BY Lea Mira - HTN staff writer - 8.18.2026
Hotel guests never stopped wanting food delivered to their rooms. What changed is who takes the order, who delivers the meal and who captures the revenue and customer data that come with it.
At a growing number of limited-service, select-service and extended-stay hotels, that business has shifted to DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub and other third-party delivery services. CAMO Hospitality is betting that hotel owners will want a larger share of those transactions, and it has raised $4 million in seed funding to expand a platform designed to put the hotel brand back between the guest and the food being delivered.
The Anaheim, California-based company plans to use the funding to enter additional U.S. markets, support portfolio-wide deployments currently being tested with hotel brands and management companies, and continue developing its technology platform. CAMO says revenue has grown more than 200% year over year and that its service is now operating at more than 60 hotels across six U.S. markets. Investors include Anthony Lacavera, founder and chairman of Globalive; Rajan Hansji, CEO of Hansji Corporation; Azim Jamal, CEO of Pacific Reach; Parsa Rohani, co-founder of Neudesic and Timu; Evan Weiss, co-founder of LWHA; and several hotel owners already using CAMO. The participation of existing hotel customers could also help as CAMO tries to move from individual property deployments to larger agreements with management companies and brands.
CAMO is going after a part of the hotel stay that has largely migrated outside the hotel technology ecosystem. A guest may book directly with a hotel, use its mobile app, check in digitally and unlock the room with a phone, only to leave that environment entirely when it is time to order dinner. CAMO estimates that guests spend more than $5 billion annually on restaurant delivery to U.S. hotel rooms and says roughly nine in 10 hotels do not offer traditional room service. The company has not published the methodology behind those estimates, so they are best viewed as CAMO’s assessment of the addressable market rather than established industry benchmarks.
What is clear is that major hotel companies increasingly see third-party delivery as an amenity their guests expect. Hilton and Grubhub expanded their relationship in late 2024 to more than 2,600 Hampton by Hilton, Tru by Hilton and Spark by Hilton hotels after earlier deployments at Homewood Suites and Home2 Suites. Guests at participating Hilton properties can scan a QR code to access Grubhub’s marketplace, giving them a convenient way to order restaurant meals, groceries and other items. Grubhub said orders to Hilton properties had more than doubled after the partnership began in 2023, suggesting substantial demand for delivery among hotel guests.
Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and Grubhub followed with an even broader agreement in 2025. The program spans Wyndham’s nearly 6,000 U.S. hotels across 20 brands and gives guests and hotel employees access to Grubhub+ benefits while they are on property.
For hotels, those partnerships solve a real operating problem. Guests get access to a huge selection of restaurants and established delivery networks, while the property avoids the labor, food costs, equipment and management burden of operating traditional room service. The downside is that much of the transaction takes place outside the hotel’s systems. The delivery marketplace controls the ordering experience and customer data, while the hotel generally receives little or no direct revenue even though the guest is making the purchase during a hotel stay.
CAMO approaches the same problem differently. Instead of directing guests to an outside marketplace, the company provides a hotel-branded ordering experience while managing the ordering technology, kitchen fulfillment, delivery coordination and guest support behind the scenes. Guests can scan an in-room QR code and order through a mobile interface carrying the property’s branding. CAMO routes the order to a partner kitchen, manages fulfillment and delivery, and gives the hotel a share of the transaction along with access to order and performance data through its property portal. “Guests never stopped wanting food delivered to their rooms,” CAMO founder and CEO Kevin Rohani said in announcing the financing. “The traditional model just became too expensive and operationally complex for most hotels to support.”
The economics make the concept particularly relevant for select-service and extended-stay properties where operating a conventional kitchen and room-service department would be difficult to justify. CAMO requires no kitchen buildout or additional hotel headcount and uses a revenue-sharing model rather than asking the property to create a new food-and-beverage operation. CAMO says orders average approximately $45 and delivery times average about 22 minutes. The company also says most hotels using the service generate between $1,000 and $5,000 in monthly net profit through their revenue share, although property-level financial results and the full economics of the revenue-sharing model have not been made public.
