Why Hotels Buy Technology But Still Struggle to Get Results with Technology - Mark Fancourt

Josiah: What you're about to hear is my wide-ranging conversation with Mark Fancourt, one of the industry's foremost leaders in hotel technology. He is a person that so many hoteliers, so many leaders I respect turn to when it comes to figuring out how technology can help their operations, how it can improve guest experience, and how it can empower their teams -- people on the front lines, people above property. It's one of the reasons I love learning from him. We recorded this conversation at the end of last year, and I published part one of our conversation, which was a little more focused on AI, a few months ago. There's a link in the show notes if you want to check that out. This conversation gets into many different elements of what it looks like to operate with the best of technology, how to think about it, how to plan for it, how to adopt it, how to use it so that you get the most out of it. I've included some chapter markers if you want to jump to a specific part of our conversation. But if you care about driving results with technology in the hospitality industry, you're going to want to hear what Mark shares here in this episode. There's a lot that you'll take away and can apply in your business that's going to elevate your performance with technology. So without further ado, let's get into it.

[Hospitality Daily intro]

Josiah: If you're advising a CEO or a CTO around how to take advantage of emerging AI opportunities, it feels like there are interesting technologies that are constantly emerging. Do you start with the exciting technology that emerges, or do you start from a what's-going-on-in-the-business perspective? What are the problems to solve? What do you find most useful at this point in time?

Mark: There's a handful of things I've seen out in the market that I really like, and they address the front side of the business. They might not be full AI at the moment, because the technology community is still trying to work out what to do with a lot of these things -- let's be honest about that. But for example, there's a tool out of France that I've been following for quite some time. They started out with the simple objective of analyzing and making more valuable customer information data, and they focused specifically on that and built the layers. I'm going back probably a couple of years now, which I would say is pretty far ahead compared to where most things are.

The other thing that I think is so industry-shifting, so important for a true high-touch hospitality experience -- and I don't mean just at the top of the funnel, I mean all layers -- is real-time voice communication coupled with real-time translation. This is just extraordinary technology, and it's totally within the grasp of the industry right now. I was just saying to someone the other night, "Don't you want your staff to be able to talk to each other?" Yes or no? I think the answer in hospitality is yes. These are no-brainer things that will make an immediate impact on your business and they don't require a major technical forklift. They're there.

As someone who's been speaking to as many people as you do in the podcast space and with your other role at Actabl, you know how hard we're all working to figure out what we can do and what is within our current environment that we might be able to augment or add on. When you and I last spoke -- and it's been a hallmark of my approach for a very long time -- if you wait, you lose. It's really that straightforward.

Bringing it back to your question: Actabl is a great example. When you're on a phone call with your customers and potential customers and they say, "Do you have plans for artificial intelligence?" You are not saying, "No, we're not doing anything with AI." And the thing I always say to people on the operational side is: it will come because it has to come. Neither you nor I nor anyone else needs to tell the technology community that we want to see AI capability coming into product lines. It's going to come, and if you're with the right vendor, it's going to come. So don't sit around waiting because of the next shiny thing. You've got to keep moving.

Number two is: most people have some understanding of how this is going to work, and there's plenty of dialogue from my peer group and beyond noting that structure is everything -- and structure has always been a problem for our industry. So if you want to take advantage of these things, just like other things in the past, you have to get the house in order.

Josiah: To build on your Actabl example -- we're working with 150,000 hoteliers using our platforms. One of the things we've observed is that all of this AI-powered magic is running on data. Job number one is normalized data, so we've been really leaning into that.

In our earlier conversation, we were talking about long-term partnerships and making sure you have the right partners. I think it's reasonable to ask your technology partners: what is your plan to build on that? But I'm thinking about the interfaces themselves. Typical software has different charts and dials, but the job to be done behind it is to help you make better decisions. That's where AI could get really good and interesting -- because assuming your data house is in order, there are novel ways of presenting information that are more intuitive, faster, and help you decide what to do in a way that's relevant to your context. So it's a bit of a misnomer to just think about AI, because that's just good computing. That's good product design. Sometimes throwing "AI" on it makes me think: what's your product strategy? Maybe it's not an AI strategy, maybe it's a product strategy.

Mark: Right. If I said to you, should we or should we not have structured databases? You'd say of course. Should we get our product into the cloud? Of course. Should we look to take advantage of artificial intelligence as a layer of technology to make our products and services better? Of course. So we do get excited about the next generations of technology, but it is a next generation of technology that we will leverage, just like everything else. It's about leveraging the tool sets that are out there to make your product a more valuable product.

Even today, the simple ability for technology to harness a significant amount of information, analyze it at speeds that are almost disturbingly quick, and then give you meaningful output and respond to your questions -- that is priceless.

