Skift Travel News Blog

Rocco Forte Hotels have launched two urban art-themed tours which have been designed to immerse guests into the deep history of the world of graffiti and street art in Berlin and Munich. 

According to a release from Rocco Forte Hotels, Munich has often been regarded as the birthplace of German graffiti art and has been home to the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art since 2016, which is the first museum of this kind in Germany.

Guests of the Charles Hotel in Munich will have the opportunity to take part in an exclusive tour of the city’s artistic facades, walls and subways – led by street art pioneer Matthias Köhler (aka Loomit) – with Loomit sharing his personal street art highlights and the story of how the street art movement in Munich began. 

At Hotel de Rome in Berlin, guests will have the opportunity to join a private guide on a discovery tour of the urban art and graffiti scene across the city, with guests invited to experience the city as a ‘gigantic open-air art gallery’, learn more about the background of the artworks and discover how they are created.

The graffiti tours are available to book at the The Charles Hotel in Munich and the Hotel de Rome in Berlin.

Multi-modal transportation platform Omio has raised $80 million, with plans to expand via new partnerships, acquisitions and further growth into the U.S. after Europe-wide expansion.

Omio launched in North America in 2020, but was then hit by the pandemic. However revenue has recovered to more than double pre-pandemic levels, and according to reports founder and CEO Naren Shaam said the U.S. market had “bounced back.”

The Berlin-based travel app, which integrates more than 1,000 transportation providers across trains, buses, ferries, cars, airport transfers as well as flights, may also be able to tap into increased demand for sustainable travel (it claims that one in four customers change their bookings from flights to trains), as well as travel’s holy grail of the connected trip.

Earlier this year Omio helped build a new international website for the UK’s London North Eastern Railway, to make train travel easier to book for overseas customers. The rail company counts 10 countries as its global market, including China, Japan, Spain, South Korea and Italy. The new search and booking engine lets customers in those countries purchase tickets in their own language and currency.

In March it added a partnership with CheckMyBus, a global intercity bus search engine, while it also has collaborations in place with Kayak, Huawei and Portugal’s state-owned railway company.

Omio’s Series E funding came from new investors Lazard Asset Management and Stack Capital Group. Existing investors NEA, Temasek and funds managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management also contributed.

In 2020 Omio raised $100 million to fund the purchase of other travel companies, after buying Australia-based Rome2Rio in 2019.