What's Happening in Hotel Tech Today? - Jordan Hollander, Hotel Tech Report

Josiah: Are you curious about what's going on in the world of hotel technology? I know I am. I feel like this is an area that is always changing so quickly. It is so important in making sure that you have the right tools to delight your guests, empower your teams. And so to talk about what's going on, I can think of few better people who can speak to this and have the perspective to speak to this than Jordan Hollander, who is the co-founder of Hotel Tech Report. In this episode, you're going to hear how the buying process of technology is changing for hoteliers today, key types of technology that hold a lot of promise and are really interesting right now, as well as how to implement technology successfully. We cover a lot in this fast-paced conversation, and so let's get into it. 

Josiah: What's happening in hotel technology today?

Jordan: Yeah, I think just coming off of HITEC, I mean, the general sentiment we're seeing is that buyers are becoming more sophisticated, like finally, and they're doing more diligence. I think one of the things they're probably like on the buyer side doing a little less of is going to trade shows just because when you think about it, software is not a great thing to see in person. Nobody likes co-view software unless you're a video editor at a news station who needs to cut with someone. So when you're sitting with a salesperson, like why is it? It's kind of a weird experience. And so it's always better to try this off for yourself, see what it looks like, read about what people are saying, and read reviews online. So a lot of people want to collect more information upfront. The other thing that I've seen since I worked on the hotel side of business is that buyers are going along the thread of being more sophisticated. They're not taking recommendations at face value. So, for example, I was working for a management company in the Bay Area, not so far from you, probably some hotels that you've stayed at, like Casa Madrona and Sausalito, the Lodge at Tiburon, Hotel Abri downtown. And we were looking for a new marketing agency. I wasn't in the marketing department at all. I was in BizDev doing M&A, new hotels, and then also looking at optimizing the hotels we had with capital expenditures. But our regional marketing manager came to me and she's like, I think we need a new marketing agency. What do you think of these three? And she lists three marketing agencies. I'm like, at that time, I literally knew nothing about marketing. I think I'm pretty dangerous now, but I literally knew nothing about marketing. And she was putting it on me to like decide between these agencies. And I was like, well, what's the difference between them? So she sends me like a sales deck for each. I'm like, oh, they all do SEO. They all do web design. Like I literally, there's no differentiation here. And then she's like, I like this one. I'm like, why do you like that one? She's like, well, I used to work down in Coronado and we used to use them. And it's like, well, OK, so you're not going to go out and do like a proper vendor search. You're just going to go to the things that are top of mind. And I think buyers today, like partially because there's platforms like Hotel Tech Report where you can get this information yourself, you can educate yourself and get that first 80% of the buying decision or research process done really quickly and easily. But they're just looking at options like you would in any other department of the hotel. Would Marriott buy all of their global sheets from one vendor that they didn't look at any other vendors? And so, from a technology perspective, they're looking at solutions more frequently. They're getting more curious. And I think part of the issue right now is obviously interest rates are super high in the hotel industry, which means your cost is going up, and then your labor cost is going up, and inflation is impacting your cost of goods and FF&E and other areas. And so you're like, well, what the hell do I do to improve my NOI? And there's not that much you can do outside of trying to rearrange your processes or your people. And the only way you could do that is by having technology that allows you to bring in new people more efficiently or to reorient those people or to restaff and rethink your staffing model. And so technology is super core to that. And I think hoteliers know now that number one, it's not super scary to buy technology like it's not rocket science. And we're also seeing a big decentralization. So that was like a weird case where I was asked to make this marketing decision. And a lot of the management companies ' buying decisions used to be at the CIO level. So CIO, sure, now today they make purchase decisions about whether we use Azure or AWS, or whether we use maybe not CrowdStrike for cybersecurity after what happened last week, but which cybersecurity vendors are they using? But they're not going to make a decision about a CRM the same way that when you were at Duetto, your CTO wouldn't tell you what CRM you should use, HubSpot or Salesforce, although I know he was at Salesforce previously, so he would be biased. But he would make decisions about the things that are relevant for his department. We're seeing more and more of that happening at the hotel level. Why would someone who's a centralized tech person make a marketing or a revenue management or a sales decision? So those decisions are getting decentralized and the buyers are becoming more sophisticated because information is just easier to access.