I'll give you a real example. I support Appalachian Hotels from a strategic perspective, and one of the first things Chris Hunsberger said to me when we were designing for the company was, "Mark, I really want to make sure that whatever we do, we end up with actionable insights that the team can do something with." Four years ago that meant something. Today it's very much a reality. You might have to pick information from here and there because it might not be native to a particular business application, but you can do that. From a productivity perspective, that's streets and bounds beyond what we've generally been able to do as hotels in the past. And that's available at the desktop level -- basically to everyone in the building.

Josiah: I was at an industry conference and someone showed me this demo of what they were calling a ProfitSword killer. The interface was great, the demo was really slick. But the magic of technologies like ProfitSword is really in the data underneath it. You can query it in these ways, and in 30 seconds you can create a great user interface with vibe coding. The reason I'm asking is less about me and Actabl and more for hoteliers listening to understand: are there fundamental things that have been true for decades in hotel technology, wherever technology goes, that remain? I'm thinking about data normalization. In the ProfitSword example, a lot of the work we're doing is standardizing across properties, across brands -- that's the magic. And then you can have different interfaces. Is that a through line?

Mark: It's as fundamental as running water. What took me into the enterprise side of technology back in the nineties was enterprise brand platforms for distribution, CRM, and e-commerce -- pre-booking engines -- with hooks into revenue management. Yet you couldn't do anything unless you standardized and structured your data and put organizational discipline in place. Even beyond the technical side, data is a form of language and it's institutional. If I'm sitting in a corporate office and you're sitting at one of the properties and we're dialoguing over some piece of business information, we need to be speaking the same language. Otherwise I say what I say and you say what you say, and we don't understand each other -- even if we're looking at the same value.

Data structure is just another term for your institutional language -- how you communicate what you do as a business so that it doesn't matter what level, layer, position, or role you play. You all understand what you're talking about, and too many organizations do not approach it from that perspective. There's just no way around it. If you have the organizational discipline to go through the hard yards to do it -- and it also includes your technology tools -- then you are ready for anything. And if you don't do it, it's the thing you always have to do before you can be ready for the next thing. It doesn't matter if you picked a new PMS, a finance system, or a service management system. You always want to know what's going on in your business, and if you want to compare, contrast, and communicate with each other, it's got to be the same.

So the message for hoteliers is: if you haven't started doing it, artificial intelligence is just the next catalyst that's come along suggesting it's time to do something you should always have been doing. Discipline is hard. I spent many years helping some of the best brands in the world standardize their information. It's a painful process, but once you do it, it's the oil of the organization. There's only winning after that.

Josiah: I want to take advantage of the fact that we spoke about a year ago, Mark. In that conversation you touched on something to the effect of there could be this opportunity for boundaryless intelligence -- getting rid of silos, rolling up data. You would think operators over the past year would have seen this as a huge opportunity. Is your sense that operators have made more progress in this direction, or are they moving at the same speed as always?

Mark: This is a passion project of mine. The reason being is I had the good fortune to work with a really interesting piece of software about 15 years ago called Cenium -- a Norwegian company, sort of very left field for the industry. The learning from that experience was seeing what is possible in hospitality when you've broken down all the silos and largely put the entire business into one piece of technology.

The roll-on effects for the industry affect every other aspect of the business. All the staff have access to everything. All the products are in the same place. All the pricing is in the same place. All the customer information is in the same place. There's real-time impact when I sell something in the restaurant for the supply chain, because it automatically orders a replacement. We always talk about technology helping our people do the things technology can't do well. This is the ultimate example of it.

If you roll this back to the major challenges in our industry: one is demand and supply -- what I call the digital shelf, getting your products on the digital shelf. Number two is staffing. It's my belief that a lot of that has to do with the fact that the jobs aren't that interesting, because we haven't made them interesting because we've kept everyone separated. Number three is aligning the customer experience with the staff experience: if the staff have no idea whatsoever what the customer is doing across the business, but yet the digital experience presents itself as cohesive. And the last piece is job structure, roles, and organizational efficiency -- because all of a sudden you don't have to design for silos anymore, you can start to design across the business. This is business transformation on the back of technical capability. And the best part is the winners are the customer and the staff, which are the two people we want to win.

Coming back to your core question: having been around it for a long time, I've been anxious to see the penny drop, and slowly but surely people are starting to go, "Hang on, maybe there's something we need to think about here." Number one reason our attention has been diverted is that for 25 years we ended up in a race to create a digital rooms market. And I would argue that in the process of creating our digital rooms market -- which is entirely necessary, it's not a critique -- we forgot to be great hoteliers across our product and service stack. Today, in the grand scheme of things, we still only have one true digital market. Most of our products cannot be sold digitally, even at brand.com level, let alone into a distribution network.

Josiah: Looking back over the notes from our last conversation, you said there's such a big opportunity to move to a total revenue world. One of the stories of 2025 has been a big miss to top-line expectations. So this isn't just a nice-to-have -- hotels need this. You're saying there's been this rooms focus, but there's so many other things that could be monetized. Where have we ended up with that?

