What I Saw at HITEC 2026 That Nobody Else Is Talking About

I came home from HITEC San Antonio 2026 pumped. Not because of the keynotes or the booth announcements, but because of a gap I saw that nobody on the main stage seemed to notice.

Most new tech vendors at HITEC were building guest-facing AI, with many incumbent providers focused on ways to streamline the guest experience. Meanwhile, the problem that takes up the first two hours of every General Manager’s and Revenue Manager’s morning - the tab-switching, manual stitching, and the sprint to understand what happened overnight - was barely mentioned.

Here’s what I actually saw.

Most startups were guest-facing. Very few were fixing the back office.

I walked the hall carefully. The pattern was striking: guest communications, chatbots, in-room AI, booking agents, digital concierges. All of it pointed outward, toward the guest. Floor Bleeker put it plainly: the big PMS companies are building AI for better guest experience, better connectivity to other systems, and for easier guest interaction. That’s where the product roadmaps are pointed.

But the hotel owners and hospitality leaders I spoke to told a completely different story. Their companies are under enormous pressure to save costs. What they’re looking for is something that actually reduces overhead and improves hotel margins, and that angle is being played by very few right now. Even the major PMS companies aren’t talking about it.

The back-of-house problem, where knowledge workers spend hours on tasks they hate, where mistakes compound silently, and where the sheer volume of moving parts is simply too much for any one person to track, went almost unaddressed at the show.

That’s not an oversight. It’s a market gap.

“Chat with your data” is still just another dashboard.

The industry conversation right now is converging on agentic AI and the ability to query your systems in plain language. And I genuinely believe that’s progress. But when I walked around the event, I noticed the same limitations:

1. “Chat with your data” is still pulling information out of silos.

2. You’re still the one stitching the picture together.

3. You’re still the one deciding what to do with it.

That’s a better dashboard. It’s not an operating system.

The question that matters isn’t “can I ask my PMS a question?” It’s:

1. “What happened overnight?

2. “What does it mean?”

3. “What should I do about it before my first meeting?”

Those are three different things. Most of what I saw at HITEC answered the first one, but what I hear from our customers every week is that they need all three, and they need them waiting in their inbox, not sitting behind a login screen.

What customer conversations tell me about the real market.

The conversations I have most often with hotel teams follow the same pattern. Revenue teams missing yielding opportunities across multiple properties, pacing behind for months without anyone catching it. Not because the data wasn't there. Because nobody had the time or the setup to act on it.

The data exists. The systems are surfacing signals, but teams don't have the capacity to act on what their tools already know. That's the pattern we kept seeing before we built Otel.

One hotel group we work with were using the best-in-class systems across the board. After onboarding, they went from reactive pricing to 120 rate actions a month, and grew RevPAR 8.6% in three months. Same teams. Same systems. The difference: instead of spending the first hour gathering data, they spent it acting on it.

That's not a dashboard story. That's an operating system story.

The show got the agentic shift right, but missed the accountability question.

The most important structural shift I saw confirmed at HITEC was the move from chatbot to agent. AI that plans, routes, and executes across live systems rather than just answering questions. That’s real, and the vendors who demonstrated it credibly had my full attention.

But the accountability conversation that needs to follow that shift was mostly absent.

Here’s the practical version of the problem: when an AI system makes a recommendation and something goes wrong, such as a rate moved, a guest complaint escalated, a legal question arises, who is responsible? The answer, as a handful of legal cases are now making clear, is the hotel. Not the vendor. Not the algorithm. The hotel that signed off.

That changes what “AI in hospitality” actually needs to look like. It can’t be a black box. Every recommendation needs to show its reasoning; the source, the logic, the options, so a Revenue Manager can explain a rate decision in an ownership meeting, not just say “the system suggested it.”

What I’m taking home.

HITEC convinced me of three things I already believed, and one I hadn’t fully articulated.

The three I already believed:

1. The back-of-house problem is underserved.

2. Hotels need action not just insight.

3. Human-in-the-loop AI is the right posture for this industry right now. Nobody wants a fully autonomous agent making rate decisions unsupervised.

The one I hadn’t fully articulated: the efficiency and margin story is the right message for this moment. The industry is under cost pressure. Boards are asking hotel groups what they’re doing with AI. The language that lands isn’t “better analytics”, it’s “your team does more with less, and your margins go up.”

That’s the conversation the show mostly didn’t have. It’s the one we’re going to keep having.