🎬 The Classic Movie: “Let’s Build Our Own Tech!” (And Other Famous Last Words)
It usually starts with a bold idea in a boardroom. “We should build our own tech. We know what we need. It will be cheaper, We’ll move faster. We’ll own it.”
Cut to twelve months later, and the scene is quite different. The team is stuck juggling feature requests and bug tickets. The development agency vanished somewhere between the second sprint and the first invoice. Integrations turned out to be major headaches. And what was supposed to be a competitive advantage slowly became a source of frustration, delays, and mounting costs.
At that point, the conversation shifts from “Let’s build it” to “Let’s not drown.”
Hotels are amazing at hospitality, at driving topline and bottom-line, at operational excellence. But building, maintaining, and scaling software? That’s a whole different sport. One that requires a dedicated product mindset, iteration, and yes a certain level of obsession.
So when hotel companies come back after trying to build, It’s understanding that partnering doesn’t mean giving up control. It means accelerating results without reinventing the wheel.
That is not to say it’s not possible to work, but it is rare. After 10 years of being involved with software in Hospitality I’ve seen less than 10 projects that work end to end and only 2-3 that truly delivers sophisticated Analytics. The strategy of these 2-3: Hybrid…
Will hotel be able to build better with AI? Not yet but soon perhaps. However maintaining a production grade enterprise application with multiple data pipelines, failover mechanisms and a truly scalable architecture is not yet something AI can do.
Tech is hard. Doing hospitality is hard. And trying to do both? That’s when you need a drink at the hotel bar.
