There are three points of view to consider when assessing technology’s role in the growth of a hotel portfolio: brand, owner/investor, and operator.
For the global brands, technology is an important part of their overall package and sales appeal. Owners and franchisees are buying a tried and trusted hotel operating solution. It may not deliver the most cutting-edge tech, but strong brand recognition and sales power are obvious attractions.
Marriott, for instance, has a legacy tech stack in need of modernisation, but the scale of its loyalty programme delivers a recognised competitive advantage.
In February’s earnings call, CEO Anthony Capuano underlined how modernisation is an ongoing project: “The multiyear transformation of Marriott's three major tech systems: property management, reservations and loyalty is well underway, and we're rolling out the new systems to a meaningful number of our hotels around the world in 2026.”
Brand promise
CFO Kathleen Oberg added that “our digital tech transformation” accounts for 35 per cent to 40 per cent of the group’s total annual investment spending ($1 to $1.1 billion). Oberg made it clear that she expects the tech investment “to be reimbursed over time.”
Mactaggart Family & Partners is a real estate development and investment manager based in London. Its hotel portfolio includes Resident Hotels in Liverpool, Edinburgh, Victoria, Covent Garden, and Soho, with a sixth hotel opening soon in Farringdon.
Mactaggart owns another set of hotels, formerly branded as Sleeperz Hotels. These properties in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Cardiff, and Dundee, have been converted to Marriott’s Four Points Flex by Sheraton brand.
Mactaggart’s CEO William Laxton said: “The cost of guest acquisition is the area where a strong operator has the greatest impact, and we have been very successful in driving direct bookings and creating loyal guests. The recent addition of Marriott’s Four Points Flex flag, which has access to the largest loyalty programme in the sector, has added another facet to this ability.”
Orderly transition
Converting to a Marriott brand is a very orderly process with a strict timetable, said Simon Kaye, COO, Hospitality Technology Advisory, who is overseeing tech deployments and migrations for all Mactaggart-owned hotels.
“Marriott have a specific day in the diary when a property goes live. Things must go in a certain order which does mean occasionally you have to make a compromise on route, or there might be a backlog of issues that need attending to once the properties are live,” he commented.
He added that although Marriott’s legacy stack and use of on-premise Opera 5.6 excludes the ability to do something very new or different, the scale of the brand means, “they’re likely to have many of the integrations you need because they’ve integrated with just about everything in the world, obviously.”
Kaye is also upgrading the Resident Hotels’ tech stack and moving from a Guestline PMS to Opera Cloud. Commenting on the choice of Opera Cloud, Kaye gave two reasons: “Firstly, it helps knowing that Marriott are moving to Opera Cloud too. Particularly on the back end with finance there will be a common process. Across all the Mactaggart-owned hotels, we’re running the money through the same accounting systems: from Opera to Sage.”
Secondly, from a recruitment perspective, many hotel employees and candidates have experience of Opera, one of the dominant global PMS platforms.
“Employees might stay longer because they’re using a familiar system and not constantly having to think about what button to press for moving a guest to another room,” said Kaye.
Multiple ownership and PIP cycles
For consistency of product and investment, it is an advantage for a group of hotels to have a single owner or a simple ownership structure. However, because of timing, multiple ownership structures, and capital investment cycles, guests can have inconsistent experiences of hotels within the same brand family.
Some franchisees and owners may delay upgrades until absolutely required and tech expenditure is often more pliable than other areas. A newly built Hampton by Hilton, for instance, will feel fresh, modern, and well-equipped simply because it’s new. Meanwhile, a full‑service Hilton that charges higher rates may lag in its room technology (no smart TVs, no mobile door locks, etc.) because the brand cannot force continuous upgrades outside the PIP cycle, which is typically seven to 12 years.
Data and decision-making
The needs of hotel owners and investors extend beyond day-to-day operations. Owners need to access performance data from across their portfolios, which may include branded and unbranded properties under the control of a range of management companies.
This typically means using a custom data collection system: “We switched to a single external platform and mapped all the KPIs from our various management companies, plus benchmarking data from the likes of CoStar, via XML,” said a NYU IHIF 2025 investor council attendee.
Another investor hoped that AI can speed up data-driven decision making, such as calculating and comparing variable room costs across a portfolio. She said: “I think AI can help us aggregate data, make conclusions, and cut back on the feedback loop of how we make decisions, because it’s all very time-consuming.”
Simplicity and speed to market
Simplicity is often a priority for operators. Oliver Baxter, IT director at Clermont Hotel Group said: “For BI, we keep things straightforward. We plug new hotels into the same reporting setup we already use with our existing data feeds. That way, the numbers look and behave the same as the rest of the portfolio, and everyone from operators to owners gets consistent, reliable reporting without us having to build anything from scratch.”
Matthieu Weiss, COO and co-Founder of Frenchospitality, a luxury hotel, serviced apartment and co-living group, operating across Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and other European locations, said: “Whenever we open a new property, technology is the key component that makes it operational from day one. That’s why we prefer an all-in-one platform like eviivo. The real gain has been replacing multiple tools – PMS, channel manager, CRM, booking engine, payment processor – with just one. For a 40-room hotel, this means savings of up to €9,000 per month. We've also managed to reduce our tech stack costs from around 4 per cent of revenue to 1 per cent.”
And when the time comes to sell, routine upgrades can have an outsized impact on asset values, commented Kaye: “When you prepare a property for sale, you want to make sure that your routers and wi-fi are not at the end of their lives, because the net return on upgrading them is probably ten times the cost.”