Technology

Trip.com Group Sets New Standards in Travel Personalisation at ITB Berlin 2024

Published

2 years ago

March 7, 2024

BERLIN, March 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — As ITB Berlin 2024 draws to a close, Trip.com Group reiterated its commitment to reshaping travel experiences through innovation, with a special focus on AI, personalisation, and meeting the evolving needs of global travellers. Schubert Lou, Chief Operating Officer of Trip.com, delivered a keynote that delved into the burgeoning realm of experiential travel and AI’s pivotal role in customising journeys to individual preferences.

Experiential Travel with AI-Powered Innovation

Mr Lou’s keynote titled, “How to Accommodate the Global Traveller” highlighted a shift towards more meaningful and immersive travel experiences, emphasising the growing interest in festivals and unique cultural events among young adventurers. He noted a rising interest in travel that transcends mere sightseeing, highlighting the experiential desire of today’s travellers in seeking out thrilling hikes, spectacular fireworks, and energetic festivals.

Mr Lou said, “In a world where travel is increasingly about the depth of experience, Trip.com is leading the charge, harnessing AI to craft journeys that resonate deeply and personally with each individual. Our technology is not just about facilitating travel; it’s about enriching lives and creating memories that last far beyond the return flight.”

He also shared impressive engagement statistics for TripGenie, the revolutionary AI travel assistant. The advanced multi-destination itinerary planning tool has led to users spending an average of 20 minutes more on the app on days they interact with it, securing nearly 1 million inquiries to date, doubling the order conversion rate, and improving user retention rates.

Trip.com Group remains committed to further advancing personalised travel – with the recent launch of the Trip.Vision app, leveraging Apple Vision Pro technology, embodying the Group’s innovative approach to travel, offering immersive experiences of global destinations and setting new standards for personalised exploration.

Redefining Hotel Experiences with Enhanced Personalised Packages

Boon Sian Chai, Managing Director and Vice President for International Markets, also spoke at ITB Berlin, where he highlighted, among other initiatives, innovative travel packages that deliver increasingly personalised hotel guest experiences. Trip.com’s “Hotel Rooms Plus X” offering epitomises this shift, merging stays with custom experiences that resonate with the personal interests of travellers. “This approach marks a new era where every hotel stay is transformed into a personalised journey, deeply connected to each traveller’s individual tastes and interests,” he said.

Mr Chai also revealed trends shaping the hospitality sector, such as AI-enhanced search features. Trip.com’s AI-ranking lists, including “Trip.Best,” “Trip.Trends,” and “Trip.Deals,” offer personalised travel and accommodation suggestions fine-tuned by over 100 million user reviews and curated by market experts – setting a benchmark for customised hospitality experiences, and informing travel partners how to better appeal to customers.

Live-streaming, a format that gained traction during the pandemic, has become a mainstay in driving hotel bookings. The “LIVE for Trip” campaign, featuring interactive sessions with extensive real-time travel deals, has amassed over a billion viewers and features extensive partnerships with hotels, reinforcing the company’s innovative edge. Since its launch in 2020, the livestreams have featured thousands of products from global destinations, including France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Southeast Asia, and more.

A New Chapter in European Growth

Trip.com Group has been at the forefront of enhancing travel experiences across Europe through strategic collaborations with an extensive network of partners spanning flights, hotels, trains, tours, attractions, and payment services. Each market is tailored to meet the distinct preferences of local travellers, and our market-specific solutions have been instrumental in driving remarkable growth across the continent.

Amid Europe’s growing market, Andy Washington, General Manager for Europe at Trip.com Group, spoke about travel and technology trends at the same event. He said, “Our growth in Europe reflects our commitment to bespoke travel experiences. In the dynamic landscape of the travel industry, innovation and technology adoption are propelled by a powerful alliance between consumers and businesses. At Trip.com Group, we prioritise deploying technology that directly enriches the consumer experience, streamlining and personalising every aspect of travel. This approach is especially pertinent in Europe’s varied market, where meeting diverse traveller needs are paramount.”

Visa Relaxation Boosts Europe-China Travel

The year has seen a notable increase in travel from Europe to China, buoyed by more lenient visa regulations. China’s extension of its visa-free policy to citizens of seven European nations—France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, and Switzerland—has led to a surge in bookings from these countries to China, with flight reservations up by almost 200% and hotel and train bookings by nearly 300%, compared to the same period in February 2023. These developments not only enhance travel connectivity between China and Europe but also pave the way for deeper cultural exchanges.

The company’s appearance at ITB Berlin 2024 sets a new benchmark for the future of travel, promising an era of innovation, offering personalised, technology-driven travel experiences that cater to the unique needs and desires of global travellers.

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* Note to Editor: Trip.Vision is currently exclusively available in the US on Apple Vision Pro.

