In June we headed to San Antonio, Texas for HITEC, the biggest hotel tech event in the world; thousands of operators and vendors from more than 50 countries, all talking about where the industry is going. It was a privilege to fly the flag for Irish hotel tech at something that size, and I came home with a notebook full of conversations.

As far as I could tell, we were the only Irish company exhibiting, a tiny booth beside the Oracle and Mews stands. What stayed with me wasn't that, though. It was how much of what the biggest names in hotel technology are now building matters directly to hotels here at home. This piece is my attempt to bring some of it back.

What I actually saw

The dominant conversation at HITEC was AI. But beneath the surface, it splits into two very different discussions.

The first is AI for guests: chatbots, digital concierge, automated upselling. There's a huge amount happening in that space, and genuinely good progress being made.

The second conversation is quieter and more interesting. It's about what happens behind the scenes; the work hotel teams do every morning before a single guest interaction takes place. The pickup reports pulled from Opera. The rate comparisons assembled in Lighthouse. The Excel spreadsheet emailed around at 8am because no one has found a better way yet.

That's the problem we started Otel to solve. And at HITEC, I realised we are far from alone in seeing it, but among very few actually working on it.

What Irish hotels are already telling us

I've spent 18 months on calls with GMs and revenue managers across Ireland and the UK. I keep hearing the same thing.

“Right now I have 11 tabs open. It takes me 45 minutes just to see where we are.”

The systems they use; Opera, IDeaS, Lighthouse, are genuinely good. The problem isn't the systems. It's that someone still has to manually connect them, interpret them, and turn them into a decision by 9am.

Think about what a revenue manager actually asks themselves every morning: Am I priced correctly in the short, medium and long-term windows? What are my competitors doing? Are restrictions in place that shouldn't be? Has my booking curve changed this year? Which bookings are likely to wash? No system answers those on its own. They take human judgement, and judgement takes time, which is exactly what most teams don't have.

One revenue manager we work with has automated her entire morning routine. The manual reports she used to rebuild by hand are sitting there when she walks in; pricing opportunities already surfaced, cancellations and pace already flagged. That's roughly two hours back every morning, time she now spends acting on the numbers instead of assembling them. Last month she took 120 rate actions, multiples of what she'd managed the year before. Not because the system got smarter than her. Because she finally had the time to use what it was already telling her.

And it isn't just revenue. One GM used to log into four or five systems every morning just to find out whether there was a problem. Now it's a single morning brief: arrivals and VIPs, groups in house, rooms out of order, yesterday's F&B, new reviews, and anything that needs a decision today.

These aren't magic AI stories. They're time stories.

Why this matters for Irish hospitality

Ireland has an unusually high concentration of independent hotels, where the GM is running revenue, operations, and guest experience simultaneously. The revenue manager is often a team of one. The time cost of manual reporting hits harder here than anywhere else.

Until now, most of the running has been made by enterprise and luxury groups, the ones with IT departments and transformation budgets. AI was never really aimed at a GM running a property with a team already doing the work of five. But that's shifting: 82% of hoteliers now plan to adopt or increase their use of AI over the next year, and the blockers they name most often aren't technological at all, they're staff readiness and a lack of in-house expertise. Both are far more solvable than they sound.

What I'd say to any IHF member reading this

Take 15 minutes to map out how your GM or revenue manager starts their morning. Count the tabs. Count the systems. Count the minutes before the first actual decision gets made. One of the hotel groups we work with started exactly there; a simple list of where the team loses time. That was the entire first step.

If the answer is 45+ minutes of data gathering before any thinking begins, that's the problem worth solving. And it's solvable today, with technology that works with the systems you already have.

If you’d like to know more about how Otel works, please visit our website, or book a demo.

Contact details

Paul Ryan
CEO & Co Founder

 087 904 2098
 paul@otelai.com
Web otelai.com