I read The PMS Era Is Ending a few days ago and it raised good points, especially around how slow PMS innovation has been historically, I believe this problem alone has been one of the biggest issues in hotel tech innovation over the last three decades. But, I do not think the PMS era is ending.
One of the recurring problems in technology is that everyone tends to see the industry from the center of their own world. Distribution people believe distribution is the heart of hotel tech. Marketing agencies see the fight against OTAs as the main battle. CRM people see guest data as the center. Payment providers think payment rails are the foundation of everything.
My view is, payments are infrastructure, not strategy. Distribution is the key factor in revenue, but it is not the whole business. The fight against OTAs is really a question of controlling your own distribution, not eliminating intermediaries. Etc.
Stronger data
AI is going to force the industry to have stronger and better data channels. Yes, one can suppose that AI can handle the mess of data so why bother. But then what do you do when it starts to mess up rates and availability? Because it based the actions on some fuzzy logic.
Apps vs platforms
In theory, best-of-breed is ideal. The best RMS, the best CRM, the best guest messaging platform, etc. But trends are moving toward consolidation. One major vendor is simply easier to manage. One support team, one commercial relationship, one negotiation, and fewer integrations to maintain. A specialist product may be stronger in one category, but for hotels who mostly deal with the unpredictability of humans, reliability of systems is better than perfect systems.
For all we say about AI being able to handle unstructured data, if guest profiles are in one place, rooms in another, F&B in yet another, and operations elsewhere, I believe the error rates will be even higher. I’m sure this is debatable. Just like the Lidar+vision vs pure vision debate. But logically one clean source will always be better for humans and AI.
PMS and the risk of stagnation
The criticism of slow PMS vendors is fair. For decades, PMSs have been the bottleneck of hotel innovation. Closed APIs, expensive integrations, poor documentation, and painfully slow development cycles have made them obstacles rather than enablers.
Entire categories of hotel tech exist because PMSs failed to evolve. CRSs became separate because PMSs never solved distribution properly. Customer data platforms exist because guest profile management inside many PMSs is so bad that in some cases, it is easier for hotel staff to create a second guest profile than to find the original one. That is not a data problem, it is a product failure.
There is a future risk with platform consolidation is that once vendors know customers are locked in, innovation slows even further. Once the vendor is settled in and they know how hard it is for their customers to switch there will be little to no incentive to innovate. I don’t have a magic answer to this – but maybe PMS will build free migration tools which would suddenly make shifting a lot easier.
Theoretically, since hotels could build their own interfaces they wouldn’t need to re-train their staff on new systems.
The AI Shift
Every vendor is adding copilots, agentic assistants, dashboards, and predictive tools. Most of it is useful, much of it will be surface-level enhancement at first. But that’s OK we need to find the way.
A few months ago, I asked the CEOs of several PMS vendors where they believed MCP (or whatever the protocol will be) would/should sit. They didn’t reply or told me “they don’t know”. Maybe they consider this a possible threat to their business model? I’m probably overthinking it.
I think PMS should be the trusted operational layer that allows AI to function reliably across departments. Could a third party do that instead? Of course. But the closer you are to raw operational truth, the stronger your position becomes.
Agentic layer in PMS
So contrary to the original article I don’t believe AI will reduce the importance of the PMS. But the PMS might become less of an interface and more of an infrastructure layer. Its value moves away from screens and toward trust, data quality, and orchestration.
I looked at a lot of agentic in saas. My over-simplified conclusion is that all agentic is (currently) doing is solving extremely bad UI and UX design. Take moving reservations as an example. In many hotels, the guest experience at reception is now worse than it was before computers. Staff are trapped behind endless clicks, slow workflows, and systems that force them to serve the screen before they serve the guest. So we create an agent that can “move the reservation of Joe Smith the Platinum member to tomorrow”. It goes through all the steps and does it.
Huge advantage in time. But it begs the question, why wasn’t it like that in the first place? Why do we have these ridiculous multi-click systems?
AI will not just improve PMS workflows. It will expose how much bad UX was normalized for decades. It will show how much unnecessary complexity hotels accepted simply because poor software became standard.
That does not mean the future is chat assistants everywhere. Point-and-click is still an excellent interface, especially in front of guests. The goal is not replacing every screen with chat. The goal is fewer bad workflows, better logic, and systems that support hospitality instead of slowing it down.
The PMS War
The future PMS may look less like traditional software and more like infrastructure. The interface may matter less than the trustworthiness of the data underneath it. As I mentioned above, one could imagine hotels building their own UI layer on top of the system, but I think I’m getting ahead of myself here – hotels haven’t been great at building their own tools.
So what is the PMS war? Well lets see who manages to build the strongest data infrastructure for hotels and the best agentic layers on top of it. The race is on, nobody wants to be replaced. A lot of money has been poured into making the best next platform.
That is the real PMS war, but there wont be a single player. Chains are too different from groups who are too different from independents and so far this industry has proven the Innovator’s Dilemma quite wrong with very few solutions moving from small hotels to chains. So I believe that the future of PMS in the AI era is about who becomes the trusted authority of truth inside the hotel.
— Martin
