How to protect your profits by mirroring your on-property service standards to your digital guest experiences.
Berlin is the host city for the ITB hospitality conference
Key Takeaways:
After walking the trade show floor and listening to sessions at ITB Berlin, one cannot escape the relentless buzz about AI-driven "disruption" from event organisers and technology vendors. For the modern hospitality executive, the primary concern is not exclusively the nebulous promise of a generative AI revolution, but the cold reality of profit protection.
Guests don't care about a "digital-first" strategy when self-service fails, or service is lacking because staff don’t fully utilise technology, as it ruins their commission opportunities and makes them feel inflexible in delivering memorable service. These "in-the-trenches" realities won't disappear with budget "innovation" either.
The reality is that we are currently paying for the 'implementation tax' of trying to put 2026 AI on top of early 2000s technology and data stacks. IT budgets have remained stagnant for years, hovering at 3-4% of total hotel spend, even as the pre-pandemic era of hospitality reached its highest recorded levels. Back then (and as it is now), the lion's share of that small slice of the IT budget is dedicated to maintaining the status quo with IT systems, according to year-over-year data trends from Ensemble IQ’s Lodging Technology studies.
Yet hotel executives are now entering a crucial "prove it" era of tech investment, where existing and new tech are scrutinised much more closely. Given the massive industry spend on the AI revolution, which has yet to demonstrate real financial ROI to hotel asset ownership groups, it makes sense. This “prove it” era has also put the industry at a strategic crossroads.
So what happens when your rising operating expenses, which put pressure on boosting margins, clash with your need to tackle tech debt, let alone digitally innovate with tools like AI? Which one comes first? Where do budgets focus? Whether you can make the transition in a spreadsheet or not, the “budget” mindset needs to treat technology investments as CAPEX, not OPEX. Leading modern brands have already found success in making this transition by following the strategies below. They simply understand that tech adoption needs to start much earlier than before, even if that means taking on risk by being early adopters. Even more deeply, leading brands understand that the guest experience is equally as important as the building that guests and staff call home for whatever length of stay or shift.
In uncertain times, like 2026, the most responsible impulse is to tighten budgets. Without the right long-term plan, this can often lead to short-term technology fixes. Historically, talented staff could make budget technology work, like a world-touring drummer using a pizza box instead of a professional set. Leading brands treat their staff like world-touring bands by critically evaluating the professional instruments their bands need before investing. This first means recognising that your service models, both digitally and in-person, are as financially critical as your physical assets.
Hoteliers now need two parallel budget mindsets: the conventional OPEX investment alongside a foundational digital strategy treated as CAPEX. If you want to secure consistent brand visibility and credibility, as Costco recently accomplished, this is the new status quo.
Nowadays, you have far less veteran-level staff to throw out-of-the-box technology at. More often than not, those veteran-level stars had also used a multitude of tools like GoConcierge or Delphi, and know the difference between Opera On-Prem vs OHIP. They knew what worked based on decades of experience.
Due to that talent and labour gap, hotel leaders are rightly wary of solutions that promise efficiency without sacrificing the quality of service. Why? How many times have you been burned before by being promised a penultimate solution, only to receive a sub-par one? How often do your staff end up spending more time fighting the systems than serving your guests?
First and foremost, leading brands aligned their digital service delivery engines with their high-touch in-person service standards. When you shift away from digital transactions that feel generic toward genuine relationship-building, your tech stack suddenly becomes a necessity that your consumers rely on heavily across multiple devices. Even better, you can more naturally start to engage with your guests outside of the stay experience.
Leaders are starting to treat their guest experience tech stacks as merely the “canvas” for digitally mapping their uniquely human experiences. Just “being another app on mobile phones” is insufficient, whether you’re an independent full-service hotel or a global brand enterprise.
Mandarin Oriental recently demonstrated this very strategy in 2025 with the launch of its guest experience programme, which won a Skift IDEAS award.
Modern hospitality's digital touchpoints must mirror the sophistication and detail of your physical property and staff, as airlines have already proven. This necessitates flexible and consistent tech behaviour, including UI design for any device, tech responsiveness, and ease of use. These qualities are what prestigious organisations like Forbes Travel Guide seek in their digital standards for star ratings.
At the end of the day, failure to achieve this alignment leads to brand erosion. It’s simple. Modern guests who are willing to increase their “ancillary” spend with you will almost instantly lose trust in you when your technology fails to match the experience they have on the property. Ultimately, there goes hitting your goal of “elevating my net operating income levels by X%” as easily as you wished for the year.
There is one simple justification, via a question, that these leading brands use to escalate their budget needs to asset ownership group(s) with the CAPEX mindset front and centre:
Do you want a 3-star digital experience selling your 5-star property and brand of service?