Josiah: I love that. So I wonder if we could spend a few more minutes talking about this, because there is an art form to buying technology. Many people who are maybe new in their careers or they've been coming from organizations that operate in a more legacy sort of way, as you described, where it's all been centralized. This could be a new activity, right? I imagine a lot of our listeners have a lot of experience. providing hospitality, maybe not a lot of experience buying technology, but this is becoming a critical skill set for regardless of the function that you're working at within a hotel or a hotel company. So what I heard from you is, you know, there's this decentralization. I'm hearing an abundance of information. So a takeaway that I have hearing you is I need to make sure that if maybe I am in that centralized or I'm a top executive, I need to kind of push or I need to empower my teams. I also need to make sure that I'm looking at reviews. Is there any other advice you would have in that buying process so that our listeners don't just end up reading sales or marketing material and they really figure out this is going to be a good partner for our organization?

Jordan: Totally, totally. So I think that decentralization takes a lot of the workload off because you can kind of delegate who's looking at what. But within your purview, if you're a marketing manager, for example, you need to sharpen your skills because marketing is changing like crazy, whether that's Google adding AI into search, whether that's the decline of platforms like TripAdvisor in terms of driving bookings or changing their booking models. So you need to be dangerous at your game. You need to understand it better than anyone else or AI is going to take your job or someone who's better than you is going to take your job that understands AI. In order to do that, the best resource that you have is the vendor ecosystem. And that doesn't mean like, you know, you're getting on sales calls every week and they're hawking you, but like you should lean on your existing vendors for knowledge and you should take advantage. You're paying software as a subscription, you're paying a fee, you're buying into the future of that business. And it's also a service business. So, take advantage of that service, lean on them, and Ask to talk to their product team once a quarter to figure out what are the new features that they're building. What are they excited about? What does the roadmap look like? So get in front of it and be proactive. Don't just wait like, oh crap, our revenue management system dropped our rate when Taylor Swift came to town and now we need a new one. You need to be proactive about this and you need to use them to source your knowledge. And so even if you're comfortable with the vendor, constantly be talking to other people. Reed Hastings from Netflix would always tell his employees, constantly go out to the market and interview for other companies and find out what your value is so that you're not that person sitting in my company thinking, why am I getting paid half of what I should be? So I think on the tech side, think about it like that. Think about being proactive, trying to map out what the roadmaps are of these different vendors. And maybe you find a vendor that you don't necessarily want to work with, but they're building something really cool. And you could go back to your vendor and say, guys, what's the deal with this? This is an awesome feature. Why are you not building this? And you can kind of get a better feel for the software. Because most users of software, not just in hotel tech, but in any tech, we use probably like 20% of the features that are there. So we're not seeing what's really going on behind the scenes. And so try to get deeper, try to understand, even if you can't necessarily use every new feature that they're pushing to you or shipping to you, try to be more proactive about it. So I think just that idea of being more proactive than reactive is the best possible thing. The other one is acting as a fiduciary for your company. Never take one vendor at face value. Even if you like a vendor, talk to three, go deep with three, like give them a chance. And that might end up making you like the first vendor more. But it's the same thing in the investment management world where I used to, where I came from like a consultant who's managing a pension fund would be fired instantly or get barred from the industry if they just pitch one mutual fund for that pension to go into. And they didn't provide options and a rationale. So you should be prepared to do that. You should be capable. Hot ones like Hotel Tech Report can provide a lot of the information. We're not going to go all the way on that. You're going to have to pick it up after we give you a shortlist and reviews and help you kind of sift through and do the BS meltdown stuff. Is this vendor actually credible? Like you can kind of tell by the review philosophy on Hotel Tech Report. You can tell by the quality. There are a lot of great vendors that have some bad reviews. That's OK, too. That'll help you understand like, oh, you know, this this feature that someone's complaining about isn't a huge deal to me. So, like that, that kind of barrier to adopting is actually making me want it more. So just doing your research, being proactive, and just staying in front of things is always the best way to go in anything. But I think software buying hoteliers are moving more towards that and less of like, oh, I saw this cool new thing at a trade show booth. Or like, my friend told me about it needs to be a more diligent process of going out and finding new software. And we see more and more hoteliers doing that.

