Hotel design and technology are inseparable

Space has always defined hotels. Grand lobbies. Mood-lit bars. Cleverly choreographed layouts that guide guests effortlessly from check-in to cocktail. But now, every hospitality space has a second layer running through it: technology. And increasingly, the two can’t be separated. Here’s what hospitality experts had to say about it when I met them at HT360 Hospitality Leaders Forum.

The suite with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the ocean perfectly. The softly glowing lounge where guests settle into velvet armchairs with cocktails and laptops. The restaurant where lighting, music, and table spacing somehow make the whole evening click into place. This is the kind of carefully designed atmosphere hotels have traded on for decades.

But hospitality spaces are no longer just physical environments.

Today, guests experience hotels digitally too. Through the strength of the Wi-Fi. Through frictionless payments. Through lighting systems, booking journeys, integrated dining reservations, personalised messaging, and technology that quietly shapes almost every interaction they have with a property.

And increasingly, the physical and digital experience rise or fall together.

At a recent discussion at the HT360 Hospitality Leaders Forum, shared on my podcast Hoteliers’ Voice, one thing became clear very quickly. Technology is no longer something hotels simply plug into a building at the end of a project. It’s becoming fundamental to how hospitality spaces are imagined, designed, and experienced from the outset.

Because today, a beautiful hotel that doesn’t function digitally is no longer beautiful at all.

The merging of space and tech

“Space is a luxury,” said Paul Wells, Partner at Studio Moren. And nowhere is that felt more acutely than in modern hospitality. Every square foot has to work harder than ever before. Restaurants become co-working hubs by day and cocktail lounges by night. Public areas flex constantly between guest expectations, revenue opportunities, and operational realities.

Underpinning it all is technology.

“The technology infrastructure that helps drive that usability is essential to how we design those spaces,” Paul explained. Lighting, temperature, cabling – it’s all part of the picture.  Technology considerations can’t be left sitting at the bottom of the agenda, waiting politely for the architects and designers to finish. Hotels that treat tech as an afterthought often end up paying for it later. Operationally, financially, and experientially.

Lower ceilings to accommodate infrastructure? Raise floor slabs? Build flexibility into the systems for future upgrades? These are now early-stage conversations.

And they matter because technology has a direct impact on how a space feels. A lower ceiling makes the space feel much smaller. Exposed cables detract from being in the hotel bubble. Yet if the tech is missing altogether, that is keenly felt by guests too.

“If you have patchy Wi-Fi, it doesn't matter how beautiful your space is, nobody's going to use it,” Paul said.

It’s an undeniable fact. Guests don’t separate digital experience from physical experience. To them, it’s all just the hotel.

The challenge, of course, is that technology evolves dramatically faster than hospitality design does. Marble reception desks can survive decades. Tech stacks can feel outdated in three years. That’s why future-proofing has become critical.

“When we're talking to owners, operators, designers and architects, we want to understand how the space can change in the future,” said Alessandra Leoni, Head of Hospitality at Focus on Hospitality. “Technology is evolving a lot faster than it was years ago, so we need to be prepared to change the solution. Technology is a lot more scalable when it’s defined early on.”

Put guests before gadgets

So, designing technology into space matters. But how should technology be selected?

Hospitality has a habit of falling in love with shiny things. Self-service kiosks. QR codes. AI concierges. Automated everything. But technology for technology’s sake rarely works.

“Every brand should have its own voice and should have a vision for the guest experience that it wants to deliver,” Alessandra said. And technology has to fit into that vision.

That means stepping back before any purchasing decision and asking bigger questions. Alessandra says the questions hoteliers should be asking include: “What type of experience and product do we want to deliver to guests? How is that product being consumed through the journey? And how can technology play a part?”

Scot Turner, Founder of Auden Hospitality, agrees. For him, the role of technology is remarkably simple. “It has to reduce friction,” he said. “Whether it's for the guest or the member of staff that's going to be using it, it needs to take something away that makes life difficult, or add to the experience.”

And ideally? It should help bring hospitality back to hospitality.

“How do we enable people to get back onto the floor, and how does tech enable us to do that?” Scot asked.

Technology with purpose

Sometimes the best hospitality technology is invisible in the hospitality space. Guests simply experience smoother stays, better service, and fewer frustrations. We know some systems are now absolutely foundational. PMS platforms. Reliable Wi-Fi. Reservation systems. EPOS integrations.

Scot is particularly passionate about getting those integrations right.

“When you're looking at that EPOS to reservation system integration, make sure it's two-way,” he said. “Because when the waiter goes and clicks on the table, if that can bring up guest preferences and allergens, it makes it much more seamless. That's when you can bring hospitality into play. You can start talking about, ‘last time you visited, you ordered this bottle of red wine, would you like it again?’”

The same thinking now applies behind the scenes too, particularly in F&B operations where margins remain painfully tight.

“The biggest commodity within F&B after labour is food,” Scot said. “AI is coming into that in terms of being able to help chefs forecast ordering, being able to analyse things properly, being able to do menu engineering properly.”

Great tech decisions for hospitality spaces tackle experience and revenue. And it becomes even more interesting when technology starts shaping guest behaviour itself.

Prem Jethwa-Odedra, Founder of Biteluxe, shared the example of The Queen at Chester Hotel, where guests were regularly leaving the hotel to dine elsewhere. The solution wasn’t more marketing. It was smarter, more contextual engagement.

“We built an AI called Amanda, who was tasked with reaching out to every guest during pre-arrival via WhatsApp,” Prem explained. “Just to start a conversation with them, finding out the kind of experience they wanted to have at the hotel.”

Instead of pushing generic restaurant promotions, Amanda suggests booking a table at the restaurant during the flow of the conversation, for example, for the guests’ anniversary meal. The result? They doubled their sleeper-to-diner ratio year on year.

Despite all the excitement around automation, hospitality still has to be careful not to automate away the very thing guests value most: human interaction.

Scot learned that lesson first-hand. After introducing self-service kiosks to a restaurant in Manhattan, he found only 10% of people used the kiosk. “Everyone else was quite happy standing in the queue.”

Why? Because guests were enjoying the interaction, chatting with others in the queue and with staff before returning to work.

That tension sits right at the heart of modern hospitality design. Not every friction point needs removing. Some moments are part of the experience itself.

Yet in another dining outlet Scot worked on, introducing QR codes was transformational to ease the pressure on the kitchen, waiting times, and bill paying during peak times.

“Hospitality is a commodity,” Scot said. “Any time you look at a space, ask who’s going to use it, why are they using it, what do they want to get out of it, and what tech can fit into that jigsaw?”

Space and tech as one

The hospitality industry is constantly refining physical space. The arrival sequence. The atmosphere. The flow between public and private areas. The emotional reaction a guest feels when they walk into a room for the first time.

None of that is changing. But technology is now woven through every part of it.

The best hospitality experiences happen when space and tech work seamlessly together. The smartest systems are often the least visible — quietly removing friction, supporting staff, shaping guest behaviour, and allowing spaces to flex in smarter ways.

Because whether guests realise it or not, technology now shapes how a hotel feels just as much as the interiors, lighting, music, or service style do.

And perhaps that’s the real shift taking place across hospitality. Technology is no longer sitting behind the scenes, supporting the operation from the back office. It’s now part of the architecture of hospitality itself.