By Kevin Edwards, chief executive, Hospitality Technology Advisory - 10.19.2026
As consumers we are all of us used to handing over information about ourselves in what can feel, at times, an uneven trade. Is our address, date of birth and home address really a good swap for 10% off bananas? That is for every individual to decide.
The hotel sector has not been shy in joining the harvest and has become very good at gathering data about the guest online; how they booked, where they booked and what they were searching for has all been salted away. Where the sector falls down is when the guest is on the property, where little data is gathered and that which has been garnered is rarely available to those who need it.
Part of this is lack of guidance. Online retail has led the way in terms of data gathering, from the bananas up, but they don’t have to translate that knowledge into the real world. For the hotel sector, the primary act of shopping may have happened online, but everything else happens in the hard-to-control setting of offline.
In addition hotels do, however, trip over their own feet by not creating a single profile of the guest that everybody can see. The information may well be there, but it doesn’t make it out for the whole team to play with.
This means that the moment when the hotel has the most complete view of a guest, right down to whether they don’t like mushrooms, is when they arrive for check-in. After that, it starts to fall apart as the people who are interacting with the guest largely don’t have access to that critical information.
Once the guest has arrived, there tends to be a shift away from using technology and towards using pen and paper, immediately breaking the chain of information. So, should the guest decide to break with current trends and eat in the hotel, existing systems mean that the information that you have on the CRM isn’t being fed through to F&B. The mâitre d’ has no way of recognizing the guest and the servers have no way of knowing about the mushrooms. There is no operational flow for that information and the guest is left feeling like a conference attendee who has lost their name badge; introducing themselves afresh at every turn when wasn’t the point of that information to remove all those points of friction? Don’t you know who I am?
The relevance of this depends on understanding your offering. In luxury, where the sector is in a personalization arms race, and guests are more likely to eat on site, it’s all about figuring out how to make a guest feel special. “Show me you know me” has made the leap from online retail and is now a central tenet, a hygiene factor of the luxury hotel experience.
If you don’t understand why your guest is there and you haven’t mined their booking patterns and past stay for the ways to make their trip memorable and loyalty inducing – or just mushroom free – then you leave them wondering why they are paying a premium for their night. While the setting used to be everything in luxury, now it is merely the backdrop to how you are going to make them feel like the most special person in the world.
You can put technology in place to make information flow better around the property, but if it’s not getting to the people it needs to reach, then it’s useless data.
Kevin Edwards, chief executive, Hospitality Technology Advisory. Kevin’s 30 years in technology have seen him focus on hotels, delivering projects including technology due diligence and transition on the £500m acquisition of Leela by Brookfield and go-to-market strategies for multiple hospitality technology companies including customer experience experts Alliants. Kevin co-founded the hospitality technology consulting firm Avenue9 in January 2014, selling the company to JLL in 2015 after reaching £2m in annual revenue. He has subsequently consulted for groups including Dorchester Collection, Starwood Capital and Soho House. Along with Simon Kaye, he launched Hospitality Technology Advisory in 2024 with the objective of aligning technology more closely with properties’ needs as hotels evolve as an asset class.
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