Josiah: I appreciate you not mincing words there, because it is one thing to throw a great party at a trade show, and it's another thing to build software that will really help you. Sometimes there's some overlap there, but they're not always correlated, right? And so it's look at actually the product you're buying and the team and the people. Those conversations are going to be invaluable. I've spent a lot of my career working at different technology companies, so I've seen it from the inside. And I'll tell you the amount of information And also willingness to have these kind of conversations is incredible. And so, as you pointed out, I mean, this is going to help you personally in your career. It will help your organization, even if you end up staying with all the same partners that you have now. This is a vital thing to keep in mind. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the technology itself, Sean, because you have a really interesting vantage point. A lot of people are either within a hotel organization or they're at a technology company that's probably focused on one element of the ecosystem. You see the whole ecosystem. Our listeners know technology is important. But across the entire ecosystem, what elements of it to you are most interesting today?

Jordan: Yeah, I think we're seeing a huge uptick in sophistication of meetings and event sales. I use this example of we're trying to book a a rooftop here in downtown LA for a hotel tech report party. The founders of Duetto were there. I think it was when you were there also. We're trying to book this rooftop and we reach out to the sales team and we're like, Hey, we've got like a $20,000 budget. We're not a huge event, but it was like, not nothing. And so we're looking to book this party. Here's what we want. I think it was like 10 days later, they responded with, what's your budget? And I'm just like, we had already booked a suite at the Hyde Lounge at what was Staples Center that's now Crypto.com Marina. And it's like, you just missed opportunity. And so there's two components to that that are challenging. Number one is like live bookable inventory, but there's also some stuff that requires a human touch. So it's like bringing true revenue management and displacement analysis in real time to the sales function. And so we're seeing a lot of companies that are kind of addressing that problem. Duetto obviously bought MiceRate. There's a really cool startup that's kind of doing out of New York that used to be called Tori, they just rebranded. That's kind of automating sales emails with AI. So like when you fill out the RFP form on the website, it basically goes back and forth with the buyer until they need a human to get in the loop. We're seeing, you know, platforms obviously like Groups360 or Meeting Package that are doing really cool stuff, bringing a lot of the kind of chain and regional chain inventory online. There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to book 20 rooms and an event space or some F&B the same way that you book a leisure room. Now, obviously, if you're having your wedding there, you want to have your hand held and you want to have a lot of visibility into this. But if you're a meeting planner who's booking You know, 20 meetings a year and you're just completely strapped like you need fast information. And so ideally, that should be bookable. But if not, you need to get all that really quickly. And so we're seeing a lot of evolution and kind of innovation in that space. Another one that's really cool is a company called Visiting Media. That's kind of like a technology partner for Matterport, really focused on hotels. They're obviously all over the place, but doing the kind of 3D walkthroughs that we've all, at least here in the US, gotten used to when it comes to looking at apartments or houses. And so just making it so it's really easy to understand instantly what you're going to get. the other side. And even if that means understanding different room types and amenities, it's really important. So we're seeing a lot of cool stuff. And now Visiting is building some sales software so you can actually see analytics on what people are looking at so that the salesperson can be informed of what to talk about. So there's really cool innovation coming out of that space for sure.

Josiah: I mean, I feel like I've been to a number of investment conferences this year where group business and meetings just come up again and again as a hotspot in terms of revenue opportunity. So you need to have the infrastructure to capitalize on that opportunity. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what you're seeing happening in the guest experience space. You talked in the past about the rise of guest experience platforms that incorporate so many different aspects of how we delight guests and the operations behind the scenes to make that happen. What are you seeing take place in that area of hospitality today?

