From a White Sheet of Paper to a Full House

Yesterday I had the honor of lecturing a class at EHL – École hôtelière de Lausanne, at the invitation of Senior Lecturer Ian Millar. Twenty students, one long session, and one big question: what does it actually take to build a hotel?

I’ve spent 25+ years doing IT consulting for hotels across the Asia-Pacific region. Every project I’ve worked on has taught me the same thing: the technology is rarely the hard part. The hard part is everything around it: the people, the money, the sequence, and the promises made on a handshake.

So I didn’t give the students a theory lecture. I walked them through one real project, start to finish. The title comes from what the owner said to me on opening day:

“You made my dream come true.”

That’s the job. Here is how it goes.

Watch first: the six-minute version

I asked AI to turn the lecture into a short explainer video. It follows the same arc as the session, from a blank page to a finished lobby. Watch it here, then read on for the detail behind each scene.

1. It starts with a white sheet of paper

My favorite kind of client walks in with nothing but a blank page and a question: “400 rooms, on the beach… what do we need?” That freedom is rare. A branded property (Accor, Marriott, IHG) never arrives with a white sheet, because the brand standards have already made most of the decisions.

The project I showed the students began exactly this way. The owner arrived with a master plan for a resort: 188 keys of rooms and villas, part of a much larger parcel of land (the resort itself covered only a sixth to an eighth of it), and a 25 billion peso investment, roughly US$441 million. Her questions were simple. What will it take to make this a success, and how long will it take?

2. The first lesson: it will not finish on time and on budget

I told the students to be realistic from day one. A small job, such as swapping a point-of-sale system, might land on time. A major multi-year project never does.

On this one, we estimated about two and a half years from breaking ground to opening. It took six. The pandemic cost us time, restarting cost more, and the owner changing her mind added the rest. None of that was anyone’s failure. It is simply what large projects do, and you and the owner need to know it before you start.

3. Tell the dream as a story

Most owners aren’t technical, so I don’t hand them a specification. I build a briefing book, a storyboard, like a fairy tale: there was a piece of land, the owner wanted this, and they lived happily ever after. It can run to 120 pages of pictures and a few words, and it is how we agree on every item together.

The book is organized around the guest journey, from choosing a hotel (increasingly through an AI assistant rather than a booking site) to leaving a review afterward. And here is my measure of success: I read the TripAdvisor reviews. If guests mention the technology, I’ve probably failed, because they usually bring it up when it’s bad. I want them to write about the beach, the breakfast and the staff. Good technology is seamless and almost invisible.

What do guests really want, and will pay for? A clean room, a comfortable bed, a great shower, security, excellent Wi-Fi, and somewhere to charge their devices without crawling behind the furniture.

4. Know who is in the room

A hotel project has a crowded cast: the owner (who holds the pen, and therefore the power), the master planner, the architect and interior designer, the project management team, the consultants, the general contractor, a long chain of subcontractors, and, eventually, the brand.

A few things I shared about them:

• Architects and designers are proud of their work, rightly so, and they don’t enjoy a technology person putting sockets on top of it. Work with them carefully. When a designer refuses a power socket beside a beautiful piece of furniture, you compromise and hide the socket. You are still delivering what the guest needs.

• The brand brings expertise and the flag over the door. The owner pays for it. Hotel groups often arrive with a list of 42 systems, “we want it all,” but the owner may not need everything on day one, and some items can wait three or six months. Be very clear in the management agreement about who is responsible for what.

• Subcontractors are where many pain points begin: communication breakdowns, sudden product substitutions, scheduling clashes, “not my fault, they did it,” payment disputes, and work quietly subcontracted again. Personally, I prefer to contract directly with the owner, because a general contractor may not know how the owner or operator wants the hotel to look.

5. Build from the bottom up

I teach technology as a stack.

1. Cabling. The most important layer. Never, ever cut cost here. Buy the best, run it everywhere, install it properly, and test it. If it fails, nothing works, cloud or not.

2. Network. Standard boxes on top of the cabling. The brand of switch matters far less than people think.

3. Systems. Accounting, HR, food and beverage, marketing. Make sure everything has open interfaces so data moves without friction.