About Trip.com Group

Trip.com Group is a leading global travel service provider comprising of Trip.com, Ctrip, Skyscanner, and Qunar. Across its platforms, Trip.com Group helps travellers around the world make informed and cost-effective bookings for travel products and services and enables partners to connect their offerings with users through the aggregation of comprehensive travel-related content and resources, and an advanced transaction platform consisting of apps, websites and 24/7 customer service centres. Founded in 1999 and listed on NASDAQ in 2003 and HKEX in 2021, Trip.com Group has become one of the best-known travel groups in the world, with the mission “to pursue the perfect trip for a better world”. Find out more about Trip.com Group here. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube

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Technology

Bloomberg Introduces Spread-to-Benchmark Quoting for EUR and GBP Portfolio Trading Baskets

Published

13 hours ago

June 2, 2026

LONDON, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Bloomberg today announced the launch of Spread-to-Benchmark quoting and trading for Euro (EUR) and Sterling (GBP) denominated portfolio trades through its Portfolio Trading Basket Builder (PTBB). The new functionality expands the range of quoting protocols available for European credit portfolio trading and reflects growing client demand for spread-based execution workflows, alongside increased dealer support for the convention across EUR and GBP markets.

Spread-to-Benchmark quoting is a well-established protocol for USD credit portfolio trades and is used by market participants to evaluate and execute portfolio trades. By extending this workflow to EUR and GBP portfolio trades, Bloomberg enables clients and dealers to transact using a familiar spread-based methodology across additional credit markets.

The introduction of Spread-to-Benchmark quoting for EUR and GBP baskets reflects increased client interest in evaluating portfolio trades through a spread-based lens and the growing adoption of spread-based execution workflows in European credit markets. The workflow provides market participants with an additional framework for assessing the relationship between credit spread risk and underlying government bond yields when pricing and executing portfolio trades.

Additional Workflow Flexibility 
The workflow complements Bloomberg’s existing portfolio trading capabilities, which support the full range of market-standard quoting conventions, including Price, Yield, Spread-to-Benchmark and Spread based workflows that reference Bloomberg’s evaluated pricing service (BVAL). This gives clients flexibility to compare and execute portfolio trades using the quoting methodology that best aligns with their investment objectives, execution preferences and internal risk management processes.

“European credit clients continue to look for execution workflows that reflect how they evaluate risk and monitor portfolio trading outcomes,” said Harry Street, Global Head of Credit and Equities Trading Product at Bloomberg. “By expanding dealer support for Spread-to-Benchmark quoting for EUR and GBP baskets, Bloomberg is broadening the range of workflow options available to clients trading European credit portfolios.”

“Portfolio trading workflows in fixed income continue to become more sophisticated as institutional investors look for ways to evaluate execution quality in changing market conditions,” said Kevin McPartland, Head of Market Structure & Technology Research at Crisil Coalition Greenwich. “Spread-based quoting helps market participants more clearly distinguish between the impacts of credit spread and underlying rates movements when determining how best to execute a portfolio trade.”

Bloomberg’s Electronic Markets solutions are used by leading financial institutions to trade efficiently in over 175 markets around the world. More than 9,000 client firms use Bloomberg Electronic Markets to access industry-leading depth and breadth of liquidity across asset classes from over 800 dealers globally. Bloomberg Electronic Markets provides market participants with comprehensive solutions across the trading lifecycle, including robust price transparency, analytics, automation and execution, powered by Bloomberg’s high-quality, multi-asset class data and tools.

About Bloomberg
Bloomberg is a global leader in business and financial information, delivering trusted data, news, and insights that bring transparency, efficiency, and fairness to markets. The company helps connect influential communities across the global financial ecosystem via reliable technology solutions that enable our customers to make more informed decisions and foster better collaboration. For more information, visit Bloomberg.com/company or request a demo.

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SOURCE Bloomberg L.P.

Technology

Dr. Sunho Kang, a senior battery-technology executive with leadership experience at major global battery and EV manufacturers, joins TeraWatt Technology as Head of Product and Technology

Published

13 hours ago

June 2, 2026

SAN FRANCISCO, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — TeraWatt Technology Inc. (Headquartered in California, USA) is pleased to announce that Dr. Sunho Kang has joined the company as Head of Product and Technology.

Dr. Kang is a globally recognized battery-technology executive with more than 25 years of leadership experience spanning the United States, Asia, and Europe, and a distinguished track record of advancing innovations from laboratory research through gigafactory-scale production. He has held senior executive positions at world-leading organizations including Samsung SDI, Apple, and Volkswagen Group of America, and brings deep expertise in lithium-ion battery materials, cell engineering, and product industrialization across a broad range of applications, including electric vehicles and energy storage systems.

At TeraWatt, Dr. Kang will lead global product development and the commercialization of TeraWatt’s battery technology platform, aiming to accelerate the delivery of TeraWatt’s competitive products as well as the technology and commercialization roadmap including manufacturing scale-up.