Jordan: Yeah, I think we're seeing this. It's kind of the first generation of really sophisticated operators on the guest experience side. And obviously, like in your neck of the woods, Canary just raised $50 million. They're doing an incredible job. But I think what Canary did that was really unique is that They built a modular platform that works for SMB and enterprise, and no one had really done that in guest experience. It was either like a super customized platform that we're trying to be like the reseller or the preferred option for Hilton, and we only go enterprise and we don't talk to anyone else. or like this super small hotel geared solution. And so I think what Canary's done is they've built a platform that again is modular. It works for the super sophisticated use cases and for the simpler use cases. And then, they have a commercial model that aligns with that. But they've also built it modular in terms of product. So a lot of companies in a space like ours will try to be an all-in-one. Sometimes, that's an all-in-one PMS. Sometimes, that's all-in-one guest experience software, etc. But what's really unique about what Canary is doing is they build a kind of digital tipping, contactless checking, digital authorizations, guest messaging, and guest apps. And they let their buyers choose what they're ready for instead of saying, oh, you've got to use all of this right now. The buyer could be like, we actually just want to help create a better culture and incentivize our staff. So we really like digital tipping. And they can bring customers in and then upsell them to new solutions when it's the right solution, not because they forced them to use that solution. And I think that's just, just part of it is just time in the market. It's like they didn't have this broad swath of solutions when they got in the market, and they weren't able to serve the more complex use cases. And over time, they've just built it. They've built a business in a really smart way. So canaries, one of them do is doing a really nice job and then moving up market from smaller properties. There's a company out of Germany called Magic that's doing some cool stuff. Um, so, and I think in tandem with that, it's like the guest experience software is actually driving real revenue to the bottom line that you can track on the P&L for the first time with upsells and mobile ordering and even the digital check-in or the digital authorization to check-in. You're getting credit card information and identity information. So, it's driving P&L value, whereas ten years ago it was like, hey, I want some towels, and that's all I could do. And now it's like the VCs are like, oh, wow, the booking isn't the only place when transactions happen on property. This is happening throughout the stay, and this is the new platform that's enabling that. And so, you're seeing companies like F Prime, they're like, let's put a bigger round on this. This is a scalable business. There is an opportunity here. And so, it's really exciting to see what's happening on that side as well.

Josiah: I'm fascinated watching this because I have this theory I have been developing over my career that operations is really where the magic happens in hospitality, even having worked at companies focused on more of the commercial side. I think because, as you mentioned, there are technological factors that have taken place where we've always known in hospitality that there are so many touch points that we have pre-stay, on-site, post-departure. where at each of those stages you can build stronger relationships, you can monetize, and it's really encouraging to see elements of that coming together. I know you've spoken in the past about the consolidation happening in the industry with regards to technology. If I'm hearing you talk about Canary in this example, I feel like for the hoteliers listening and even for the technology companies, reading between the lines, some takeaways I have from what you shared are it's incredibly so important to integrate technology well, because whether it's a point solution or a larger technology stack, I think you're getting at this notion of sort of fitting into the needs that you have in the business. And it seems like if you're a hotelier, you need to think about this because there may be consolidation, but whether there is or not, you need to make sure that everything's integrated. Totally.

Jordan: Totally. And I think, yeah. And I think to that point, like, think about you running your podcast, like you're, we're talking on Riverside right now. If Riverside launched a podcast syndication platform, I don't know, use like we use transistor. Like, would you care that it's on Riverside? No, it has to be better than transistor or I'm not going to use it. And so, and it has to be easier to serve my needs. And so. I think a lot of times with this all-in-one, it was like, oh, we're just doing it because it's easier. We have one contract. But for most hotels, you don't need contracts anymore. It's SaaS. You pay monthly as you go. You cancel any time. That's how modern software works. And so you're going to use best of breed solutions. I think there's still this kind of like, Oh, integrations are a pain and we want to use one solution to make it easier. At the same time, you're just going to use the thing that serves your need best. And especially when you go cross department, like why the heck does like the operations team need to be using the same software vendor that the revenue management, like they don't even interact with each other 90% of the time. So there's no need for it to work with one company for both of those software contracts.

Josiah: One more question just on the purchase process. Thinking back to how we started this conversation, you talk about more sophisticated buyers, the buying process being more decentralized. And then what you're just getting at here, I think, is interesting for our listeners in the sense that just the way that SaaS products are structured, if I'm understanding you correctly, there's more of this opportunity to try things perhaps. And I'm curious to hear your reflections on, or maybe observations of hoteliers that you've spoken with that you think have done a really smart job of rolling out technology. Is it a little bit more of this, let's try either kind of within one hotel, or how are you seeing smart, I guess, implementations of technology?