There is a profound strategic risk in "brand-tech misalignment." When a modern guest expecting a bespoke stay is forced to use a generic, third-party interface, the disconnect is jarring: it's the digital equivalent of a stained white carpet in the centre of a penthouse suite. According to Hubspot:
38% of customers will stop engaging with a brand if the web-based content or layout is unattractive.
Why is that important? Because 75% of consumers admit to making judgments on a company’s credibility based on the company’s digital experience (across web and apps). The small, mundane, ordinary “stuff” matters so much more than you may think. Ultimately, the goal of your tech stack for guest experiences should be to provide smooth, natural interactions that feel like a permanent extension of your brand identity when the guest is on property. Nothing more, nothing less.
While it’s fun to dream like you have a blank check, there is a widening "budget gap" in the hospitality technology sector. Economy and mid-scale segments often use apps or app-like experiences, especially when using AI, to automate human interactions and transactions. This is by design, since the economy-to-mid-scale guest segments expect convenience and ease over true personalisation or white-glove service.
In modern times, however, the best brands use technology to support and enhance human interaction, even if that interaction is indirectly between two humans through devices. Why? Generic automation fails for guests with higher ancillary spending habits because “generic” is inherently lacking in relevance, timeliness, and flexibility to their desires and expectations. When modern guests feel like they are just another number in a marketing funnel, they disengage. According to the annual consumer index report by Attentive, one of the single largest global e-commerce solutions, 81% of shoppers routinely ignore or disengage from self-service marketing offers they find personally irrelevant.
To truly engage the high-value traveller, leading brands are adopting a digital strategy that moves away from rigid, "one-size-fits-all" technologies and towards technology that can adapt to their on-property service standards. This is particularly important when dealing with staff shortages; the tech must help current team members do their jobs better, not frustrate them with more admin.
Right now, Alliants is developing a new feature for our Guest App that lets guests access your entire appstore app experience via a web URL. Now you’ll have absolute flexibility for how your guests want to engage with you.
While others are pushing a more rigid, mobile-only design experience, we know why absolute flexibility matters. For instance, 75% of digital itineraries are accessed on desktop computers for one of our leading modern hotel customers. Why? Their high-value guests and their assistants plan on larger screens. We know that forcing the customer’s guests into a mobile app breaks the consistency of their five-star service. Consistency is key here. For instance, what happens if you force guests into a web-based experience built for mobile phones, where formatting, user interfaces, text sizes, and more are jammed together (exactly what HubSpot warns against)?
Where other tech providers damage your brand’s trust by sending guests to third-party URLs to buy upgrades, the Alliants Web App is fully white-labelled. Your guests stay on your domain, which builds confidence and drives conversions.
Furthermore, instead of automated upsell tools that cut your hardworking staff out of their commissions, we build fulfilment logic that protects team incentive policies while naturally growing your total guest spend, even if guests prefer self-service bookings when planning their itineraries.
Because it delivers actual results you can measure at your front desk, your concierge desk, call centres, and every other guest-facing team member. Our Web App infrastructure alone has already helped early adopter customers cut contactless check-in times in half through the new interface, and we are still only in beta. It also helped our earliest adopter achieve a 3x increase in ancillary revenues compared to the previous technology stack.
We are also currently focused on advancing the "Digital Wallet Revolution" in our industry through our Digital Keys solution. The digital wallet has become the remote control of the modern guest's life across all industries. Single-stay digital keys are already becoming a thing of the past for us: when a guest downloads a key to their phone’s wallet, uses it for one stay, and it expires at 11:00 on the day of departure, ending up in what we call the "wallet graveyard."
The new way is similar to an Infinite Multi-Stay pass, where keys can be assigned automatically. By utilising Apple Member Pass functionality, we create a persistent relationship where "One Booking = One Pass" evolves into "One Guest = One Pass.”
This persistent Member Pass lives in each guest’s wallet forever. Between stays, it functions as a loyalty card, showing real-time status and point balances. During a stay, it automatically updates to become the room key. For a Marketing VP, this functionality now acts as a "permanent billboard" in the guest's pocket. Imagine changing the dynamic member pass card art to promote a new direct booking offer during a seasonal event.
Every time a customer opens their wallet to pay for a coffee or board a flight, they see your brand. This level of brand visibility is a powerful tool for driving higher guest spend and recognising guest loyalty, such as seeing status and loyalty points balances in the past.
As mobile payments continue to dominate, with digital advertising making up 77% of the total $422 billion U.S. ad market, representing $324.9 billion in spend. Owning that space in the digital wallet is a strategic necessity for your brand now if you want some of that market share.
As you explore the last days of ITB Berlin and move on to other conferences this year, remember that your physical property is only half of the modern guest journey. You cannot sell 5-star in-person service through a cheap, 3-star digital interface. To protect your profits, your digital presence must act as a high-quality digital mirror of your on-property brand promise.
If you want to learn how Alliants is helping our customers protect profits while elevating guest experiences to memorable new heights, find us at various conferences this year or contact us!
