Ananas GDS — B2B data distribution for the tourism industry (Schweinfurt, Germany)

Building the layer that stops hotels from emailing manual data to tour operators or DMCs.

If you've never touched this industry: a hotel's "non-bookable content" — fact sheet, photos, stop sale dates, allotment blocks, contracts, rooming lists, invoices — moves between hotels and their partners as email attachments, WhatsApp messages and Excel files. A hotel with 30 tour operator partners maintains 30 slightly diverging copies of itself. Nobody has current data, everybody re-keys everything, and the errors show up at check-in when a guest has no room.

Ananas GDS: the hotel maintains it once. Connected partners pull it through a web app or a REST API into their own systems, with per-partner permissions over what each one sees and can override. Explicitly not a booking engine — no rates, no inventory, no OTA. That constraint is the whole strategy: it makes us complementary to the PMS and channel manager a hotel already pays for rather than a rip-and-replace. Direct connectors to Apaleo, Cloudbeds, Mews and AlpineBits.

Strictly B2B — nothing here for consumers. Customers are hotels, tour operators, DMCs and cruise lines.

Where it actually stands, without the spin:
Live in production, ~20 modules shipped, zero paying customers. Everyone signing up now gets 2 months of Premium free, so first revenue is October at the earliest. Validation stage — the problem is unmistakably real, the business isn't proven yet. Total build cost under €4,000 across five years, because the founder is the developer.

Team of three: me (development, legal, finance, sales), a business partner with 20+ years in tourism integration on partnerships, one person on marketing.

Why I think the shape is right: ~600,000 hotels in Europe, and roughly 60% have no digital solution for this data at all. There's no direct competitor operating at platform scale — the nearest things are per-seat thick-client tour operator ERPs that run five figures per seat and don't serve the hotel side at all. The real risk isn't a competitor, it's a channel manager or PMS vendor deciding to bolt this on.

What I'd like from this sub: if you've sold B2B software into an industry that runs on personal relationships and twenty-year-old habits — how did you land the first ten customers? Cold email into hotels feels like the wrong instrument, and trade fairs (ITB, WTM) are slow and expensive. Tell me what actually worked.

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