Mark: It's certainly more of a dialogue now, and you're hearing people say, "Well, wouldn't it be good if..." And you have to start. It's not that you couldn't have done this before. It's just that, as so often in our industry, we don't get out of our own way and think a little bit differently to move ahead. But it's absolutely necessary. And it's not for technical reasons -- it's all for business reasons. If you can distribute your products further, the principle of distribution is that you'll sell more. If you can break down the operational silos, you'll more than likely deliver a better customer experience at the fulfillment stage -- but you'll definitely deliver a better staff experience. The staff might want to stay around longer because their jobs will be more interesting, more impactful. And young people today want to feel like they're making an impact.

Then once you put technology behind that and we start to talk about what I see as next-generation concepts such as experience management -- and I don't mean XM the way it's talked about today, I mean on the back of that capability -- we really start to become the curators and the concierges of meaningful experiences. We visualize as an operation what to deliver to the customer, and then find even more revenue opportunities within that construct. We're talking about an industry that's hardly scratched the surface of exponential financial growth. And I would like to think, in the vision I have for it, much happier, more engaged, and more interested staff in our industry. I don't see anything bad about any of that.

Looking around at the organizations that bring technology to the industry: Oracle is getting themselves back to a true platform environment after the 10 years post the Micros acquisition. Agilysys has been working seriously toward this objective. Shiji has been working seriously toward this objective. Smaller companies like Maestro have always had this as an objective within their environment. And I go back to my Cenium days, where it was sort of the big daddy of all that because we had sort of had it all.

For me, it truly is the next big thing for the industry. And it's exciting because I think technology has the capacity to really make the differences we've all felt it potentially could. Things are moving, things are shifting on both sides. I don't want to pretend it's easy because it isn't. Nothing valuable ever is.

Josiah: What's cool about observing your work, Mark, is that people I respect look to you for guidance on technology strategy -- from the technology side to the hotelier side. Seeing you advise the Appalachian team over the last four years, thinking about what's possible -- you've not only demonstrated this as a corporate leader at very large, respected organizations, but also for emerging brands. This strategic focus on how do you imagine what's possible feels more important than ever.

Before we go, I want to touch on something we mentioned briefly in our last conversation: education being a limiting factor. You mentioned that the lack of education causes a lot of technology to fail. Whether we have a CEO listening, a general manager, or somebody on the property who wants to make something happen with technology -- what do you feel is most useful in educating people on the opportunity in hospitality? What's most useful for a hotelier who wants to show people it's possible?

Mark: It's our job. What's the point in learning things over a career if I can't turn it around and put it back into the industry? Some of the things I say could be disturbing to people, and probably most people think I'm crazy.

Josiah: It keeps it fun. We have to record another spicy episode where we lean into the obscure opportunities of where technology could go.

Mark: For me it's always been about competitive advantage. Who doesn't want to be the most powerful player in their marketplace? We've all got beds, and most have restaurants. The further up the scale you go, there's quality environments and designer locations, but not everyone has the same technology -- and this is how you can win.

All you have to do to win is use your tool sets to the absolute best of your ability, and you'll already be so far ahead of your competition by doing nothing more than that. How do you do that? No one ever wants to teach our people how to be great with their business tools. This is an exponential problem in our industry, and yet it's the simplest solution to so many things that ail our industry seriously. If people did this, I wouldn't have a job. It's that fundamental.

More often than not, the main reason people are struggling is not because they don't have a good tool. Despite what people will say, we have really good technology in our industry and a lot of companies work very hard to make good tools. Will there be feature and functionality gaps depending on the age of those organizations? Yes. Accept that -- this is normal. You cannot have 37 years of experience when you're only five years in. Building technology takes time.

If you're struggling, it's probably because your team just isn't quite sure how to get all the juice out of the orange. And there's a really simple solution to that: call your vendor up and tell them you want them to come out and do reeducation on their very important business platform so that your team knows how to get the most out of it.

Josiah: That's it.

Mark: A good partner will do that. Will it cost you some money? Yes. Education costs money. If you went to university, it cost you money. Nothing is free. And if it's important to your business to be really good at what you do, make sure your team has the education to be really good at what they do.

Josiah: I love that.

Mark: You don't need me for that.

Josiah: Well, I always enjoy our conversations. I appreciate you making time to share your perspective. For people listening and watching, is LinkedIn the best place to follow you and your work?

Mark: They can always find me at travhotech.com. But LinkedIn seems to be the best way to reach people and hopefully make a difference, which is certainly my objective.

Josiah: It's a treat to talk with you.

Mark: Likewise.

Josiah: Hopefully we speak before another year has passed and we see each other at an event. I think the next recording we've got to do is in person together.

Mark: We should indeed. I'll come to you.

Josiah: Sounds fun. Good to see you, Mark.