If a hotel lists a “fitness room” online, guests expect to find one when they arrive—not a locked door or a blank wall where equipment used to be. Yet that kind of mismatch, while frustrating, is incredibly common. It’s a symptom of a larger issue in hospitality: broken content.
“A guest books via an OTA and after checking-in goes to look for the fitness center. But they can’t find it, or it looks like it’s been closed,” said Natalie Kimball, Vice President, Strategic Account Management Americas and EMEA, Shiji Horizon Distribution & Iceportal Content during a conversation on the show floor at HITEC 2025. “So, they contact the OTA and ask for a refund. The OTA refunds, and then they call the hotel and say, ‘We had to refund a guest because you don’t have a fitness center.’ And [the hotel’s] like, ‘Wait, no, no, no—it just moved to a different floor.’”
Even when the guest experience hasn’t truly failed, the miscommunication across systems can be costly. The reason? A lack of a unified source of truth.
A Hidden Layer That Cleans, Translates, and Distributes
Many hotels use legacy descriptors like “DBL” or “Delux” that are inconsistent across platforms and not intuitive to travelers. A double room might mean two beds, one bed for two people, or even two door handles—depending on the brand, region, or PMS.
To clean up this long-standing mess, Kimball’s team created Iceportal Content, an invisible layer of infrastructure that standardizes and distributes accurate data. “If we see that something has changed in the PMS, the CRS, on Expedia or Booking, we can detect those updates,” she said. “We take a 10,000-foot view and ask: Have we seen this change anywhere else? If yes, we validate it and push the correct version to all platforms.”
This API-driven system doesn’t just pretty up bad data; it fixes it at the root. And the company doesn’t require hotels to overhaul existing tech stacks. “They don’t have to stop using their current systems—keep using your PMS, your RMS, your content management vendor,” Kimball said. “We’re just solving the last-mile delivery and consistency issue that those systems weren’t built to handle.”
Built by Hoteliers, Not Just for Them
Unlike many tech products built in a vacuum, Shiji’s infrastructure layer was developed with direct input from the field. Kimball and her team literally locked hoteliers in a room (along with an OTA representative)—with snacks and coffee—and covered the walls with sticky notes naming every content issue they faced, from resort fees and tax policies to casino amenity categories.
“If you solve for amenities but don’t solve for taxes, it’s of no use to us,” one participant said. “If you solve for taxes but you don’t solve for casino amenities, it’s of no use to us,” another added. That full-spectrum thinking became the foundation for a platform that handles both descriptive and operational data—from photos and room types to policies, pet fees, and cancellation terms.
“We wanted to stop making solutions for hoteliers and start solving problems with them,” Kimball explained.
AI Has a Role—But Only If the Data Is Right
While AI is often pitched as a cure-all, Kimball is clear-eyed about its limits. “Trying to solve the problem of incorrect data with AI is never going to work,” she said. “You’ll just get stuck in a cycle—‘I told you it’s no longer a fitness room, it’s a fitness center’—but AI keeps overriding the update.”
Instead, she sees AI’s value in intelligently detecting and validating changes across the hotel’s digital ecosystem, not making assumptions or auto-writing content. “You can let Expedia or HotelTonight style the language however they want. Just start with correct data,” she said.
A Better Guest Experience—and Fewer Refunds
Ultimately, this isn’t just a back-end housekeeping project—it’s about the guest experience and the bottom line. If travelers get accurate descriptions and can rely on what’s listed online, they’re more likely to have a smooth stay—and return.
“People don’t want to rebook a bad experience,” Kimball said. “They want consistency. You give them that—whether it’s through great content or a team member who’s worked the front desk for 20 years—and they’ll come back.”
