The new hospitality stack: How technology, payments, and guest experience are converging
Co-authored by The Anything Group and Cendyn
One Guest, Five Records
A couple books a suite for their anniversary. They add a spa treatment by phone a week later. They pay the deposit on one card and settle the folio on another. They mention the occasion to the front desk on arrival, and again to the server at dinner.
By checkout, five systems hold five fragments of that stay. None of them holds the story. Nothing malfunctioned, that is the system working exactly as designed.
Hospitality did not choose this. It accumulated, one reasonable purchase at a time, over twenty years. A PMS here. A booking engine there. A payment processor selected by finance, a CRM selected by marketing, a messaging tool selected by operations. Every decision was defensible on its own day. Stacked together, they produced an operating environment in which the guest is one person and the technology sees five different people.
That was survivable while a guest’s expectations were set by other hotels. It stopped being survivable the moment those expectations were set by everything else on their phone where checkout is two taps, where the service already knows them, and where every handoff a hotel exposes reads as friction the guest has been trained to find unacceptable.
The numbers bear out how common the fragmented state still is. Despite years of investment in hotel technology, only 11% of operators report a fully integrated technology stack, while more than a quarter run their properties on seven or more platforms. The operational burden is measurable: 27% spend more than eleven hours a week consolidating and reconciling data across systems, and 91% still rely on manual reporting inside otherwise automated workflows. The predictable result is a confidence gap: only 15% of operators express strong confidence in the accuracy and timeliness of their own operational data.
Add sustained margin pressure, payment flows that now run beneath the entire journey rather than sitting at the end of it, and AI models that are only as good as the data underneath them, and the silos stop being an inconvenience. They become the constraint.
Our two organizations arrived at that conclusion from opposite ends of the building.
The Anything Group was founded in 2021 by Rich Tuckwell, after more than two decades inside hospitality and hospitality technology watching operators assemble their capability from a dozen unconnected providers and then quietly absorb the cost of stitching those providers together. TAG’s answer was structural: put brand, content, booking, payments, and analytics under one roof, so the guest-facing experience and the infrastructure beneath it are designed by people in the same conversation.
Cendyn’s premise starts from the data. A hotel’s PMS, booking engine, loyalty platform, and sales tools each hold a piece of the same guest, and until those pieces resolve into a single trusted profile, marketing, revenue, and sales teams are working from different versions of the truth at the same time.
One roof. One profile. The same conviction, approached from the experience side and the data side which is why this piece exists.
The Gap Between Guest Expectations and Hotel Reality
1. Booking and Distribution: The Unit of Sale Is the Trip, Not the Room
Legacy booking infrastructure was built to sell a room for a set of dates. That is not how guests think about travel. They think of trips a stay, a dinner, a treatment, a round, a second property for the last two nights, dates that shift while they plan.
ALBIE, TAG’s booking engine, was built against that gap. Its cart lets a guest reserve multiple properties within a group, plus activities and ancillaries, across different dates, inside a single
reservation and it does so on the hotel’s own website rather than as another OTA. That distinction matters commercially: trip-level basket economics have historically belonged to third-party channels, and this puts them in the direct channel, where the margin and the guest relationship both stay with the hotel.
The intelligence layer is where the revenue usually hides. Dates unavailable, so suggest adjacent ones. Property sold out, so surface a sister property near the original search. Room type gone, so trigger an automated upgrade rather than an empty result. Nothing available at all, so notify the guest the moment it opens. Every one of those is a demand a conventional engine simply drops.
Distribution is the other half of the same pillar, and the one that scales. Availability, rates, and inventory have to stay truthful in real time across the brand site, the GDS, metasearch, and paid channels, because a rate that disagrees with itself across two surfaces costs more in trust than it ever earns in yield. Cendyn’s CRS, booking engine, and rate parity tooling are built for exactly that problem across independents, boutiques, and groups alike, not only at the top of the market.
The commercial case is well documented. Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort, a single North Miami Beach property, rebuilt its reservations infrastructure on Cendyn’s CRS and booking engine and shifted roughly 14,000 room nights from OTA to direct approximately $2.1 million in avoided commission costs while lifting direct bookings by an average of 3,000 room nights year over year. Beach Terrace, a 48-room family-owned hotel, increased total bookings by 58% and website revenue by 52% year over year on the same foundation. Different scales, same mechanism: when the booking and distribution layer is coherent, demand that was leaking to intermediaries comes back to the hotel.
2. Payment Flows: The Transaction That Disappears
Across the wider economy, the mark of a mature payment experience is that the customer stops noticing it. Hospitality is moving the same way from payment as two discrete events at check-in and check-out, to payment as a continuous layer running beneath the whole stay: deposit, activity, on-property spend, incidentals, settlement.
RIKER, TAG’s payment infrastructure platform, is built for that model for hospitality and experience-driven businesses where transaction volume is high, service environments are live, and reliability is not negotiable.
But the strategic argument for treating payments as part of the stack is not really about processing, and it is worth being precise about the distinction. Payment credentials belong in the payment layer and should stay there. What the rest of the stack needs is not the payment, it is the transaction.
