Many hotels believe the “build-it-yourself” approach using standard, non-industry-specific tech is ideal. However, it often turns into a costly nightmare.
NB: This is an article from Demand Calendar
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Ambitious projects frequently spiral into chaos. Integrating diverse hotel systems with unique data structures is more complex than expected; requirements change, internal expertise is limited, and costs escalate quickly. Teams often spend significant time and resources without gaining actionable insights from unified hotel data. A key mistake is starting risky internal projects when effective hotel-specific solutions already exist. A more innovative approach is to adopt industry-specific technology designed to address hotel data challenges from the beginning.
The Harsh Realities of Building Your Own (or Living in Generic BI Land)
While a perfectly tailored internal system or a flexible setup crafted in Power BI or Tableau sounds appealing, the practical realities paint a far less rosy picture. The journey of building and maintaining your own hotel tech stack, or heavily customizing generic tools for specific hotel needs, is fraught with challenges that often undermine the very goals you set out to achieve.
Distraction from Your Core Business
Fundamentally, hotels excel at hospitality, not software engineering. Embarking on major internal tech builds or complex BI configurations inevitably diverts significant resources – time, money, and focus – away from enhancing the guest experience and driving commercial growth. Critically, it misallocates your valuable talent. Highly skilled Revenue Managers or Analysts end up acting as data engineers, wrestling with technical issues instead of focusing on strategic initiatives that generate revenue and profit. This internal focus on building and fixing tech fundamentally pulls your organization away from its core mission.
The Never-Ending Cycle of Development, Maintenance & Security
Custom-built solutions, or intricate setups in generic tools, are often inherently fragile and difficult to maintain. They can rely heavily on the individuals who created them, making staff turnover a significant risk. Furthermore, the tech landscape constantly shifts – APIs break, data formats change, and integrations fail. This creates a perpetual maintenance burden, inevitably leading to that system built years ago quickly becoming outdated, unable to keep pace with market evolution, or incorporate new capabilities. These difficulties in keeping up with evolving, industry-specific systems turn what should be a competitive edge into a burden, allowing your competition to gain an advantage.
Compounding these issues are the complex challenges of security and compliance (like GDPR, PCI DSS), which are frequently afterthoughts in custom builds, difficult to retrofit, and leave the hotel dangerously exposed. It’s a resource-intensive and risky cycle inherent to custom builds.