Those economics will become increasingly important as CAMO moves into more markets. The software can be rolled out relatively easily, but preparing meals and getting them to hotel rooms quickly is a local operating business that depends on kitchen capacity, delivery distances and sufficient order volume within a relatively compact area.
CAMO appears to be building around that reality rather than pursuing a hotel-at-any-cost expansion strategy. Its platform connects guests, hotels, kitchens and last-mile delivery, and CAMO’s terms note that orders may be delivered by CAMO Eats or third-party delivery providers depending on the location. That operating model also separates CAMO from many of the hotel technology companies already competing for in-room dining transactions. IRIS, INTELITY, Crave Interactive and RoomOrders all help hotels digitize food ordering, but they generally assume that the hotel or one of its existing outlets will prepare the food.
IRIS allows guests to place food-and-beverage orders from their phones and integrates with hotel POS and PMS systems. Its technology can support ordering and payment across rooms, restaurants, pool decks and other areas of a property, making it well suited to hotels that already have a food-and-beverage operation but want to make ordering easier and more profitable.
INTELITY incorporates in-room dining into a broader guest-experience platform that includes mobile applications, smart-room tablets and staff-facing technology. Crave similarly gives guests access to dining, spa bookings, concierge services and hotel information through in-room tablets and mobile interfaces. RoomOrders uses QR codes and NFC tags to give guests app-free ordering from hotels, restaurants and other vendors. Its model demonstrates another way properties can create a digital ordering layer without forcing guests to download a dedicated hotel app.
For a full-service hotel with an established kitchen, these platforms solve a different problem than CAMO. The hotel already knows how it will produce the meal and needs technology to improve merchandising, ordering, payment and operational workflow. CAMO is aimed more directly at hotels where food production itself is the obstacle. Its proposition is that a property can offer something closer to room service without taking on the employees, kitchen equipment, food inventory and management infrastructure normally required to provide it.
Other companies are pursuing versions of the same idea. Butlaroo, for example, allows hotels to combine offerings from several nearby restaurants into one hotel-branded menu, with payments automatically divided among participating kitchens and a fee retained for the hotel.
The presence of competing approaches suggests there is a real gap between traditional room service and handing the guest completely over to a delivery marketplace. The challenge is finding a model that gives hotels enough control and revenue to matter while still providing the selection, speed and convenience guests have come to expect from consumer delivery apps.
There is also a cautionary precedent. Butler Hospitality built a network of ghost kitchens to provide outsourced room service to hundreds of hotels and raised roughly $50 million as it expanded into multiple U.S. markets. The company ceased operations in 2022, leaving hotels without service and illustrating how difficult it can be to combine food production, delivery and hotel service standards while maintaining sustainable economics.
CAMO’s model is not identical to Butler’s, and the comparison should not be pushed too far. Butler operated a capital- and labor-intensive network built around its own food-service infrastructure, while CAMO’s platform incorporates partner kitchens and can use third-party delivery providers as part of its fulfillment network. Still, Butler’s experience points to the questions CAMO will need to answer as it expands. Hotel density, kitchen utilization, delivery costs, guest adoption and order frequency all become more consequential when a service moves from a concentrated group of properties into a national network.
Portfolio agreements could improve those economics if they allow CAMO to enter a city with dozens of participating hotels rather than building demand one property at a time. They could also give the company more predictable transaction volume around which to build kitchen and delivery capacity. Guest adoption will be just as important. A QR code is easy to place in a hotel room, but guests who already have DoorDash, Uber Eats or Grubhub on their phones still need a reason to choose the hotel-branded option. Hotel branding alone may not be enough to change that behavior. Menu quality, price, selection, delivery speed, ease of ordering and how prominently the service is presented during the stay will likely have a greater influence on whether guests use it.
CAMO’s reported 22-minute average delivery time could be a meaningful advantage if it can be maintained as the company scales. A curated network of nearby kitchens may not match a large marketplace for restaurant selection, but a faster and more predictable experience could appeal to guests who simply want a good meal delivered to their room without searching through dozens of listings.
