Last week, GuestRevu had the honour of sponsoring Next Wave Hospitality: The connected hotel, Hospitality that performs. The GuestRevu team joined hoteliers, operators, technology providers and hospitality partners for a day of frank discussion about what it really takes to build a better-performing hotel.
.png?width=600&height=400&name=The%20connected%20hotel%20is%20still%20a%20people%20business%20(Next%20Wave%20Hospitality%20recap).png)
The event was designed to create space for the kinds of honest conversations that might be awkward in formal sales pitches or behind desks. The organisers set out to understand from hoteliers on the ground where the real operational gaps are, rather than simply claiming that one system is “the best”.
The wide-ranging agenda included talks and discussions on economics, design, infrastructure, cyber security, AI, WiFi, the guest journey, revenue and loyalty. For me, though, the most interesting thing was how often those conversations returned to people.
Talk to hoteliers for long enough, and eventually the conversation comes back to the people in the hotel, both the staff and guests. The panellists and speakers explored topics like how to get the best staff, and get the best out of them; what kinds of experiences guests love, and what makes travel worth paying more for; and where technology can help, where it gets in the way, and where it can be a real risk.
Hospitality is resilient because people still value experiences
The day opened with Thomas Pugh, Partner and Chief Economist at RSM UK. His charismatic speaking style only somewhat took the edge off a fairly sobering economic picture. Energy prices, inflation, political uncertainty, labour market pressure and consumer confidence are all creating challenges for businesses. Hospitality is particularly exposed to energy costs; Pugh noted that hotels are among the biggest energy consumers.
And yet, the legendary resilience of the travel industry provided an (admittedly slim) silver lining.
Although consumers may be cutting back in many discretionary categories, travel has declined relatively little. Pugh pointed out that people have continued to prioritise short stays, long stays and weekends away, even through the previous energy and cost-of-living crises. Hotels, he suggested, have also been able to pass inflation through to consumers more effectively than many retailers.
That resilience is hard-earned, though. The reason people are still willing to spend on travel and hospitality is that they are not simply paying for a bed, a room, or a transaction – they are paying for an experience.
Or, as Inna Nekrassova, Director of Revenue at Hotel Café Royal, put it during the connected guest journey panel, “the guest doesn’t just buy a room, they buy an identity.” If the experience of this identity is incoherent across the hotel’s reputation, brand, facilities, staff or service, the experience starts to feel less valuable, especially when guests are paying more for it.
The guest experience is therefore of crucial commercial importance. If costs are rising and guests have less disposable income, the experience has to justify the spend. Guests will be less tolerant of inconveniences and disappointments. They will be less likely to tolerate a slow or frustrating check-in, sub-standard room cleanliness, slow wifi, or surly staff. The marketing and the money need to match the reality.
The conversation always comes back to people
I was pleasantly surprised that the conversation during the design session focused significantly on designing the hotel around the staff experience, as well as the guest experience.
Panellists Neal Stone, Director at leapSTONE, and Dave Bennett, Technical Director at Focus Group, discussed the importance of bringing together a “diagonal slice” of representatives across an organisation to solve problems (people from different seniority levels and different parts of the business). From a technology perspective, they noted that decisions should not just involve senior stakeholders; the people using the systems on a daily basis also need to be part of the conversation.
Alessandra Leoni, Head of Hospitality at Focus on Hospitality, reiterated this point later on in the day, stating: “Look ahead, look at your guest reviews, bring everybody that contributes to the guest experience in the room… have your commercial team talk to the IT managers, the IT directors, because we cannot continue to work in silos.”
Hotelier Sir Rocco Forte’s famous statement, “You can excuse an ugly building if the staff deliver the right service (it's much nicer to have a combination of both things), but the staff at the end of the day are the service”, remains as true as it ever was.
Beautiful spaces, clever systems and innovative guest-facing tools can be good investments, but when hotel staff are battling against poor processes, siloed information, or unreliable connectivity, their frustration will end up impacting the guest (one way or another).
Neal described customer experience and employee experience as equally vital, referencing the idea that if staff have a better experience, they can provide better service, which in turn improves the guest experience and supports commercial performance.
I found it inspiring to hear leading minds in hospitality asserting that a good hotel is not just guest-first at any cost – it is people-first, and that includes the people who work there. Staff and guests are part of the same experience ecosystem.
AI should facilitate hospitable people, not replace them
AI was (obviously) a major theme, but the conversations were not about replacing hospitality with automation. They were about how AI can support the human interactions that make hospitality valuable.
The session title, AI alone won’t fix it, was a good summary of the mood. AI is powerful, but it cannot fix unclear objectives, disconnected data, poor processes, weak infrastructure or a lack of operational alignment. It's just a tool, as Arik Fletcher, Fraction vCTO at Focus Group, so eloquently put it:
“I think the thing to remember with AI is it’s a force amplifier. Bad data, bad systems, bad processes, bad practices, they'll get worse with AI. Good practices, good systems will get better with AI. It's not going to solve a problem that you can't solve yourself, it just does things faster.”
There may be niche hospitality concepts where minimal human interaction is part of the product, but for the vast majority of hotels (even those using tech to streamline previously human-led tasks like checking in), hospitality is still an interpersonal transaction.
