The hotel with no staff gave me better hospitality. Here’s why that matters.

A few months ago, I checked into a full-service hotel in midtown Manhattan. It had a doorman, a concierge, and multiple staff behind the front desk. I'd just flown in from London and, like any English person, I needed a cup of tea.

When I booked, I'd checked there was a kettle in the room, as I always do. When I got there, there wasn't one. I called down to reception. "Of course, we'll send one up." An hour passed and no kettle arrived. I called again. Eventually, I went downstairs myself, and four hours after the first call, I had my tea.

A few weeks later, I stayed at an aparthotel in London. The building had no staff on site. I booked through an app, checked in online, and received my door code through the guest communication portal.

Everything was great for the first night, but on the second night I had a problem. My door code didn't work and I was locked out.

When I booked, I'd received a WhatsApp from the brand's virtual concierge saying: "If you need anything during your stay, just let us know." I'd almost forgotten about it, but I texted back saying "help, I'm locked outside." Within 30 seconds, someone replied. A minute after that, I was inside.

Even though it went wrong, I felt looked after.

So which stay delivered better hospitality? The fully staffed hotel, or the building with no staff on-site?

The answer reveals that we've been asking the wrong question. The industry has spent years debating how to keep up with technology: which platforms to adopt, which systems to integrate, when to automate and when to hold back.

But that framing puts technology at the centre of the story, and technology was never supposed to be the story. The real question is: what does good hospitality look like when technology is doing its job?

To answer that question, I interviewed 38 leaders across 13 countries, from CTOs and tech founders to operators and independent property owners, for my book Tech-Enabled Hospitality.

I expected the conversations to be about platforms and tools; however, I was surprised by what came up instead.

Every single person relayed the same message: the future of hospitality is hospitality. It's just being redefined and reshaped by technology. That means every industry conversation around AI, automation, and digital transformation is asking the wrong question if it starts with the technology. The operators who are winning have started with a hospitality strategy and then found the technology to enable it, in that order.

What emerged across those conversations was a shift the industry has been slow to accept: high-touch and high-tech increasingly describe the same thing. 

The technology debate, for one, is no longer about access. A few years ago, the kind of tech stack a Hilton or Marriott could deploy required six-figure budgets, a dedicated IT department, and enterprise-level resources. But today, a single-property operator can access the same calibre of tools within a much smaller budget. Cloud-based all-in-one systems, API-first platforms, and no-code tools have fundamentally democratised hospitality technology.

During my research, I spoke with independent operators with modest budgets across the world, from Bali to Iceland. And I found people running technology to rival that of branded city-centre hotels.

The most innovative operators I encountered had more curiosity, not more resources. They only needed initiative and imagination to use tech to improve both their businesses and the guest experience.

What that means for operators is that tech has never been more accessible. And for tech companies, the customer base has never been larger.

While the tools and how easy it is to access them have changed, so have guests. And that shift is less forgiving. Consumer expectations around personalisation have moved faster than most hotels have been able to keep up with. Guests have become used to digital experiences that anticipate what they want, and the gap between what they get from a hotel and what they get from the rest of their digital life is widening.

The big mistake here is assuming guests are comparing you to competing hospitality operators. They're comparing you to the last great digital experience they had. Amazon remembering their preferences, Uber automatically updating their arrival time, Netflix anticipating what they want to watch before they know themselves.

When they walk into a hotel and queue at a front desk to provide passport details and a payment card they've already given you online, and explain, again, that yes, they'd like an exterior room, even though they've stayed with you six times before, the frustration is real.

Guests want friction removed so that when they do engage with a person, it means something. The word that came up repeatedly in my research was choice: let me check in digitally if I want to, let me speak to someone if I want to. The best operators are designing for that choice.

But there's a fear that runs through conversations about automation in hospitality. That efficiency and warmth are a trade-off to AI, automation and relying on tech too much, especially for the guest experience. My research suggests the opposite is true, but only if you're intentional about it.

When you automate the transactional, repetitive, and administrative, you create time for staff to have the kind of conversation that turns a one-time visitor into a loyal guest. The best operators I spoke to are using automation to free people to do what humans do best: empathise, surprise, and delight.

Which brings me back to those two stays. The New York hotel had every human resource at its disposal. The staff were warm and well-intentioned, but their time was so consumed by operational tasks that none of them had been freed up to actually attend to guests. A simple request for a kettle went unfulfilled for hours.

The London aparthotel had no staff at all, yet the technology was so well designed that I felt genuinely looked after, even when something went wrong.

That's not the absence of hospitality. That is hospitality. And when you combine that kind of seamless, anticipatory technology with a great team freed up to focus on genuine human connection, the result is something most hotels don't currently deliver.

Even with all this in place, many operators are still going about implementation the wrong way.

When technology fails in hospitality, it’s rarely because the software didn't work. It's because the organisation wasn't ready for it.

The GM who sees technology as IT's problem. The front desk team who feel threatened by automation. The owner who treats tech as a cost line rather than an investment.

The conversation in our industry tends to focus on procurement: which PMS, which channel manager, which guest messaging platform is best? But that's the wrong starting point.

We should be asking how technology can provide better hospitality for our guests and a better experience for our teams. The operators getting this right involve their teams from the start. They communicate the 'why' before the 'what'. And they celebrate adoption instead of just measuring it. In other words, they treat technology adoption as a cultural priority.

One operator I spoke to put it like this: "We don't have a tech strategy. We have a hospitality strategy that technology enables."

With that mindset shift, you begin to look at tech as an enabler instead of just a bolt-on, which helps you get your whole team invested and involved. And with the right approach, tech-enabled hospitality can go beyond facilitating a frictionless stay to helping us reimagine how we monetise and market our spaces.

For that to happen, there's a question we need to ask ourselves: are we just selling heads on beds? Because if we are, we're leaving enormous value on the table.

In my research, I spoke with the team at Zoku, an extended stay brand based in Amsterdam. They looked at the traditional hotel room and asked a deceptively simple question: why are we only monetising this space for the hours someone sleeps?

So they redesigned everything. Now, they sell space as a service across all 168 hours of the week. Their properties function as workspaces during the day, conference rooms in the afternoon, and sleeping quarters at night.

The shift from revenue per available night to revenue per available hour is only possible with the right technology underneath it: flexible booking systems, smart room configuration, and dynamic pricing that responds in real time. But, like all good tech-enabled hospitality, this starts with a mindset shift, not a software purchase.

The operators who recognise how these shifts are compounding, and approach technology strategically rather than tactically, are the ones who will define what hospitality looks like over the years to come. The future of hospitality is still hospitality. The question for every operator is whether they're building the team, the culture, and the technology to deliver it.

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About Jessica Gillingham

Jessica Gillingham is the founder and CEO of Abode Worldwide, a globally recognized strategic public relations firm that sits at the heart of the developing intersection between real estate, proptech and hospitality. The firm partners with technology brands that are shaping the future of hospitality.

A regular industry speaker, author, and adviser, Jessica is also the host of the Pillow Talk Sessions podcast and author of the industry book, “Tech-Enabled Hospitality - Strategies to Elevate Guest Experience and Operational Efficiencies.”