Technology

Bold prediction: The PMS isn't going anywhere by 2030 — but it will look nothing like it does today. It becomes the heart of the hotel, connecting and coordinating most AI tools, agents and decisions running across the property.

The death of the PMS was mooted back in 2014 when I joined hospitality from airlines. 14 years later, we still have PMSes. Their primary all-in-one functions were:- Handle check-in/out- Manage room key cutting- Take payments- Set up the hotel room inventory and types- Assign a price per room- Link to selling channels like OTAs- Manage housekeeping- Manage facilities management/maintenance- Handle on-site eventsSeparate RMSes now do pricing and push rates to PMSes.

The Enterprise PMS will still be around in 2030. Every hotel needs a system of record to manage reservations, inventory, rates, guest profiles, financial transactions, and operational controls. AI doesn't remove that requirement.

Generally, more people with access to AI will not mean better solutions, it will mean more noise in the market, more fragmented and badly deployed technology - just like the last decades, but at a bigger scale, and the people who suffer are hotel employees and guests. I do believe that to stand out from the pack and deliver something truly remarkable, you need genuine innovators to bring all these solutions together in a coherent ecosystem that is open, collaborative, and truly end-to-end in how we serve guests. The best technology partners will build closer partnerships at the backend layer, while hoteliers can build complete AI workflows on the frontend.

By HITEC 2030, AI will not have eaten established hospitality tech. It will have eaten the repetitive workflow layer around it. Hotels will still rely on PMS, CRS, RMS, payments, distribution, and other systems of record. Those systems are too operationally critical to disappear quickly.

2030 is a long time from now, especially in AI-years, which are only about 60 days long!If I think about the current trajectories and strategies of the bigger companies that will lead this movement, I see larger travel enterprises implementing foundational agentic backbones like Frontier from OpenAI or Claude Enterprise from Anthropic.