Folio activity is the most honest record a property holds. It reflects what a guest actually valued rather than what they told a survey: the treatment added at 9pm, the upgrade taken without being asked, the F&B spend that says more about the relationship than a loyalty tier does.
When that transaction record reaches the guest profile, it becomes something a marketing team can act on total spend by guest, and segmentation that reflects real behavior rather than declared preference. A campaign aimed at guests who have spent more than $500 on spa is only possible if the spa spend and the guest identity live in the same place.
Cendyn’s CRM surfaces folio transactions against the guest profile and calculates total guest spend from them, without storing payments data. That is the correct boundary, and it is the one the industry should be designing toward: payments handled where payments belong, transaction signals flowing to where decisions get made.
3. Guest Experience: Personalization Is a Data Problem Wearing a Marketing Costume
Personalization has been hospitality’s stated ambition for a decade, and its most reliable disappointment. The intent was never wrong. The foundation was. A profile assembled from a booking record, a transaction record, and a loyalty record that disagree with each other produces personalization that is generic at best and wrong at worst and being wrong is more damaging than being silent.
This is Cendyn’s core territory: unifying guest data from the PMS, booking engine, loyalty program, and ancillary systems spa, golf, F&B into one profile, holding B2C and B2B on the same foundation so that marketing, revenue, and sales work from a single view of the same guest.
What that foundation makes possible is concrete. A Spanish hotel group used Cendyn CRM to unify guest data from its PMS and reservation systems into a 360-degree view, then ran personalized lifecycle campaigns off its pre-stay, post-stay, OTA win-back, and reactivation with campaigns connected to loyalty and revenue attribution. The result was €3.2 million in campaign revenue across 3,583 bookings. The unified profile was not deliverable. It was the precondition.
On the marketing side of the same problem, TAG built Tagalitics to answer a narrower version of it: campaign performance and spend scattered across Google, Meta, Yelp, and Instagram, consolidated into one AI-driven view so decisions are made on evidence rather than platform-by-platform anecdote.
AI runs through all three pillars, but it is worth being precise about how. AI applied to fragmented data does not produce insight; it produces confident nonsense at speed. Applied to a unified stack, it does the work operators actually need: forecasting demand, surfacing the next best offer, reconciling anomalies, handling routine guest communication so staff spend their time on the parts of hospitality that cannot be automated. The dependency runs one way. There is no AI strategy that is not first a data strategy.
There is also a newer reason this matters. Travelers increasingly arrive with a shortlist assembled by an AI assistant rather than a search results page. Which properties make that shortlist depends on the volume, freshness, and specificity of what the wider web says about them which turns post-stay experience and review generation from a reputation exercise into a distribution one.
What this means for hoteliers
Convergence is a direction of travel, not a plan. Three steps turn it into one.
Audit for handoffs, not features. Most stack audits inventory what each system does. The more revealing exercise is to map every point where data passes between systems and every point where it doesn’t, and a person bridges the gap manually. Those handoffs are where revenue leaks, where the guest experience breaks, and where labor cost quietly accrues. If 27% of operators are losing eleven hours a week to reconciliation, the first question is not which system to buy. It is how many hours your own team is spending in the gaps.
Assess integration readiness before capability. The best-in-class system that doesn’t integrate will underperform the adequate system that does. Questions worth putting to any vendor: What does your API actually expose, versus what is only available inside your interface? Who owns the guest data, and can we export it in full? What is the real implementation timeline, including our side of the work? Which of our existing systems have you integrated with in production and can we speak to that customer?
Sequence by impact, not by renewal date. Most hotels sequence technology investment around whichever contract expires next. A better sequence starts with the layer that unlocks the most downstream value, usually the one holding guest identity and builds outward from there. Score each candidate on revenue impact and guest satisfaction impact, then start where both are high and integration risk is low. That is rarely the most exciting project on the list. It is almost always the right first one.
The Stack as a Brand Experience
There is a habit in this industry of filing technology under operations plumbing that matters only when it fails.
That framing is now a competitive liability. Every system a guest touches is saying something about the brand, whether or not anyone designed it to. A booking flow that understands they are planning a trip rather than reserving a room. A payment that never interrupts them. A message that arrives already knowing who they are and what they came for. These are brand moments as surely as the lobby, the uniform, or the tone of the welcome and unlike those, they scale.
The brands that win the next decade of hospitality will be the ones that stop treating the stack as infrastructure and start designing it as experience: connected underneath, emotive on the surface, and built around a guest the systems finally recognize as one person.
That is where our two organizations meet and why this stopped being a technology conversation some time ago.
About The Anything Group
The Anything Group (TAG) is a global brand, marketing, and technology company that helps businesses drive growth through integrated strategy, creative services, and proprietary technology.
Founded in 2021, TAG brings marketing, content production, web development, booking, payments, and analytics together in one connected ecosystem, helping brands simplify operations and deliver better customer experiences.
With roots in hospitality, TAG serves more than 300 brands across hospitality, healthcare, education, retail, luxury, fashion, and media, supported by a global team.
Press contact
For requests and further information contact:
[email protected] | +1 305 564 9718
