Some hoteliers (brands & management companies) believe that developing tech solutions in-house is cheaper and provides better customization to the hotelier's concrete needs and control over the ongoing maintenance and performance. Another school of industry-thought believes that hoteliers should focus on their core competencies: providing the best customer experience and best returns possible to ownership and outsource technology applications, products and solutions to specialized vendors.

So the question is, in this era of rapid technological advancements and adoption of next-gen technologies such as AI, IoT, automation, robotics, blockchain, etc., should hoteliers keep technology developments in-house or outsource to specialized, well-funded vendors?

Ian Millar
Ian Millar
Manager of Institute of Business Creativity & Senior Lecturer at EHL Hospitality Business School

This is a tough one. Yes hotel companies should concentrate on being hotel companies but if we look into why they have in the past built their own systems it is probably due to existing ones not meeting their requirements, overly expensive and poor integration with other systems and lack of ongoing support (what industry people have told me). So basically born out of frustration of existing off the shelf solutions. Today where the new breed of technology solutions are taking a more open and collaborative approach, Open API's and with a more cloud computing platform it makes sense to go with off the shelf solutions.

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