🔎 A deep dive into the history of hotel tech

Welcome to RemoteHotelier!

Today’s edition is a bit different. I’m writing this ahead of time because, when you read it, I should be on holiday somewhere in Mexico.

Bringing the laptop on vacation is a big no-no. So today, instead of hotel tech news, I wanted to try something different: a deep dive into the history of technology for hotels. I hope you like it!

You can’t have hotel technology without hotels, and you can’t have hotels without hospitality. The origin of the first accommodation is unclear, but there are records of organized rest stops in Mesopotamia that go back 4,000 years ago. So we could say hospitality is almost as old as human civilization.

If we want to find the first example of hospitality as a business, we'd have to travel in time to the Roman Empire. They built taverns on the main roads that also offered food, beds and stables. I guess this was something similar to the kind of place we see in fantasy movies and series set in medieval times, where people stop to drink beer, rest and get into the occasional sword fight (or laser guns, if you are picturing Star Wars).

Among many other things, Romans were known for their trading skills, so you can guess it didn’t take long until they did the math and realized they could start charging people to use the services in these taverns. This seems to be the point in history when hospitality as a business was officially born.

When do you think hotels started to look like the ones we know today? Let's jump forward in time to find out. Depending on how we define hotel, we can find different examples. We can go as far as the year 705, when the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan hotel was founded in Japan. Regardless, the purpose of the first hotels was similar: to offer a safe place along long routes to rest and continue the journey.

By the way, in 2011, this hotel got the Guinness World Record as the oldest operating hotel. It was run by the same family for 52 generations until 2017. A tiny detail that pretty much screams DON’T LET INVESTORS IN.

Jokes aside, up until this point, it was normal to work long hours every day with barely any free time. But the labor movements after the Industrial Revolution brought along regulated hours and paid holidays. Add the fact that railways made it possible to travel long distances in a reliable way at a reduced cost, and voilà, you have the perfect recipe for accommodation demand growing exponentially.

This rising demand also created a need for consistency, and some entrepreneurs read this very well. They understood that guests like to know what service they can expect, regardless of the location. And that’s how the first hotel chains were born.

So what actually pushed hotels into the modern age? Between the early and mid 1900s, three technologies that we still use today played a huge role in transforming modern hospitality:

Telephones:

Before phones, reservations came by mail, telegrams and walk-ins. Suddenly, this new tech created instant demand, so they needed entire teams just for the phones. Things like taking reservations, waking up guests or taking messages and writing them on paper and delivering them to rooms were done by the hotel staff.

Automobiles:

Cars, buses and taxis changed how people moved and helped cities grow in new directions. Hotels no longer were tied to train stations and spread away.

Planes:

Once commercial aviation took off (no pun intended), modern hospitality expanded even further, and hotels started popping left and right in destinations that trains and cars could never reach.

Bigger hotels needed strong systems to ensure that nothing fell through the cracks. How do you think hotels kept everything organized without computers? They used very clever pen and paper tools that usually consisted of many different elements, but I’d like to highlight these four:

Do they ring any bells? Modern PMS replicate this functionality in one way or another. So, these systems were the foundation of what technology for hotels is today.

As good as these early systems were, they were fragile and almost impossible to scale. Hoteliers were always looking for ways of improving these processes, and technology was already lurking in the shadows to resolve this.

One of the biggest leaps in hotel tech occurred in 1978 with Fidelio. It was the first digital PMS that could finally handle everything the manual systems did, and more. Finally hotels had a single system that actually managed the property.

Before that, there were a few important attempts, but they looked more like central reservation systems than PMS. The next natural step was to connect these CRS tools with the PMS within the properties. That’s when we started seeing the infamous green screen terminals with keyboard commands and codes that only front desk supervisors understood (believe it or not, there are hotels still using them).

And then the internet arrived, and the whole industry changed. When hotels started being connected to the internet, new players came into play (hello OTAs 👋).

For the first time in history, people were able to book hotel rooms without going through a call center or travel agent. And that completely changed the game in hospitality.

Funnily enough, these new tools also created new problems. Just to mention one, channel managers were built to fix the holes that OTAs were doing in hotel availability.

Since then, the volume of data that PMS have to process just went through the roof year after year.

Hospitality has been notoriously bad in adopting new tech. Cloud technology, for example, was common in many industries long before it became normal for hotels. But that’s changing because the mindset is different.

Technology used to be seen as a necessary evil, and now is an investment.

It’s impossible to predict the future, but if I had to guess, these two topics are very well positioned to be the future of the industry:

Integrations:

Hoteliers don’t need more tools and more logins. They need systems that talk to each other. Vendors used to be very reluctant to integrate with third parties, but today it’s quite the opposite. Companies proudly announce new integrations because that’s something hotel users want to see.

Open APIs and marketplaces are something we’re already seeing and I think we’re going to see more. As it happens in other industries, older players struggle to understand this, but the modern hospitality companies born in the digital era adapt very fast. It’s no surprise they’re eating their lunch.

Artificial Intelligence:

It seems that labor shortages are happening in many locations at the same time. Work in hotel operations is tough, I can tell. So, unless this problem is somehow reverted, AI should be applied to reduce the workload of the remaining staff.

That said, I’m totally against AI used to track staff performance because a) there are more important problems to solve first and b) it sounds an awful lot like burning the remaining staff you still have.

With this, we got to the end of today’s edition. If you’re still reading, it means that either you read the whole thing or you just skipped to the conclusion. Either way, thank you very much for that.

If there’s something I got from researching and writing all this, it’s that hospitality keeps repeating the same cycle over and over: problem, solution and progress.

It’s always been like that, and that’s why I love working in this industry so much. Sure, the speed and the context might change, but no matter what your role is, we all seem to share the same instinct. We’re all natural problem solvers.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading.

One quick note: researching this post was hard because different sources mention slightly different dates and facts, so if you spot anything inaccurate, let me know and I’ll update it.

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See you next week!
Jose