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What the World Cup revealed, and what HITEC almost said out loud
While HITEC was happening, host-city hotels kicked off this summer expecting the World Cup to answer a straightforward question: how much can a global demand event lift room revenue? The results have been more complicated, more unexpected, and more instructive than a simple room revenue story.
CoStar's tournament-tracking data show host-market RevPAR growth running close to 13% year over year, driven almost entirely by higher average daily rates rather than occupancy gains. The American Hotel & Lodging Association's (AHLA) member survey reports hotel bookings tracking well below initial forecasts across several host cities. New York saw occupancy climb above 90% during tournament weeks. Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco ran closer to normal operating conditions.
Same competition. Different outcomes by market, and more importantly, different outcomes within those markets beyond the room revenue captured.
The hotels reporting historically high net operating income so far were not simply the ones that priced rooms the hardest. They were the ones that knew why each guest was coming and shaped the experience around that knowledge. For them, the World Cup was not a rate event. It was a context event for every person who walked through their digital or physical doors.
Mandarin Oriental New York built the context before the guests arrived. The property launched a dedicated World Cup page positioning itself as a "refined sanctuary." The substance behind the phrase is what matters: a private concierge for pre-arrival planning, connecting and family room configurations for groups, Les Clefs d'Or concierges building itineraries around match schedules, and curated experiences for staying guests and visitors alike.
Each of those is a mechanism for knowing who is arriving before they check in. By the time a guest crosses the threshold, the hotel already holds a working picture: who they are, why they chose this property, and what the stay needs to look like around the event. The contribution margin follows from that knowledge.
Properties that treated events like the World Cup purely as a room-demand question adjusted pricing when occupancy fell short of projections. That was a rational response to what the numbers showed. The problem is that RevPAR only reflects how full the hotel was for guests with Property Management System (PMS) reservations. It does not reveal who was in the building, why they chose to visit, or what the property could have done to earn a larger share of their total spend.
That gap opens a question the industry has been circling for years during events like HITEC without quite confronting directly:
Does your hotel know this guest, or only their room booking?
Three themes dominated the HITEC agenda across its near week-long program of more than 50 sessions:
All three are legitimate, critical, and the discussions they generated were genuinely useful. The gap is not in the subject matter. It is in how far the conversations went.
Most sessions were strong on the "why" and reasonably thorough on the "what." Fewer arrived at the "how." Almost none arrived at the specific "how" that connects most directly to a property's P&L: not how to improve the guest experience in the abstract, but how to grow net operating income through a sharper understanding of every individual who walks through the doors, regardless of whether they have a PMS reservation.
Several sessions pointed in that direction. Amadeus's "The End of 'Heads in Beds': The Era of Revenue Beyond the Four Walls" correctly diagnosed that the room is the wrong unit of analysis. IRIS addressed how every guest touchpoint carries revenue potential. Ireckonu argued that hotels that do not own their unified guest data will cede competitive ground to those that do. Three vendors, circling the same insight from different angles.
What remained largely unasked: whether the data being collected is the right data to grow contribution margin in the first place, or whether the current definition of "guest" is broad enough to include everyone with genuine spending potential on the property. The PMS will tell you your hotel was at 78% occupancy. It will not tell you that the locals watching the match in your lobby bar would have spent twice as much at your restaurant if a guest-facing team member had merely informed them of an offering.
The first, and easiest change that would do the most to answer the question HITEC was circling is a definitional one: broaden the meaning of the word "guest".
In traditional hotel operations, "guest" means the person who booked a room. That is where financial measurement, operational priority, and service delivery are conventionally focused. That definition leaves a meaningful amount of margin unaddressed. A more useful definition of a guest for 2026 and beyond is:
Every individual, in person or digitally, who engages with your brand and has any propensity to spend.
The locals watching a sports game at your lobby bar. The random person scrolling your website’s entertainment offerings. The day visitor in your spa. The person responding to your pre-arrival message who has not yet decided on a restaurant. If they can open their wallets and engage, they are guests, whether or not they have a PMS reservation. This matters because every major theme at HITEC depends on this broadening, and none of them works without it.
