Connected Systems, Disconnected Thinking

Hotels have never had more technology at their disposal. Property management systems with open APIs. Booking engines that can talk to CRMs. Revenue platforms that integrate with channel managers. Customer data platforms promising the single guest view that everyone talks about at conferences but nobody seems to actually achieve.

The tools exist. The connectivity exists. So why does walking into most hotel groups still feel like walking into a technology museum where everything was bought in a different decade, by a different department, for a different reason?

Decisions Made in Isolation

Here is what I see almost every time I audit a hotel's tech stack. The booking engine was chosen by the revenue management team. The CRM was chosen by marketing. Operations selected the PMS. Finance picked the payment gateway. Each decision made sense to the people making it, within their own context, solving their own problem.

But nobody was looking at the whole picture.

The result is a collection of individually sensible decisions that, taken together, create something incoherent. Systems that don't talk to each other. Data sitting in silos. Guest information scattered across four or five platforms with no way of bringing it together into anything resembling insight.

This isn't a technology problem. It's a structural one.

The Seniority Gap

There is something else happening that makes this worse. The people ultimately signing off on technology decisions are, in many cases, profoundly untechnical. That isn't a criticism. The role of a General Manager or CEO in hospitality is strategic, commercial, people-focused. It has never been a technical role and there is no reason it should be.

But here is the tension. The person recommending a system sits at one level of the organisation. The person approving the spend sits several levels above. And in between, there is often nobody who can translate technical capability into strategic value. Nobody who can look at an API specification and explain what it means for guest experience, for revenue, for competitive advantage.

When there is a seniority gap between those suggesting the systems and those signing off on them, there is no way that CEO is going to make a sensible decision.

That gap is where bad technology decisions get made. Not out of incompetence, but out of a lack of someone who speaks both languages.

Two Paths Diverging

If you zoom out, the underlying issue becomes clearer. The technology and the operations have been on diverging paths for years.

On one side, the tech has accelerated dramatically. APIs, webhooks, data warehousing, middleware, AI-powered automation. The capabilities being brought to market through modern connected platforms are genuinely impressive. But they are also genuinely technical. Understanding how APIs work, how data flows between systems, how security and authentication need to be handled. None of this is lightweight.

On the other side, operational roles in hotels have become noisier and more demanding in completely different directions. Sustainability reporting. Post-pandemic recovery. Staff shortages. Rising guest expectations. The people running hotels have been pulled in a hundred directions, and deep technical literacy was never going to be one of them.

So the gap widens. The tools get more powerful. The people making decisions about those tools get further from understanding what they can do. And the opportunity cost compounds quietly in the background.

The Guest Pays the Price

That opportunity cost shows up in the place it matters most. The guest.

Hotels are complex operations with multiple revenue streams. Rooms, food and beverage, spa, golf, events, retail. Each of those generates data about preferences, spending patterns, frequency, timing. In a connected world, that data becomes insight. Insight becomes personalisation. Personalisation becomes loyalty.

But when every revenue stream lives in its own silo, none of that happens. The guest who books a spa treatment every visit never gets a proactive offer. The corporate booker who always requests the same room type fills in the same form every time. The couple who celebrated their anniversary at your restaurant last year gets the same generic email as everyone else.

The technology to solve this already exists. The problem is not capability. The problem is that nobody is connecting the dots.

Five Clients Out of Thousands

There is a story that I think about often. A well-known booking engine, one with hundreds if not thousands of hotel clients, was acquired a couple of years ago. During the acquisition process it emerged that the platform had a full reservation and booking API. Fully functional. Well documented. Capable of powering entirely custom booking experiences.

Five clients had ever used it.

Not because it was poorly built. Not because it was expensive. But because nobody at those hotels knew it was there. And even if someone had stumbled across it, whose job was it to do something with it? The web design agency? The marketing team? The revenue manager? It fell outside everyone's strategic consideration because there was no one whose job it was to think about the stack as a whole.

That is the CTO gap in a single anecdote. Powerful technology, sitting dormant, because there is no one in the building whose role is to see it and act on it.

Buy the Technology That Enables You to Build

The answer is not to hire a full-time CTO for every hotel group. In most cases, that is not a permanent role. It is a capability that matters enormously at specific inflection points. When you are changing your PMS. When you are implementing a customer data platform. When you are evaluating middleware. When you are making any decision that affects how your systems talk to each other.

At those moments, you need someone who can perform a comprehensive tech audit, build an integration strategy, and support the procurement and onboarding of systems with a view of the whole architecture. A fractional CTO. Someone who sits across the technical and the strategic, even temporarily.

I am a massive advocate for what I call the buy-and-build strategy. Do not reinvent the wheel. Put in place well-connected systems that serve as your foundation, and then be creative on top of them.

I saw a perfect example of this recently. A hotel I know well implemented a new connected golf reservation platform. Because the platform had proper API connectivity, their technical team was able to use AI to develop a fully custom booking experience that sits on top of it. The result is something entirely bespoke, built on top of something robust and well-supported.

That is what good technology strategy looks like. You buy the technology that enables you to build. You do not buy finished products and hope they do everything you need. You build a connected core and then innovate around it.

The Opportunity

The hospitality industry is not short of ambition when it comes to technology. Every conference I attend is full of conversations about AI, personalisation, data-driven guest experiences, digital transformation. The appetite is there.

What is missing is the bridge between that ambition and the technical architecture required to deliver it. Someone who can look at a hotel's entire operation and see not just what each system does in isolation, but what they could do together. Someone who understands that the PMS, the booking engine, the CRM, and the payment gateway are not separate purchases. They are components of a single architecture that either works as a whole or fails as a collection of parts.

That role exists in every other industry. Hotels just have not caught up yet.

A Simple Test

If I sat down with a General Manager tomorrow, I would ask two questions. First, who in your organisation is responsible for overseeing the technical strategy of this hotel? Second, could you draw me a picture of the different systems you have in play and how they connect to each other?

The chances are they could not answer either question. And if I pushed further and asked them to point to someone in their organisation who could, they probably could not do that either.

That alone is telling enough.