Hotel Polypharmacy

In medicine, there is a phenomenon that is not a disease but nevertheless requires treatment. It’s called “polypharmacy” and occurs when a single patient regularly takes five or more medications. This phenomenon generally affects a patient under the care of different specialists, each prescribing medication within their own area of expertise.

While none of these doctors is doing anything wrong, the result becomes a kind of pathology in its own right. There is no issue with any of the individual medications; the problem lies in the accumulated list. What is missing is the integrated view of the treatments.

Over the past decade, the hotel industry has reached a similar point. In 2016, the conversation was about websites, booking engines and channel managers, and not every hotel had the complete set. Today, these three are joined by an ever-growing list of solutions, and what is missing is an integrated perspective.

The list includes, among other things, urgent messaging, chatbots, CRM, RMS, email, price comparison tools, reputation management platforms, mobile apps and loyalty programmes. Hotels are being swept into a budgetary snowball effect: although none of these solutions is particularly expensive on its own, together they can add up to a significant cost.

Hotels are constantly presented with tools that promise to reduce their dependence on OTAs, improve conversion rates and increase direct bookings. When factual evidence is lacking, another argument is used: guests “expect these things”.

Some argue that hotels invest too little in technology. Hotels would certainly say they invest enough. The reality is that they have invested in an ever-growing number of solutions and yet, in 2025, independent hotels handed 63.4% of their bookings to OTAs, according to Cloudbeds.

Despite a decade of conversion-enhancing solutions, conversion rates remain around 2% since 2012. Furthermore, consumers have caught on to the tricks, with 70% distrusting countdown timers and “last chance” warnings. Meanwhile, 65% say they avoid brands that use them, according to a Twilio study.

But there is an even more significant figure on top of all this. Only 20% of industry professionals feel that their technology infrastructure is fit for purpose, according to a survey by the Hospitality Women’s Innovation Council. The system is broken and, before there is time to fix it, another wave of technology is already hitting hotels: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This new wave confronts hotels with more solutions and more decisions. It also brings the risk of repeating the pattern of the past decade: with even more fragmented investment in small tools in an attempt to address a list of problems that’s growing at the same pace as the new solutions.

There is a well-worn saying that systems need to be integrated. But integrating twelve tools does not create a strategy; it simply creates twelve connected tools. It is like treating interactions between medications by adding yet another medication.

Any technological shift of this magnitude requires decisions, that were previously considered settled, to be revisited. That is why AI is also an opportunity for hotels to start afresh, redefine their strategy and choose the tools that support it, rather than simply accepting what is being sold to them. Commercial pressure will be intense, as will the fear of being left behind. The question to ask about every new solution is not “What does it do?” but “Which part of my commercial strategy does it serve?”

Medicine already has an answer to polypharmacy called “de-prescribing”. It involves reviewing the list from time to time and removing what is no longer needed. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. Nobody complains about adding an extra medication; they complain when one is taken away. Adding something is easy to justify. Removing it requires an explanation.

Hotels will face the same resistance. Not every hotel needs a loyalty programme. Not every hotel needs an RMS. Many conversion tools could be removed without anyone noticing, and the clue lies in the metric they report: “influenced revenue”. When a solution cannot tell you how many bookings it generated, it tells you how many bookings it influenced.

AI helps hotels sell, but it also helps them manage operations and deliver a warm welcome. And welcoming guests is what the hotel industry has always been about. This new wave is an opportunity to go back to basics: first ask what kind of hotel you want to be, and only then decide which tools you need to get there. Digitise, personalise, connect. In the right order. And, from time to time, review the list and remove what is no longer needed.

*Article originally published in Portugal by TNEWs