Tech should make those interactions easier, better informed and more timely. It should help staff understand the guest, prepare for the guest, respond to the guest and learn from the guest. It should give teams more space to be hospitable, not less.
Guest feedback is a perfect place to apply the powers of AI. Reviews, surveys, comments, sentiment and recurring themes help hotels understand what guests are actually experiencing. AI can help make sense of that information at scale, but the purpose is still going to be implemented by humans working at hotels, and that is to create better stays for guests at hotels.
“You know, I'm sure there was something called ‘big data’ a few years ago, you know, it's nothing new that we're dealing with”
– Kevin Edwards, CEO, Hospitality Technology Advisory
When it works well, Infrastructure is invisible
The event also made a strong case for treating infrastructure as part of both the guest experience, and the operational kit for hotel teams.
During the design session, Dave Bennett pointed out that, now that most hotel systems are cloud-based, connectivity becomes far more significant. Unlike office workers, hotel teams (and guests) cannot simply pick up their laptops and go to a coffee shop down the road if the connection fails.
The WiFi session made it even clearer that WiFi is no longer just an amenity. It supports guests, staff, operations, data capture, personalisation, payments, communication, housekeeping, meetings, entertainment and loyalty. Much like good plumbing, when it works, nobody notices. When it fails, it becomes a front desk issue, a review issue and potentially a revenue issue.
The vast majority of your staff and guests do not really care about the details of the infrastructure behind their experience – the wifi or the plumbing – they just need it to work.
The connected guest journey is not a funnel
The panel on the connected guest journey explored how discovery, booking, pricing, experience, feedback, and loyalty now interact, especially in the post-AI online space.
Ashleigh Donald, Co-founder of Halo, described the current landscape well, “for hotels, the guest journey no longer starts and certainly doesn’t end at checkout. Every stage… is connected: how a guest discovers you, how they book, what they pay, what they experience on property and how they feel afterwards.”
The guest journey is no longer a neat funnel. Guests move between reviews, websites, social media, OTAs, AI search, personal recommendations, brand content and direct channels. Paul Griffiths, Head of Growth at GuestRevu, compared it to driving through Milton Keynes: roundabout after roundabout, with guests entering, leaving, circling back and changing direction along the way.
That means successful hotels will be the ones that integrate marketing, revenue, operations and guest experience strategies to enhance guest experiences and sentiment through multiple interconnected touchpoints. Guest reviews affect future demand. Pricing and brand positioning influence expectations. Operational delivery determines loyalty – both in the form of returning guests and positive word of mouth. Staff experience impacts guest experience, and if you’re doing it right, guest feedback informs what the hotel should fix, promote or rethink.
The ‘connected hotel’ is a commercial idea as well as an operational one. Interconnected, non-linear guest journeys are best supported by connected, non-linear hotel teams. Marketing needs to understand what guests love, hate, or don’t really notice. Revenue teams need to understand perceived value (and how far they can push it). Operations need to understand what promises are being made (implicitly or explicitly) before arrival.
Better technology should make hospitality feel more human
Giving guests a variety of options and the ability to choose their level of technology within the same hotel offering was something that came up in several sessions.
Neal shared a relatable example from air travel that applies just as well to hotels:
“Some customers will want a lot of touch points, and they'll want reassurance throughout that experience, and others [are] quite happy to almost not be greeted at the cabin door and just sit down and get on with their flight. That same person on the return journey, by the way, may be the complete inverse. So I think control and choice is really interesting, and we need to bake that into the infrastructure.”
- Neal Stone, Director, leapSTONE
Some guests want a high-touch, reassuring, human experience. Others want speed, control and minimal interaction. The same guest may want different things on different trips.
When used well, technology can be extremely useful in providing these options for guests. Self-check-in, guest messaging, CRM profiles and integrated systems can all help hotels adapt to different guest needs. But the best examples are not the ones where technology replaces a service, but where it augments or supports better service.
As an example, Paul Griffiths mentioned how a self check-in kiosk that works and has a staff member nearby to help is incredibly useful (both for the guest and the staff). A kiosk that fails and sends the guest on a frustrated search for a human is worse than just waiting.
The question hoteliers should be asking themselves is not, “Can this be automated?” Instead, hoteliers should be asking, “Will this make the experience better for the guest, easier for the team, or more useful for the business?”
What hoteliers should take away
Hotels need strong infrastructure. They need reliable WiFi. They need secure systems. They need connected data. They need tools that reduce friction and help teams make better decisions. But the reason they need all of this is that hospitality is a people-first business, and to succeed, you need to maximise the amount of time people spend looking after and creating great experiences for others.
Hotels may be operating in a relatively resilient sector, but guests will not accept poor value. If people are still prioritising travel while cutting back elsewhere, hotels have to work even harder to make sure the experience is worth it.
The experience might be romanticised by marketing, influenced by reviews and supported by infrastructure, but it is ultimately delivered by people.
Although we are more teched-up than ever before, what makes the hospitality industry special is the people who work in it and the experiences they give guests. To paraphrase Richard Branson: Use tech to look after, train and uplift your people, and they will look after your guests.