Jordan: Yeah, totally. Strawberry is a great example of a company that used to be Nordic Choice Hotels. They had an in-house PMS called Sennium and this is the death knell for most hotel companies. Why are you building a software company? It was like this like on prem solution that wasn't great and they started piloting Mews at some of their properties and then kind of, uh, you know, I don't want to say, you know, curated the deal between these two, but they're like, Hey, if you kind of buy a setting and you can scale to our properties and like take over this customer base. And so I think that's one example of a company that saw, okay, maybe we did things wrong. We don't have a business like building a property management system. Let's figure out how to fix it. And now that they're on Mews, the head of IT systems over there, Span, was telling me that they're doing a pilot with flex keeping on an 800 room property. If it works on an 800-room property for housekeeping and operations management, then it's going to work for the rest of our portfolio. So they do a pilot. They set up goals and KPIs ahead of the pilot. So it's not just like, oh, let's do one thing. In the end, we have no idea what the next steps are. What did success look like? Did it work? Did it not work? Um, so they set up their KPIs and, uh, at the end of that pilot, they know whether it's something that they want to explore, um, and whether they want to try different solutions on top of that. So I think they're doing really smart stuff. They did the same thing with Event Temple. So I think they're there. They become really sophisticated at let's try this. Let's let's try a solution that plugs in easily with our core operating system. And then let's experiment. And when we experiment, let's do it the right way. Let's stop the experiment, right? Let's set up our KPIs ahead of time. Let's set up next steps so that we know when we finish this, if we hit those KPIs, what happens next. And I think that's the kind of behavior, at least at the enterprise level, that you want to see.

Josiah: I love it. Jordan, you have built an incredible resource for the industry at Hotel Tech Report. I can't tell you how many people I've run into in remote parts of the world who tell me how they're religiously on your site, learning about what is new and available. I know you're always working on new things. And I'm curious, for all the hoteliers listening, is there anything you've been working on recently that you'd like to bring to their attention and have them check out?

Jordan: Yeah, totally. So I think when a lot of people look at HotelTechReport, they see a review site, and the reviews there, they're great, like in themselves, like look at one review, and it does X amount for you. But the real value of what we've been doing over the last seven years is the data set that we have. And so last month, we put out that we crossed 50,000 reviews. And so when you have 50,000 reviews, and you know all the characteristics of all the hotels, we know What amenities do they have? What's their ADR? What do their online reviews look like? Do they have an FNBL? We have all this data about the hotels and the software that they're satisfied with. What region are they in? We can now start to make really, really good recommendations. And so on the back end of that data, we built a tool that we'll be launching very soon, in the next month or so, that's an AI tech staff advisor. And so I know AI is buzzy right now, so I'll explain exactly what it does. Basically, you go onto this platform, you type in your hotel, and we instantly grab all the information about your hotel, like images, room count, ADR, online reviews, amenities, and what tech stack you use, and then we basically put together an end-to-end tech stack recommendation and audit. We give you a digital transformation score that's kind of like a credit score for your hotel so you can see how you benchmark against other properties. And then, as you go and add your different tools, so you say, I use this PMS, I use this guest messaging software, or I use this channel manager, or maybe I don't use a channel manager, I use a CRS, we start improving your score. And then we make recommendations that are either if you have a low fit, so there's a low match rate, we use that K nearest neighbors model to basically evaluate whether this solution is a good fit based on the data set and based on the hotel data that you're entering. If it's a bad fit for your business, like let's say you're a large enterprise company and you're working with a vendor that only serves small hotels in a completely different region, it'll have a low fit score, it'll say you might want to evaluate these solutions. Or let's say that you don't have a guest experience platform. It'll talk about the value of guest experience platforms for driving ADR, driving total RevPAR, and it'll tell you why you should use it, which solutions you should use, and why those solutions are the best match for you, like with the narrative analysis that's written by GPT. So that's coming out next month. And we're just really excited to basically be able to not just tell you which PMS you should use as a revenue management system but also start helping hoteliers be more proactive. And a lot of the stuff that we started our conversation with is like, how do you do that? Where do you start? And what we want hoteliers to be able to do is input their hotel, track their progress over time, and get recommendations in real-time. So we can kind of, if you think about like a lot of the venture capital networking platforms, it's like, Josiah, you were looking to raise from Battery Ventures and you haven't talked to them in six months. You should go talk to them. We want to create a platform like that that we're building off of to help hoteliers go through that process without having to think about it too much.

Josiah: Amazing. I'll include a link in the show notes where people can learn more, Jordan, but for people who are just listening to the audio, where would you point people where they can access this?

Jordan: It'll be on hoteltechreport.com. We'll have a link in the header. I don't think we've actually decided what it'll say, but probably AI advisor or something like that. It'll be something like that.

Josiah: Amazing. Well, I can't wait to see that, Jordan. Thank you so much for taking time to chat today. Thanks for having me, Josiah. Great to catch up.