Dr. Kang commented:

“I am thrilled to join TeraWatt Technology as Head of Product and Technology. TeraWatt’s innovative battery platform presents a tremendous opportunity to push the boundaries of lithium-ion technology, and I look forward to working with the team to accelerate product development and commercialization to deliver meaningful impact.”

TeraWatt Technology founder CEO Ken Ogata, Ph.D. commented:

“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Kang as our Head of Product and Technology. His deep expertise in battery materials, cell engineering, and productization will be instrumental in accelerating TeraWatt’s product roadmap and technology leadership. Together with Dr. Kang, we will continue to drive our mission forward.”

About TeraWatt Technology Inc.
TeraWatt Technology Inc. is a California-based company that produces lightweight, high-power, and safe next-generation lithium-ion batteries.

Company Overview
Name: TeraWatt Technology Inc.
Representative: Co-founder and CEO Ken Ogata
Headquarters: 28 Geary St, Suite 650, San Francisco, CA 94108, United States
Founded: January 2020
Established: December 2019
URL: https://www.terawatt-technology.com/

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SOURCE TeraWatt Technology Inc.

Technology

Tencent Cloud and Soniox Announce Strategic Partnership: Combining Advanced Speech-to-Text (STT) Technology with Global Real-Time Infrastructure

Published

13 hours ago

June 2, 2026

HONG KONG, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, today announced a strategic partnership with Soniox, a San Francisco-based speech AI company that specializes in developing high-accuracy, low-latency speech AI solutions. The collaboration integrates Soniox’s speech-to-text (STT) technology with Tencent Cloud’s Real-Time Communication (TRTC) enterprise-grade global infrastructure, enabling enterprises to build and deploy multilingual voice AI applications across 200+ countries and regions.

Elevating Enterprise Voice AI at a Global Scale

In enterprise voice AI deployments, latency directly affects user experience and application reliability. The integration of Soniox’s high-accuracy, low-latency STT with TRTC’s global transmission infrastructure reduces latency across the entire pipeline, creating a comprehensive end-to-end solution for enterprises deploying conversational AI applications worldwide.

Soniox is the voice platform for every language. Unlike legacy speech AI, which was built primarily for English-speakers, Soniox delivers native-speaker accuracy across 60+ languages. Its technology can handle mid-sentence language switching — a user can switch between English and Chinese in a single utterance, and Soniox will capture every word with complete accuracy. All of this works through a single API that works for both speech-to-text and text-to-speech.

By integrating TRTC, the partnership leverages an enterprise-grade real-time communication backbone featuring more than 3,200 global nodes, sub-300 ms worldwide latency, and advanced capabilities such as AI noise suppression and weak-network resilience. These capabilities enable conversational AI applications to operate reliably across diverse network environments, including regions such as Southeast Asia and Africa.

With the roll out of this partnership, developers can integrate the Soniox STT API directly within the Tencent Cloud console. Whether targeting English-speaking markets or supporting languages such as Arabic, Hindi, and Malay, enterprises can build global voice applications — including intelligent customer service, voice assistants, real-time translation, and meeting transcription — to address the demands of expansion into emerging markets and multilingual scenarios.

Wison Xie, Head of Product at Tencent RTC, stated: “Tencent RTC has always been committed to providing reliable real-time communication infrastructure for global enterprises. Our partnership with Soniox brings together our strengths in enterprise-grade audio transmission and Soniox’s advanced speech recognition technology. Together, we are making it easier for businesses to deploy accurate, low-latency voice AI applications across any language and any market.”

Klemen Simonic, CEO at Soniox Inc., stated “At Soniox, our mission is to help businesses understand every word, in any language, with native speaker accuracy and exceptional speed. Partnering with Tencent Cloud combines our speech AI with world-class real-time infrastructure, enabling enterprises to build voice AI experiences that scale globally with low latency and reliability.”

About Tencent Cloud:

Tencent Cloud, one of the world’s leading cloud companies, is committed to creating innovative solutions to resolve real-world issues and enabling digital transformation for smart industries. Through our extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT, and network security. It is our constant mission to meet the needs of industries across the board, including the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, finance, healthcare, property, retail, travel, and transportation.

About Tencent RTC:

Tencent RTC provides real-time communication solutions, including audio/video calling, live streaming, and in-game voice. With enterprise-grade security, AI-powered enhancements, and a global network of over 3,200 nodes, Tencent RTC powers mission-critical communication for customers worldwide.

About Soniox:

Soniox is a next-generation voice AI company bringing about the end of English-first speech AI. Most people on the planet did not grow up speaking English and often mix languages mid-sentence; and yet legacy speech AI was built for just English. Soniox is different: native-speaker accuracy across 60+ languages, true mid-sentence language switching, and flawless alphanumeric recognition that legacy providers still can’t match. For developers building global apps, Soniox is the only option. Try it for yourself at soniox.com.

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SOURCE Tencent Cloud