A Quarter-Century of Digital Innovation in Hospitality

2025 is a special year for the German travel tech industry: Swoppen and CultBooking are celebrating their 25th anniversary. Two companies that have spent a quarter-century helping hosts digitize their distribution, automate processes, and run more successful businesses.

What began as a vision to empower hotels, vacation rentals, and apartments with smart software has grown into a proven technological alliance. Swoppen, as a provider of practical hotel software, and CultBooking, one of the leading booking engines, have worked closely together for many years, with visible success for their customers.

Technological Pioneering: What’s Standard Today Was a Small Revolution Back Then

CultBooking was the first booking engine in Germany to enable XML integration between hotel software (PMS) and Internet booking engines (IBEs). As early as the 2000s, availability and prices were automatically transmitted from the PMS to the IBE, and bookings flowed back into the PMS.

What now feels standard was a true quantum leap back then: moving away from manual data entry toward automated processes and greater booking reliability for hosts. In cooperation with the channel manager CultSwitch, it was possible to make all rooms available across all channels simultaneously. And even then, CultSwitch guaranteed that overbookings would not occur, and if they did, CultSwitch would cover the loss. This built a lot of trust in cloud-based technology.

Anniversary Promotion: 25 Weeks, Double the Benefit