There’s a new 3-letter acronym circling the hotel tech sphere (yay): MCP. And before you yawn hit delete, this one might actually be useful.
MCP stands for “Middleware Control Platform” (at least for now). If the early vendors are right, this could be more than just another integration tool, it could become a direct revenue lever. That’s worth looking at.
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The easiest way to describe MCP is to call it a switchboard. A single point of entry for AI agents or chatbots (or any other tool). They connect to the MCP server, and from there, they can tap into your booking engine – but actually it could also be to your PMS, CRS, CRM, website, reputation tools, spa systems, golf bookings, even your café’s menu, if you want. One in, everything out.
The MCP doesn’t store any of that data. So you don’t run into the usual problems with sync, cache, PCI or GDPR headaches. It just routes the request to where the data lives, grabs it, and returns it. No storage or memory, just a unified language, rules and routing. It’s like a real-time translator with a set of routing rules that you can bake in.
Latency will still be an issue, of course. Nothing magic here. But that’s a technical speed bump, not a structural one.
Now here’s why this matters for hotels: with MCP, hotels finally have a way to expose their full ecosystem to AI agents (or any external systems that uses the protocol) without relying on API-by-API integrations. Think about itinerary bookings: rooms, F&B, wellness, in-stay preferences, and loyalty. Plus one could imagine a whole bunch of additional data that could be used.
Theoretically if a hotel uses MCP it could unlock entirely new direct revenue streams. Because it would be a standard that AI Agents can use instead of individual connections, which will always go to OTAs first. An AI agent plugged into an MCP could book the room, the spa, the airport pickup, the family package, and the dog bed, all from the hotel’s own data, not from homogenized third party data.
We’re still early. There’s no dominant standard yet. But if MCPs succeed in simplifying access to fragmented hotel data, they may be the infrastructure piece we’ve all been waiting for.
But where does it sit? Is it attached to the PMS as that is the most accurate source of truth? Is it a third party vendor (yet another one) who manages all the APIs to the vendors? If it is with the PMS, then they might restrict or make connecting to it expensive (it been done), but then some CRSs are starting to change crazy API rates too.
Food for thought.
