Welcome to RemoteHotelier #83!
I came across Gaiarooms through Peter Fabor’s newsletter (which I highly recommend btw), and it was too good not to dissect the case this week.
In today’s newsletter:
📲 96 Digital hotels with remote receptionists
🆕 + 6 new product updates
🔌 + 1 new integration
💼 + 6 new jobs in the job board
📲 96 Digital hotels with remote receptionists
Gaiarooms is a Spanish hotel group with close to 100 properties. Its business model is to buy old hotels in prime locations and turn them into fully digital properties.
Its founder sat down for a couple of interviews I’m leaving here if you want to either watch or listen.
They’re an absolute masterclass in hotel operations and technology. I really enjoyed learning about this company, and I recommend watching one of these two options if you’re interested in this topic. Besides, he explains how hotels operate to people outside of the hotel world, which makes it very engaging:
Audio in Spanish with subtitles in English: The first half of the episode covers the business, and the second half is more about the founder’s personal story (this was my favourite):
Audio automatically subbed to English: The content is similar, but I think the questions are better in the first video:
1. No staff isn’t the same as no humans.
I love that they don’t remove the receptionist from the equation. Instead, they turn the role into remote receptionists. At the time of the podcast, they had 180 employees for 96 hotels.
I also loved the fact that when they buy a new hotel, they don’t let the staff go: they offer the option to retrain them as remote receptionists.
2. Remote receptionists.
Their digital setup lets them monitor everything that’s going on in each hotel. Their tech stack even allows them to tell the remote front office everything they need to know about a guest before they even answer the phone.
3. A good Wi-Fi is the backbone of everything.
Speaking of their digital setup, he breaks down what they install and how much it costs per room (roughly €600 per room). That includes:
Electronic locks
Presence and noise sensors.
Climate controls.
A BMS.
CCTV.
A Good Wi-Fi
He insists that a good Wi-Fi is the backbone of his hotels (for obvious reasons).
4. Half of the guests never interact with staff
I found this very surprising. Despite all their efforts, he says that half of their guests never interact with the remote team at all.
This could be due to at least two reasons:
Those guests choose this type of hotel because they don’t want to talk to anyone.
They’ve got the guest journey so polished that guests don’t need any extra help.
5. They use OTAs as secondary tools.
According to him, Booking is 90% of the OTA market in Europe.
When Booking detects that a hotel doesn’t have rate parity, it pushes that hotel down in the search results.
Gaiarooms offers a better price than Booking on purpose and accepts being demoted because part of their strategy is to start selling once the bigger hotels are already filling up.
If you think about it, that’s very smart. By then, most of the hotels that would rank above them are already full, so the demotion barely hurts.
6. The Directo plugin for Google Chrome.
During the first interview, he mentions a Chrome extension I’d never heard of before. It’s called Directo, and it highlights the hotels on Booking that offer better prices on their own websites (and on other OTAs).
As I’m planning going to Madrid on Christmas, I used the occasion to test the plugin myself. Funny enough, one of the first options where I saw the button appear was one of his hotels:
Directo also charges hotels for sending guests their way, but it’s a reasonable monthly fixed subscription rather than a commission for each booking.
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RESOURCES
📍 Next Event: World Travel Market London (3–5 November).
📅 See the full hotel tech event calendar.
💻 Get your PMS comparison spreadsheet.
💸 Get your RMS comparison spreadsheet.
PRODUCT UPDATES
🆕 Inn-Flow launches Essential BI: a redesigned financial reporting tool that cuts the time to generate a full portfolio operating statement from up to 20 minutes to just seconds. [Link]
Labor and Facilities are already next on the list.
🆕 Hapi launches Guest Identity and Data Lakehouse: two products that merge the same guest’s records from the PMS, restaurant, spa and loyalty program into one profile that hotels actually control. [Link]
🆕 Booking Holdings launches Vayo: a personal AI travel assistant, backed by a planned $100 million investment, that pulls reservations from your inbox into one itinerary and watches for price drops. [Link]
🆕 Expedia Group launches Autonomous Onboarding: so properties can join its marketplace straight from their PMS or channel manager and go live in less than 24 hours. [Link]
Good news for small properties… but probably even better news for Expedia.
🆕 Vingcard launches the R-Series door reader: to bring mobile key access to places where a regular lock doesn’t fit, like elevators, parking barriers, gates and sliding doors. [Link]
Guests can tap a key stored in their digital wallet without downloading any app.
🆕 Revinate launches Pathways and Vault: alongside a new version of Revinate Chat, turning guest data into automated email and SMS journeys triggered by what each guest actually does. [Link]
INTEGRATION
🔌 roommaster launches AI Connector: an MCP integration that lets hotel teams query their live PMS data from ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini in plain language. [Link]
Asking who’s arriving today instead of running a report sounds small, but that’s exactly the kind of daily friction front desk teams would happily lose.
JOB BOARD
HOTELS
💼 Merger & Acquisitions Development Manager | Remote (based in the US) | Village Hotels.
💼 Senior Manager, Strategic Operations - Technology Strategy & Roadmap | Remote (based in the US) | Hilton.
💼 Regional Sales Manager UK, Ireland and Scandinavia | Remote (based in the UK) | Relais & Châteaux.
TECH
💼 Customer Success Manager DACH Market | Remote (based in Spain) | Smartness.
💼 Head of UX | Remote (based in Spain) | RoomPriceGenie.
💼 Global Director, Mid-Market Onboarding | Remote (based in Spain) | Cloudbeds.
That’s all for today, thank you for reading. If this was helpful, share it with someone who'd find it useful too:
See you next week!
Jose