The company also has another argument that may resonate more strongly with hotel owners than with guests: data. Orders placed independently through consumer delivery apps give hotels little insight into what guests are buying, when they are buying it or how much they are spending.
CAMO’s property portal provides hotels with order and performance information that would otherwise sit outside their systems. The platform includes real-time order tracking, revenue-share management and other property-level tools, giving operators a clearer view of a category of spending that has largely been invisible to them. That information could eventually support more sophisticated merchandising and personalization, although much will depend on how CAMO integrates with the rest of the hotel technology stack. Food-ordering data becomes substantially more useful when it can be appropriately connected with guest profiles, loyalty information and stay history instead of remaining another isolated source of transaction data.
The industry’s interest in capturing that information has parallels with the long-running battle over direct bookings. Hotels have spent years encouraging guests to book through their own websites and apps because direct relationships generally provide greater control over customer data, merchandising and economics than transactions mediated by online travel agencies. Food delivery raises a similar issue after check-in. The hotel has already acquired the guest and is providing the room where the transaction takes place, yet an outside marketplace may still capture the order, customer data and most of the economic value.
CAMO is effectively applying part of the direct-booking argument to in-stay spending. It is asking whether hotels should accept that purchases made by guests inside their rooms belong almost entirely to outside platforms simply because the hotel no longer wants to operate its own kitchen.
Third-party delivery companies have strong advantages of their own, and their growing hotel relationships should not be underestimated. Grubhub can give a property immediate access to hundreds of thousands of merchants without asking the hotel to manage restaurant relationships or worry about whether a particular kitchen has enough capacity on a Saturday night. CAMO therefore does not necessarily need to replace DoorDash, Uber Eats or Grubhub for every hotel guest. A more realistic opportunity may be to capture a meaningful portion of the demand by offering a more curated, hotel-branded alternative alongside the broad marketplaces guests already use.
The company’s ambitions also extend beyond dining. Rohani describes a broader “commerce layer” inside the guest room that could eventually encompass wellness, transportation, experiences and other on-demand purchases made during a stay. “There is a commerce layer inside every hotel room that nobody has claimed,” Rohani said. “Dining, wellness, transportation, experiences, services. A guest wants all of it during a stay, and today most of it reaches them without the hotel involved at all.”
That longer-term strategy would place CAMO in a much larger and more competitive part of the hotel technology market. Guest-experience platforms already allow hotels to sell dining, spa treatments, upgrades and other services digitally, while consumer technology companies are steadily expanding their reach across travel, dining and local commerce.
DoorDash’s acquisition of SevenRooms in 2025 is one sign of how those boundaries are shifting. SevenRooms brought DoorDash reservations, CRM, guest profiles, marketing and other restaurant guest-experience capabilities, extending the company’s reach well beyond traditional delivery. That convergence creates an interesting strategic choice for hotel companies. One path is to embrace large consumer platforms because they already have the restaurants, logistics networks, technology and customer familiarity needed to serve guests efficiently.
Another is to keep more of the experience under the hotel brand and use infrastructure providers such as CAMO to handle the difficult operational work behind the scenes. For owners, the decision will ultimately come down to economics, guest satisfaction and whether control of the transaction and its data is valuable enough to justify using a more hotel-specific model.
CAMO’s strongest near-term market may be properties that sit between two existing alternatives. They do not generate enough food-and-beverage volume to justify operating traditional room service, but they have enough guest demand to see money leaving the property every night through outside delivery services. For those hotels, even a few thousand dollars in incremental monthly profit can be meaningful if the service requires little additional labor. A credible room-service option may also improve the guest experience without forcing the property to become a restaurant operator.
The new funding will allow CAMO to find out whether those economics hold up at greater scale. More than 60 hotels across six markets is enough to demonstrate that the concept has moved beyond an early test, but broader portfolio deployments will introduce different labor markets, restaurant ecosystems, delivery conditions and guest behavior. If CAMO can maintain delivery performance and unit economics as those deployments grow, it could give thousands of hotels a way to participate in a category of guest spending they largely surrendered when traditional room service disappeared. The larger opportunity will be determining whether food is merely the first transaction that can be brought back into the hotel ecosystem.