When Airbnb was founded ten years ago, it brought a unique concept to the market: find travel accommodations that feel like home.But as the model has gained popularity, some of the stays have come to feel too much like home. Staying at some Airbnbs can feel like a game of Russian roulette: will this be the one with the kindly landlord who is responsive but far from the premises? Or will you be listening to the sound of their kids screaming through the night?Its meteoric rise shows there's an appetite for the model, but many people want the reliability that a hotel can provide, while offering the "like a local" feel that home-stays can bring.That's the thinking behind Sonder, a company that marries the two travel experiences.The idea began in 2012, when founders Lucas Pellan and Montreal-born Francis Davidson stayed at a home they had booked for a couple days. They couldn't get in touch with the host to find out how they were supposed to get inside. When they did make it in (the key under the doormat, naturally), they found half-eaten food in the fridge and dog hair covering the furniture. They opted to leave the rental and go for an apartment instead. While it was free of dog hair and debris, it was a non-notable room surrounded by sterile chain restaurants.It spurred the pair to create a new kind of home-stay experience: Sonder manages apartments in trendy neighbourhoods through major cities, and opens them up to travellers for short stays. What makes the company notably differs from Airbnb is the hotel-like amenities, like toiletries, a cleaning service, 24/7 concierge and attention to detail in the design.

When you are planning a vacation, you spend a lot of time researching the hotels you want to stay in, the places you visit, restaurants, shopping, and other things. You read reviews and experiences of other travelers. Folks at Travel + Leisure asked their readers to rate various hotels based on their location, facilities, food, service, and overall value. Here are the top 10 best hotels in the world in 2018 based on Travel + Leisure's survey.Top 10 best hotels in the worldRemember that this list is not about the most expensive hotels or the most luxurious ones. It's all about hotels that travelers think are best in terms of facilities, food, service, and overall value. So, without further ado, let's check out the top 10 best hotels in the world.10- Nayara Springs, Arenal Volcano National Park, Costa RicaIt scored 97.04 out of 100 in Travel + Leisure's survey. It was also voted the best luxury hotel in 2016 and 2017 in a survey conducted by TripAdvisor. Nayara Springs is located atop a cliff surrounded by tropical gardens and emerald forests. It costs around $750 per night on average, though you can get a room there for as low as $630 in October. The hotel has two giant pools, an award-winning spa, a piano lounge and bar, and a private plunge pool. It also arranges daily adventurous activities such as canyoning and water-rafting.

In the hospitality industry, customer experience is king. At the same time, companies face fierce competition for each customer dollar and have to deliver outstanding service with ever-increasing efficiency. Automation - especially voice processing, artificial intelligence, smart devices, and robotic process automation - can help with all three of these competing challenges.Today's customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. From research, to bookings, to their actual en-route or on-property experience, customers demand more. They want to use any device, tailored to the way they live and work. They want to immerse themselves in their leisure experience, and they don't want to have to worry about the technology.Hospitality firms are improving customer experience through natural language interaction, high-end digital experiences and with AI algorithms to help guide their leisure choices. They are also increasingly using automation and smart devices to reduce loss, speed up check-in and check-out and provide entertainment and comfort features exceeding those found in a typical home.Customers are increasingly seeing service where the curtains gently open 15 minutes after the alarm goes off, where they can ask Alexa for room service, or they can have their room cleaned based on the service team knowing the room is vacant.Improving service to their customers drives repeat business and the tailored experience provided by automation helps enable that part of the growth curve. Additionally, hospitality firms want to grow by capturing more market share, opening up new and emerging markets.Automation can help by tailoring the experience to the customer based on country or buying behavior. A customer in China books differently than a customer in France! Further, automation can help hospitality firms use detailed quantitative analytics to drive what routes generate the most revenue, which locations are best for new properties and how to distribute luxury versus budget offerings based on customer spend and feedback.

Globally, there are about 4 million hotels. Of these, only 2.1 million hotels are listed on Booking.com, 1 million on Tripadvisor and 0.8 million on Expedia. Within this, the budget hotel segment is the fastest growing (9 per cent CAGR globally) and is the first choice of millennials.In the GCC, 45 per cent of rooms are in the budget and mid-sized segment with online penetration at 46 per cent. In huge neighbouring markets like India, mid-tier (3-star and 4-star hotels) represents a $4 billion opportunity. Only 30 per cent of these are connected online for search, discovery and booking. There is significant opportunity to move hotels online by providing them efficient technology and remote services.However, the budget and mid-sized hotels and chains are ill-equipped to ride this wave because of technology and talent constraints. Hitherto, technology available for such hotels was either too complicated or too expensive to maintain, resulting in suboptimal digitisation.Targeting this opportunity is Hotel Launcher, a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology for budget and mid-sized hotels and chains. The platform's objective is to help this segment of properties increase revenues by bringing them online via an efficient SaaS discovery and booking system. They also have an engine for revenue management.Rajiv Malhotra, founder and CEO, said: "Simply put, Hotel Launcher is Shopify for small and mid-sized hotels and chains. Our technology is a highly advanced PMS [industry parlance for property management system]. It is integrated with a channel manager and a website builder. We call this solution Integrated Distribution Management System or IDMS for short."