Trybe runs the parts of a hotel the PMS doesn't

We asked Ricky Daniels, co-founder of Trybe, to explain it: it's a property management system, just not for rooms. It runs the spa, the health club and the activities a resort offers, the tennis courts, the squash, the kids' clubs, all the parts the main PMS was never built to handle. Trybe manages availability for those and lets a property sell them online through its own booking engine. It also runs the retail shop with full stock control and holds the membership database. Access control lets members swipe in and out, and there's a reporting suite around all of it. One of Trybe's selling points is packaging: bundling a treatment and spa access into a spa day a guest buys online, which he calls a big revenue driver.

Trybe came out of London in 2020, founded by Ricky with two partners, Will Taylor-Jackson and Steve Porter. It now runs in more than 400 properties across 37 countries, and in January it raised a $30 million Series A from Five Elms Capital, the Kansas City firm, to push harder into North America.

One purchase, three systems

The case for why Trybe exists is an overnight spa break, to the guest it's one purchase, but behind the desk it's three bookings in three systems: a room in the PMS, a spa slot in Trybe, a dinner table in the restaurant platform. Getting those to sell as a single package online, without someone wiring it together by hand, is the hard part.

That's what Trybe Overnights does. A guest buys the package and it splits automatically: the spa part drops into Trybe, the room into the PMS, the restaurant into the booking system. It launched with the PMS Guestline and the restaurant platform ResDiary, with SevenRooms next, and Ricky says it's the first time the whole flow has run end to end. He put the early numbers at three pilot properties booking over £150,000 of these breaks in about two months.

The other launch this year, contactless kiosk check-in, comes from the same goal of taking friction out of the operation, aimed at high-traffic places like bathhouses. A guest links a card to a wristband and then uses it to get through the gate, open a locker and pay around the property. The point is clearing the queue so the front desk can deal with the guests who actually want a person.

Staying a specialist

All of that rests on a deliberate decision about scope: Trybe doesn't try to be the hotel's core PMS. It stays a specialist in spa, leisure and activities and goes deep there rather than spreading wide, then integrates two ways with whatever PMS the hotel runs. At a big Hilton or Marriott resort, Trybe runs the wellness side and feeds back to the corporate PMS, so it isn't an island.

The discipline goes back to the founders' last company, the restaurant-booking platform Collins, which The Access Group acquired in 2018. They left after a two-year managed buyout and started Trybe in the COVID lockdowns, when senior people in health and wellbeing were suddenly home and willing to talk. The first version was barely more than a calendar that could sell a treatment and a retail product. They've added to it from customer requests ever since. He calls the approach "built for the industry by the industry."

Underneath sits a fully open API. Trybe exposes about 95 percent of the same API it uses to build its own product, so a hotel can plug in and create custom reports or its own booking journeys. Ricky still finds it odd how recently that kind of openness counted as new. When Trybe turned up six and a half years ago calling itself cloud-native, that shouldn't have been novel, but it was, because hospitality had been slow to take up technology the rest of software had used for years.

The case for a layer on top

Staying a specialist doesn't mean he wants the whole industry to be narrow. Each specialist tool needs its own AI, he says, but the industry also needs a horizontal layer that sits on top of all the individual systems, a hotel's PMS, its RMS, Trybe itself, and pulls their data into one place to do things no single system can on its own.

He's already seeing corporate clients build their own AI projects and ask Trybe to make its data available to them. His answer is to keep Trybe open rather than closed, through the API today and probably MCP later, the emerging standard that lets an AI assistant pull data across different systems, so it stays easy for clients to build on top of.

Internally, Claude has changed how his teams work with data: they talk to the CRM, revenue and accountancy tools instead of querying them, and he wants to give hotels that same conversational reporting over their Trybe data. He also sees limits. He doesn't think anyone is building a fully autonomous revenue management system any time soon, and doesn't want to be the one to try. Trybe's aim there is narrow: a module to help with yield on the spa and activities side, an area he thinks the revenue world has barely looked at. The rest he's happy to leave to the firms that do it well. Some of what a good revenue management system does, you can't just vibe-code.