By Larry and Adam Mogelonsky - 9.16.2026
With AI-aided coding reaching maturity, we’re now seeing a swath of new players on the market. Some are direct competitors in existing categories for bargain basement pricing. Others are in wholly new and largely undefined software categories. For this latter camp, one big gripe I have is that they all talk about themselves as not replacing any other piece of the IT pie. They’re all a “new category”.
On the surface, that sounds like innovation. In practice, it’s another invoice, on top of all the due diligence required to manage another system. And all this is coming in at exactly the point in history when hotel managers are being squeezed on all sides for productivity gains. A hotel tech stack is still largely a zero-sum game – budgets are defined while the promise of “time to value” for the investment is a forecast yet to be realized.
In more ways than one, the modern hotel tech stack has become a victim of its own success. Every new wave of software promises more intelligence, more automation, more personalization, more dashboards and more AI. Revenue optimization, guest messaging, workflow automation, predictive analytics, conversational commerce, agentic AI, knowledge management, digital twins, decision support…the list keeps growing to the point where a young gun may soon be required to get a Masters of Hotel Computer Science just to be hired!
Stated another way, the gripe is that only a few of these startups and scaleups are designed to eliminate an existing platform. At least, that’s the messaging in order to get traction and play the integration game aside of a dog-eat-dog fight for market share.
The result for hotel groups and independents caught within this great game is more subscriptions, more integrations, more implementation projects, more vendor management and more user provisioning.
Now, we must also consider the advent of more token consumption, otherwise known as ‘token creep’. Unlike traditional SaaS licensing where costs were largely predictable, AI introduces variable operating expenses that scale with usage. Every workflow, every automated task and every AI agent quietly consume tokens in the background, whether this is buried in a three-year subscription term or not. Individually they’re negligible, but collectively they become another operating expense that grows over time. This element is particularly of concern as hotels become more reliant on AI-driven processes while simultaneously the frontier models are required to rapidly implement a verifiable path to profitability which will mean steeper costs per token.
It’s the cloud-computing playbook all over again, only now applied to every conversation, every workflow and every recommendation engine. Meanwhile, hotel budgets haven’t magically expanded. They simply can’t. There’s seldom wiggle room in other line items on the P&L or in FF&E replacement costs to allow for it.
From the rooms I’ve been in, owners and C-suite on the hotel side are asking the same question: What do we stop paying for? We’ve seen this cool new tech that would do wonders for our hotels when configured, but what can we replace to fit it into the budget?
The industry needs to shift away from viewing technology as an additive exercise and start viewing it as a zero-sum equation. Yes, it’s about value creation, but as aforementioned, that’s somewhat of an ephemeral positioning in a risk-averse environment. Contrarily, a new AI platform that directly replaces a legacy system at a fraction of the cost while maintaining interfaces is worth the time required to implement and retrain teams. An AI system that simply creates another dashboard may not ultimately be innovation; it’s more likely to be dashboard fatigue.
In this sense – and I’m struggling to find the right KPI for this – every new system should not be evaluated solely on revenue generation capabilities but on operational complexity removed. Cost reductions are verifiable and near-term. Migrating to all-in-one systems and simplifying team usage isn’t immediately measurable but adds tremendous value in terms of productivity and team retention.
The long-term vision for hotel technology has always been a leaner, more unified stack rather than an ever-growing collection of point solutions. AI in 2026 finally offers an opportunity to consolidate rather than fragment – that’s the dream at least.
Smaller, more agile platforms can increasingly absorb functions that once required multiple systems, allowing hotels to modernize while keeping budgets under control. But this requires hotel IT professionals to have a replacement mindset.
Together, Adam and Larry Mogelonsky are the principals at Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd., an asset management and hotel development consultancy. Their experience encompasses properties around the world, both branded and independent in the luxury and boutique categories. Their writing includes eight books: “Total Hotel Mogel” (2024), “In Vino Veritas: A Guide for Hoteliers and Restaurateurs to Sell More Wine” (2022), “More Hotel Mogel” (2020), “The Hotel Mogel” (2018), “The Llama is Inn” (2017), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “Llamas Rule” (2013) and “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012). You can reach them at adam@hotelmogel.com to discuss business challenges or for speaking engagements.
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