A room full of hotel CIOs just described your biggest advantage
At a closed-door session, the tech chiefs of Radisson, Wyndham and Choice spelled out what keeps a big brand slow — split budgets, the franchisee vote, tangled data ownership. An independent owner has none of it.
by Markus Busch
The confession you weren't meant to hear. At HITEC in San Antonio, off the record, the tech chiefs of some of the largest hotel groups — Radisson, Wyndham, Choice, citizenM, Mandarin Oriental, Aimbridge — sat down with the CEOs of the biggest PMS companies and, for once, talked without a sales table between them. No names attached to anything, which is the only reason they spoke this plainly. What the giants admitted about why they can't move is a description, line by line, of the ground you stand on.
The machinery that keeps them slow. The money for technology comes from several departments at once — marketing, reservations, operations — and no one owns it, so the change that would help the whole hotel loses to a compromise that half-satisfies each desk. Worse, a brand's tech leader can't simply decide to spend: "the hardest job in this industry is the one where you have to convince a majority of your franchisees before you can do anything at all." And when AI does get funded, it gets aimed at labor cost, for one reason — that's the only case an owner will approve. The moderator's summary was blunt: the groups optimize cost, the vendors build for the guest. You have one budget and one person to convince, and you already agree with him. So spend the difference. Three of their own admissions tell you where.
Ask one question: business or leisure. The room kept circling a gap none of them had closed. Nothing in a normal booking captures whether the guest is travelling for work or for pleasure — "that single fact would change almost everything a hotel should offer." A chain can't retrofit it across every system and franchisee. You can ask it, or read it off the booking, and change the arrival on the spot: the late business arrival gets a quiet, fast check-in on a quiet floor; the family at the resort gets the what's-on rundown. Do the same across stays and it compounds — remember that she likes the room cold and have it set before she walks in, fix at her next visit the thing that went wrong at the last. That is the guest data everyone in the room wished they could act on, and you can, because it's one property's data and it's yours.
Remove one login. One supplier gave the plainest example of the day: a single separate login was removed, so staff no longer had to remember to open another system to offer an upsell — and upsells rose sharply. The tool never changed, only the friction around it. Find the one extra screen your front desk skips when the lobby is full, and take it out. You can do that before a brand finishes scoping the pilot.
Fund the guest project, skip the business case. A chain has to dress a guest-experience project as a cost cut to get it past an owner. You are the owner. Pick the thing that makes the stay better — the one you'd otherwise have to justify with a savings number you didn't believe — and just do it — over lunch, the way you decide everything else here.
None of this makes you bigger. Their scale still buys what you can't — the loyalty economics, the sheer volume of data a global brand collects. That isn't going anywhere. But a room of the people who run technology at the largest chains just spent ninety minutes naming the frictions their size bought them, and handing you, without meaning to, the moves they can't make. Their size moves the industry. It's also the brake — and every move it can't make is one you can run this week.
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