When a Technology Vendor Forgets the Hotel Is the Customer

There is a particularly revealing moment in any business relationship: when you decide to question the service you are receiving. As long as you buy, pay, renew and maintain the status quo, everything is usually cordial. A supplier’s true character emerges when you compare, test an alternative or make a decision that does not align with its interests.

That is when calls to ownership, warnings about penalties, references to the volume of business processed and a certain sense of “how dare you change?” may appear. And that is when the relationship starts to look less like a partnership and more like a show of force.

For years, I have argued that a good supplier should not make the hotel dependent on it; it should make the hotel want to stay with it. Dependency is built through long contracts, penalties, bundled services and exit costs. Loyalty is built through product, support, innovation and trust.

The problem is even more evident when there is a clear power imbalance between a large company and an independent hotel. For a major supplier, losing an account may be a commercial issue. For a small hotel, changing its booking engine, PMS or distribution infrastructure can directly affect sales and operations. That difference in scale already creates an imbalance. And when it is used to exert pressure, the relationship deteriorates.

When penalties replace the commercial argument

I have no problem with contracts. They must be honoured. But they must be honoured in both directions.

If every time a client questions the service, the first response is to remind them how much it will cost to leave, there is a problem. Because the conversation stops being:

“What is not working for you?”

and becomes:

“Be careful what you do.”

That may be legal. It may be perfectly set out in the contract. But it does not necessarily build a good relationship.

Especially when the party invoking the penalty has legal departments, resources and the capacity to prolong a dispute behind it, while the independent hotel knows that any contractual conflict consumes time, money and attention.

I am not talking about blackmail in the legal sense. I am talking about a commercial dynamic in which the implicit message ends up being:

“You can leave, but it will cost you.”

And when that message carries more weight than:

“Let us show you that we are still the best option”,

something is not working.

I also find the bypass of ownership problematic. If the hotel management team has been the point of contact for months, but as soon as a decision is unwelcome the supplier chooses to bypass that relationship and go directly to ownership, the message is quite clear:

“Since I cannot convince you, I will try to get someone above you to stop you.”

There may be cases in which it is legitimate to speak with ownership. But when it is used as a pressure tactic, it does not strengthen the relationship. It weakens it and, moreover, unnecessarily undermines the person managing the operation.

And there is another important point: if issues, problems, limitations or unmet expectations have been raised for months, it is then difficult to present oneself as surprised when the client tries another solution.

If the supplier takes days or weeks to resolve an issue, but takes hours to react when it fears losing the account, perhaps we have discovered what its real priority was.

The contract also binds the supplier

If we want to talk about the contract, let us talk about the whole contract.

Let us talk about service levels, response times, security, continuity, support, functional errors, integrations and incident resolution.

Because a contract cannot function solely as an exit barrier for the client.

If a critical process fails and the guest cannot make a booking, there is a problem even if the supplier cannot reproduce it. The professional response should not be to prove that “the system works”, but to investigate why it is not working for certain customers.

That nuance separates a defensive supplier from a partner.

It is also worth being careful with statements such as:

“You have sold X through our booking engine.”

Not exactly.

The booking engine has processed bookings worth X.

The hotel generates the sale: its product, reputation, pricing, marketing, positioning, direct sales, team and brand. The technology tool plays a part in closing the transaction, of course, but claiming ownership of all that revenue seems to me a rather self-serving interpretation.

A booking engine should be assessed on conversion, abandonment, stability, speed, mobile experience, integration, security, commercial capabilities and reliability. Not simply on the volume that passes through it.

And here we come to one of the major problems in hospitality technology: vendor lock-in.

Long contracts, penalties, bundled services, proprietary integrations, data that is difficult to extract and dependencies between products can keep a hotel in place not because it is satisfied, but because leaving is too complicated.

It is important to distinguish between two things:

Loyalty: “I could leave, but I do not want to.”

Captivity: “I want to leave, but I do not know whether I can.”

They should not be confused.

Scale should also entail greater responsibility. A large company has more resources, greater legal capacity and more resilience in the event of a dispute. That is precisely why it should use that position with greater restraint, rather than as a constant reminder of who has more power.

A supplier confident in its product should accept that the client compares options.

Testing an alternative is not an attack.

Assessing another tool is not disloyalty.

It is responsible management.

If the current solution is genuinely better, the comparison should reinforce it.

That is why, when the reaction to a trial is disproportionate, one question inevitably arises:

is there concern that the client will try another solution, or that they will discover a better one exists?

Hotels also have our share of responsibility. For years, we have accepted tools because they were familiar, because other properties used them or because changing seemed too complex.

Every critical system should periodically face a simple question:

“If we did not have it today, would we hire it again?”

If the answer is yes, perfect.

If the answer is “I am not sure, but changing would be a problem”, perhaps we have become too dependent.

My first recommendation would be to review critical suppliers using four questions: does it work, do they respond, can I leave, how much would it cost me to do so? If the last question is more concerning than the first three, it is worth reviewing contracts, penalties, integrations and data ownership.

The second is for suppliers: if a client tests an alternative, do not try to frighten them first. Ask what has stopped working, listen, compare and demonstrate that your solution remains the better one. A penalty may retain an account, but it is unlikely to restore trust.

And the third is for those of us who run hotels: let us not confuse size with being right. A large supplier may have more resources and greater negotiating power, but that does not automatically make its position the right one. A technology partner can challenge, advise and persuade. What it should not do is use contracts, penalties, hierarchies or dependency to remind everyone who is large and who is small. When a relationship reaches that point, we are no longer talking only about technology. We are talking about power.