Roughly ten years ago, Micros Fidelio seemed to have lost the connection a little with their clients and all of a sudden protel exploded; I would have put my money on them becoming the leader in the PMS race (for what that’s worth).
All of a sudden there was an explosion of new little innovative PMS Companies, many run by former Micros employees (Having an idea and a Beta product is one thing, actually being able to look after large numbers of clients is quite another).
Micros / Oracle (amongst others) had the practice as legacy system of controlling which third-party suppliers could collaborate or not, as well as how much money Hotels would have to pay to use their own data.
Then Planet bought protel, what a crying shame, obviously other motives, the DNA was gone.
Everybody is shouting “We are in a new Era, open API’s. Anybody can work with anybody now”. Oooops, well, things seem to have come full circle, Oracle seems to have done an awful lot of things much better, obviously with a PMS DNA like no others, they are charging forwards and now they are Oracle you have got to have the feeling they are a hefty competitor for anybody playing (around) in this field.
Interestingly, Mews, portrayed as the open player for all, now starts to buy Companies with ancillary products like an RMS, Atomize. Does this inherently mean the door to other RMS’s will be gently or brutally closed, who knows?
Lighthouse, born as OTAINSIGHT, which was an exquisitely simple valuable product all Hotels needed and could understand, has become Lighthouse, perhaps something Data Scientists with a PHD could really use and profit from. On top of that, why not add an RMS, so Lighthouse has done exactly that.
Now if we are honest which independent Hotel can do anything with all these levels of complexity?
Far from everybody embracing AI, sacking all their employees I believe we will also have a hefty “backlash”. Now that everybody should become an LLM expert, knock out a quick program before lunch to sort a mini problem that may arise after lunch…the writing is on the wall. You simply cannot run any type of business if everybody all of a sudden becomes the “development team”, I foresee absolutely colossal fuck-ups coming very soon, so the future is bright, in fact getting even brighter for software companies because undoing “self-invented” AI shortcuts by people who are simply not qualified even to decide whether it is worthwhile in the bigger picture has invented a new role for software Companies, “damage control“ division, I love it.
