasoner v2.4

Added an explainable-reason field for pickup-driven suggestions after a Vienna advisor request. Every suggested tariff now carries a two-part reason: the primary driver (pickup ahead of last year, compset move, city event) and a secondary sanity check (shoulder-day recovery, day-of-week alignment). The change is not visible to guests — it is the sentence the night auditor reads at the morning briefing. Rolled to all pilot properties, no regressions reported after two weeks.

2026-06-02 — EU Fiscal Composer, Portugal activation

Portugal joins France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands on the fiscal template roster. Reduced accommodation VAT at 6 percent, breakfast at 13 percent, city tax for Lisbon and Porto handled separately. Reviewed by a Lisbon contabilista certificado on the pilot roster. Two Portuguese boutique hotels ran the pilot cycle for eight weeks; both signed off.

2026-04-28 — Guest Memory Layer — quiet loyalty threshold

Moved the "quiet loyalty" trigger from the fifth stay to the third stay after a Milan pilot property observed that repeat guests at boutique scale form a relationship faster than an enterprise CRM curve assumes. The courtesy is still discreet: a nightly-rate adjustment rather than an explicit points programme. No opt-in prompt, no email announcement.

2026-03-11 — Portfolio Sync Fabric — per-property override audit view

Head-office users can now see every per-property override across the portfolio in a single audit view, filtered by author, date range or property. Requested by the northern-Italian five-property group during their quarterly review. No change to publish semantics; overrides continue to survive republication.

2026-02-05 — Review Response Studio, Dutch language pilot

Dutch joins the language roster (English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese already supported). Voice-model training samples averaged 11 previously published responses per property during the pilot with two Amsterdam and one Utrecht hotel. Live for all Dutch-speaking pilots.

2025

2025-11-19 — Direct Deal Widget v1.6, tokens.css published

The tokens.css override file is now documented publicly, so a hotel's own designer can override every colour and radius without touching JavaScript. The three shipped skins (editorial serif, sans minimal, boutique navy) become the starting point rather than the ceiling. Requested by three boutique properties whose in-house designers wanted a lighter integration path.

2025-09-30 — Google Hotels Boost joins the shortlist

Five-hotel pilot completed across Amsterdam, Vienna and Barcelona. Boutique-sized budget floor of 400 EUR per month per property confirmed as workable — the metasearch tools with a 5 000 EUR floor were rejected for the shortlist earlier in the year. Free organic Booking Links are always on; paid Hotel Ads bid management is optional and reviewed by the advisor at the first quarterly check-in.

2025-07-22 — Portfolio Sync Fabric joins the shortlist

Vetted on a five-property boutique group in Northern Italy over four months. Manual master-rate process previously cost approximately four hours of a senior operator per week; post-pilot the same work took twenty minutes. Entered the shortlist as the tenth module. Explicit note: we will not accept an eleventh module without removing one first.

2025-04-08 — Distribution Intelligence Layer, Looker Studio template v3

The hand-tuned Looker Studio template shipped with the pilot pack was rewritten to expose cost of distribution by channel as a first-class metric rather than a derived one. Same underlying data; different reading order. Feedback from three Milan and Vienna General Managers who found the previous ordering counter-intuitive at the Monday morning revenue meeting.

2025-01-14 — Housekeeping Mobile Kit — offline queue for stone-walled corridors

Offline mode extended so that room-status changes can queue for up to six hours without WiFi and replay to the SiteMinder PMS grid on reconnect, in the order they were made. Requested and pilot-tested at two canal-side hotels in Amsterdam where WiFi coverage forces daily offline use. Failure mode documented: if the same room is edited both offline and by another user online, the newer timestamp wins with a visible reconciliation prompt.

2024

2024-10-27 — Review Response Studio joins the shortlist

Seven boutique hotels across mixed EU cities completed the two-hotel-pilot standard (extended here to seven because the voice-model approach was the novel piece). Voice model derived from 8 to 15 previously published responses. Rejected the "one-click auto-publish" mode explicitly — every draft passes through a team-member review.

2024-08-05 — GuestJoy Concierge Expander joins the shortlist

Two-month pre-arrival conversation study at four boutique hotels in Barcelona and Berlin produced 62 message templates. Rejected the "AI-generated first draft" approach the vendor initially proposed — boutique guests notice generated language. Templates are hand-authored and every hotel edits them to house voice on install.

2024-05-19 — Rate Reasoner and Direct Deal Widget become the first two shortlist entries

After a full year of advisory-only work and 47 modules reviewed, the first two enter the store: Rate Reasoner and the Direct Deal Widget. Both were the least glamorous of the shortlist candidates — a pricing layer that shows its work, and a booking form that does not fight the aesthetic of a boutique website — but both were the ones every pilot GM asked to keep.

2024-01-08 — Advisory retainer service launches formally

Hotelminder was operating informally during 2023 as scoping calls and pilot-report writing. On this date the advisory retainer became a formal recurring service, invoiced monthly, with twelve boutique properties on the initial roster. This is the earliest entry we consider material for the changelog.