Held in person for the first time since June 2019, the hotel industry’s premier show on technology took place in Dallas during the final week of September, running concurrent to the Lodging Conference over in Phoenix.

Attending HITEC brought a mix of elation, excitement, uncertainty and despair as, in spite of lingering coronavirus safety concerns, it was nevertheless great to see familiar faces and learn about how vendors have innovated to help hotels meet the current market challenges. Still, much was left to be desired as true technological breakthroughs were rare and the tradeshow lacked a critical mass of attendees to give it that frisson of yesteryear.

The word we would use to best describe the show is ‘convergence’ as many tech products now have significant overlap with each other. For hoteliers, the primary follow-up action from this trend is that of tech stack consolidation. If products are converging, then it’s less about an apples-to-apples comparison of feature sets (because you know they’ll have most things already covered) or SaaS pricing models (which are also converging in accordance with market forces) than it is about integrations, APIs and development pipelines that will lay the track for even more convergence.

What we stress is that, before undertaking any changeover to forcibly consolidate your organization’s tech stack, you first outline every system, platform and module that’s already in the budget. Despite everything now shifting to the cloud, data migration can still be a kidney-stone-passing level of pain for some properties, so it’s best to first maximize your use of existing suppliers and even deepen your relationships with them before adding one-off pieces to the stack or whole new operations platforms when you only need a specific feature.

As we’re consultants who work in the middle between tech vendors, hotel owners and boots-on-the-ground employees, it’s this third constituent that needs your due consideration. If a product is confusing, if it requires lots of additional onboarding or if a front office manager has to open yet another application (or browser window), it will not likely get used no matter the incentives from above. Most midlevel managers are too busy handling quotidian tasks to have time to use at a new system.

Hospitality technology will continue to converge around one app and one customer database platform (CDP) that handles it all through a tabulated user interface, seamlessly cleaning then pushing data around to those personnel who need it. Best to start planning accordingly and hopefully next year’s HITEC in Orlando in June 2022 will see a much healthier and exuberant hotel crowd.