4. Applications and user interface. The part the guest and the staff actually touch.

Then remember that systems are tools. Every system needs a business owner (the front office manager owns the PMS, not the IT manager) and internal champions who give first-line support. If a system doesn’t help operations or return value, don’t install it.

6. Show the owner the real cost

Owners want to know what it will cost, so I give them a five-year total cost of ownership. In my example, the upfront cost of a system was $165,000. Add five years of support, and it becomes $285,000. Same system, very different conversation. Work it back to a cost per room per night: at a $220 room rate, that system came to about 35 cents per room per night. Multiply by 25 systems to get your technology cost.

I also introduced the students to a new metric I am working on, Token Cost Per Guest. AI systems run on tokens, so if the token cost per guest is $1, has the value gained from that guest justified it?

7. Red flags: what to watch when the red pen comes out

Every owner will eventually take a red pen to the budget. The polite phrase is “Can we VE this?”, value engineering. It’s a legitimate exercise as long as you keep asking one question: does the cheaper option still deliver the functionality and compliance the business needs?

Here are the tricks and traps I warned the students about:

• The quiet product swap. Part number 456 is changed to 454 during negotiation. Understand the difference and check that it is still fit for purpose. Always review the contract and bill of quantities before signing.

• Components that disappear. No batteries, to save 50 cents per device.

• Weaker warranty. One year quietly becomes six months.

• The shrinking proposal. A 25-page proposal comes back as one page. Ask for full lists of inclusions and exclusions. (Upload both versions to an AI assistant and ask for the differences.)

• End-of-life products. Ask when it reaches end-of-life and get a written commitment for three to five years of support. Buy spares: if you need 274 access points, buy 300.

• Scope creep. A defined scope quietly grows. “Can you also help with this?” is a negotiation, not a favor.

• The handshake. Never agree to anything on a handshake. Put it in an email or memo and get a written: “Yes, this is what we agreed.” Six months later, people leave, and memories fade.

• The vendor who vanishes. Check financial health, references, and official channel-partner status. I’ve asked cabling contractors for certificates that the cable is genuine, because there are many fakes.

8. The keys to success are human

The most useful tool on a hotel project is not software. It is getting everyone into a room, eating together, and agreeing what is required. Then document it, and have everyone sign off. A box of donuts helps.

Meetings run all day, and nobody remembers what was said, so I record and transcribe them. On one project I fed about six months of meeting notes to an AI and asked it to check that what was discussed had actually been agreed and delivered, and where the variances were.

And then there is the step most often cut: the simulation period. It’s a dress rehearsal with your real team before the guests arrive, where you train people and find the bugs. It is usually squeezed into the last week or two because everything upstream ran late. Protect it. Follow it with a 30-to-60-day troubleshooting period written into the contract, because something will break at the worst possible moment, like a full house on a long weekend.

9. Get your hands (and feet) dirty

My favorite part. Go to the site. Sit in the ballroom chairs and ask where the screen should go and whether everyone can see it. Go into a guest room, sit on the toilet, lie on the bed. Check that the cabling is neat, labeled, and color-coded. Study the drawings until you know what every black square means; on this project I spent a month working out where the power, USB and cable points went in a single guest room.

Nothing beats standing in the space and seeing it as the guest will.

10. …to a full house

Everything I’ve described — the blank page, the storyboard, the six long years, the arguments over sockets, the hidden cables, the rehearsal — was to reach one moment: the doors open, and guests check in.

The last picture in my deck shows the finished resort. It is open, people are staying, they are paying, and nobody is mentioning the Wi-Fi. That, to me, is what a dream come true looks like. It is not a system that works. It is a guest who never has to think about it.

If you remember only five things

1. Start with the guest journey, not the technology.

2. Never cut corners on cabling.

3. Get it in writing, every time.

4. Protect the simulation period.

5. Go to the site and see it for yourself.

Thank you to Ian Millar and the EHL students for the sharp questions, from which PMS to choose, to why projects fail (money, politics, and owners who lose interest or started with a vanity project), to what gets cut first when budgets tighten.

Terence Ronson is Founder and Managing Director of Pertlink Limited, a hospitality technology and AI advisory consultancy based in Hong Kong. Questions or a project in mind? Reply to this post or get in touch.