Selling to travel and hospitality companies

Travel and hospitality companies run on systems that were never built to talk to each other. Reservations, property management, loyalty, distribution, revenue management. Every one of them is a source of pain and a reason to buy services.

The firms that win here know which seam is tearing this year.

Who buys

Technology in travel sits with a CIO or CTO, but the business side carries real weight. A chief commercial officer or head of revenue owns pricing and distribution. A loyalty or customer leader owns the guest relationship and the data behind it. Operations leaders own the property or the fleet.

For hotel groups, the ownership model matters. Brands, management companies and owners split decisions in ways that confuse outsiders. Know who signs before you write. For airlines, cruise lines and travel platforms, the structure looks more like a typical enterprise, with a digital or product leader often holding the budget.

A typical committee has the commercial or digital executive as the economic buyer, a director who owns the system or the program as the champion, and an engineering or architecture lead as the technical voice.

The pressures they face

Demand swings hard. A good season can turn on economic news, weather or a shift in travel habits. Leaders need to adjust pricing and staffing faster than their systems allow.

Distribution costs eat margin. Every booking through a third-party platform costs a commission. Pushing guests to book direct is a constant priority, and it depends on loyalty, personalization and a website that actually works.

Legacy systems are everywhere. Property management and reservation platforms are often decades old, customized beyond recognition and expensive to replace. Labor is tight too. Front-line roles are hard to fill, which puts pressure on automation and self-service.

Which signals matter most

Tech stack signals are strong here. A job post naming a specific property management or reservation platform, especially a new one, tells you a migration is coming. A posting for a loyalty platform engineer tells you where the investment is going.

A new leader in the buying seat matters a lot. A new chief commercial officer or chief digital officer is usually hired to grow direct bookings or fix the guest experience, and they'll move in their first 90 days.

Business pressure shows up in filings and earnings releases for public companies. Read for language about distribution costs, technology investment and margin. Funding and deals matter too. An acquisition of another brand means two loyalty programs and two sets of systems to bring together. There's more on reading filings in how to read a 10-K like a seller.

An example opener

Say a mid-sized hotel group names growing direct bookings as a priority in its latest earnings release. It just posted for a CRM platform lead and a loyalty data analyst, and a new chief commercial officer started two months ago.

You joined as chief commercial officer as the company put direct bookings at the top of its growth plan. That target is yours now. My guess is the guest data you'd need to personalize offers sits split between the property systems, the loyalty platform and the booking engine, and nobody has a single view of a returning guest. Is that accurate, or is the bigger gap something else?

It's specific to his role and timing. It names the plumbing problem behind the strategy. And it's easy to correct.

What these buyers ignore

They ignore pitches that don't understand the operation. A hotel executive hears a generic customer experience pitch and knows you've never worked a front desk on a sold-out night.

They ignore long implementation timelines. These businesses can't take systems down in peak season. If your plan doesn't account for that, they'll assume you don't know the industry.

And they ignore anything that adds cost without a clear link to revenue per available room, direct booking share or guest satisfaction.

Reach the committee and go warm

Travel and hospitality is a relationship industry. Executives move between brands often, and many of them know each other. A warm intro from a former colleague or a mutual industry contact carries real weight.

Write to the commercial leader, the director running the system and the technical lead. Give each a version built for their seat. And check your network first. There's more on that in the warm intro is the most underused channel in services.