Union Square Plaza Hotel uses Cloudbeds’ open API to build technology around how the property actually operates

Located in the heart of San Francisco’s theater district, Union Square Plaza Hotel puts guests within easy reach of some of the city’s most iconic attractions. Union Square, Powell Street’s historic cable cars, Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the city’s renowned shopping, dining, and entertainment are all nearby. With comfortable accommodations, a 24-hour front desk, multilingual staff, and a central location well connected by public transportation, the independent 85-room hotel provides a convenient base for experiencing the best of San Francisco.

The freedom to build

When Union Square Plaza evaluated hotel technology, the team wanted a modern hotel platform that could bring PMS, channel management, payments, revenue management, guest communication, and distribution closer together.

Especially important, though, was Cloudbeds’ open API. “I wanted access to our hotel data so we could experiment with AI and build tools specifically around the way we operate Union Square Plaza Hotel,” explains Owner, Sal Patel.

He continues, “I did not want our ability to innovate to depend entirely on whether a particular third-party integration already existed.”

That freedom has allowed the hotel to explore its own AI-assisted tools across inventory, availability, reservations, revenue strategy, and distribution.

Building an AI layer for hotel operations

Union Square Plaza’s main use of Cloudbeds API has been to develop its own AI-assisted inventory and rate management tools.

The team is using AI to access and analyze Cloudbeds’ unified data, with the goal of making hotel operations easier to understand and manage. Instead of exporting reports, jumping between screens, and manually analyzing spreadsheets, the vision is to ask questions about the hotel in plain English and have AI work with relevant Cloudbeds information to provide answers.

One of the most developed use cases is AI-assisted rate management. The team is working to bring together availability, occupancy, existing rates, reservations, and other relevant data to analyze pricing and make rate decisions more efficiently.

Over time, the aim is to make the experience increasingly conversational: ask about upcoming dates, occupancy, availability, or pricing, receive recommendations with the reasoning behind them, and use those insights to make the final revenue-management decision.

Building without an engineering background

Sal doesn’t come from an engineering or software development background. His expertise is in hotel operations, sales, marketing, revenue, and distribution.

“With today’s AI tools, I have been able to work with the Cloudbeds API and develop things that I previously would have assumed required hiring a software developer.”

Rather than starting with the code, Sal can start with the hospitality problem he wants to solve and use AI to help bridge the technical gap. While there is still a learning curve, and he stresses the importance of good API documentation, the barrier to building custom technology has become significantly lower.

“I can describe what I want to accomplish from a hotel operator’s perspective and use AI to help with the technical implementation.”

For an independent hotel, that opens up new possibilities to build technology around the property’s specific needs without requiring an in-house development team.

Open today. Ready for what’s next.

With every Cloudbeds endpoint exposed via the open API, nothing gated behind a premium tier or a separate developer agreement, Union Square Plaza isn’t limited to the use cases it can imagine today.

“When you are building something new, you don’t necessarily know at the beginning which pieces of data or functionality you will eventually need.”

Today, the hotel is exploring inventory, availability, reservations, distribution analysis, and AI-assisted rate management. Tomorrow, there could be entirely new applications. As Sal puts it, “having full access to the API means we’re not stuck relying on Cloudbeds’s own roadmap for the data or functionality our next idea needs.”

That’s the practical difference between an open API and a partial one: instead of waiting for a vendor to build the right feature, or license access to it, Union Square Plaza can build it themselves, using data that was already there.

“For an independent hotel, this is particularly valuable because it allows us to build technology around how we actually operate the property, rather than changing our workflow to fit a generic system.”