Across generations, the industry keeps trying to force PMS systems to do work they were not built for: serving as a customer data platform, engaging directly with guests, becoming a guest profile system, or becoming the primary record of guest preferences.
The PMS is a booking and billing system. It builds context around reservations, not around people. It tells you which room was sold. It does not, by design, tell you who the guest is or what motivated them to choose you.
The first is profile conflation: For example, when a primary guest makes a reservation but two additional guests make purchases charged to the same room, the primary guest is improperly attributed to the additional guests' purchases.
The second is profile attribution: For example, when the same primary guest returns for a conference under a business email, a second PMS profile is often created for the same person because the profile is associated with each hotel stay, and not the other way around.
Both problems quietly erode the quality of every personalisation effort built on top of them. What resolves both is a unified profile for each individual, regardless of a PMS reservation, because it exists in a unified data layer on its own; one that aggregates data from the PMS, CRM, spa, restaurant, and other activity systems to answer the actual "why" questions. Why did this guest choose this property? Why did they spend what they spent? Why did the upsell convert?
That context easily determines capture rate, average spend, and acquisition cost. Every one of those elements becomes a margin lever. Without the context layer, the levers are being pulled without knowing what any of them are connected to. And context built properly within a unified profile moves from attribution to affinity: understanding how strongly a specific guest is drawn to specific attributes, and why, is how you get every individual to open their wallet further. That is the conversation HITEC was pointing toward, yet did not quite get there.
While many sessions were circling the question, another conversation on the trade show floor was answering it.
Hospitality Net sat down with Andrew Pirret, Alliants SVP of Product, for an unscripted interview about a problem hospitality has not solved across 25 years of HITEC attendance: why hotels still ask a returning guest whether they have stayed before. As Pirret laid out in the interview, the data to recognise that guest already exists in the hotel's own systems. The failure is not missing information. It is failing to surface it at the right moment. The Alliants platform connects PMS, table management, spa, and ancillary systems into a single guest view, and various tools such as an AI morning briefing agent surface that view before the team is asked, so the conversation starts with the guest already known rather than rediscovered at the front desk.
That specific failure Alliants is solving for, and the revenue opportunity it represents, is the central subject of a Modern Hotelier conversation recorded live at HITEC, with CEO Tristan Gadsby, Pirret, and Chief Revenue Officer Alberto Santana. Santana names the structural blind spot no RevPAR metric captures:
"Hotels gather the name of whoever made the booking and almost nothing about anyone else travelling with them."
He walks through a scenario drawn from this summer's World Cup tournament: a high-profile guest named Valentina books three adults arriving in Miami for a Uruguay World Cup match. One profile. Two invisible guests. "When was the last time a hotel said, 'What's bringing you to town?'"
In the same conversation, Santana cites an Alliants customer that recently went from one profile per booking to 13,000 additional guest profiles captured from 20,000 check-ins, simply by asking who else was on the reservation during Contactless arrivals.
Gadsby framed the sequence that makes all of that data useful.
“Knowing the customer comes first, then understanding the context of their stay, then knowing what the hotel and the local area can offer against that context. Only when those three layers are in place can humans or any AI tool make recommendations that feel like service rather than noise.”
The moment of arrival is when that context either shows up, or it does not. In a separate No Vacancy News episode, Gadsby and Santana argue that hospitality has built the wrong architecture entirely around arrival. Santana uses a single word as his test: "reception." At a wedding, it is celebratory. At a hotel front desk, it has become transactional. The fix is not a better front desk process. It is ensuring that guests arrive already known, with their context loaded, so every member of staff can move directly to hospitality rather than administration.
The dust from HITEC has settled, and the World Cup ends on July 19. The question both events raised does not.
What both events surface is not about major events or host-city pricing strategy. It is about what "knowing your guest" actually means in practice. Not a loyalty tier. Not a CRM record. A live, compounding picture of who is on the property right now, what they are likely to do next, and the right move to make to make that interaction worth more to them and to you.
The properties that pull ahead from here will not have a different PMS. They will have a different question to answer. So, do you truly know your guest, or only their booking in your PMS?
