Most AI advice tells operators to go and buy something. The best first move is the opposite.
Plenty of operators know they should be doing something about AI. They’re just not sure where to start. The honest answer is to begin with what you already have, before you spend a penny on new tools or new vendors. It’s worth mapping your current stack against a simple framework first. My experience from 15 years building reservation technology is that the same gaps tend to show up in the same places.
Data foundation. AI is only as good as the data it works with. The first question is whether your guest data is clean, consolidated, and accessible. Most groups have guest information spread across a reservation system, a POS, a marketing platform, and often a spreadsheet somewhere. If your data is siloed, AI tools will underperform regardless of how good they are. This is the part operators skip first, and the part that counts for the most.
Vendor AI roadmaps. Your existing vendors are your first AI layer. Before buying anything new, understand what AI capability is already in your current contracts, or coming, and whether you’re actually using it. Plenty of operators are paying for features they haven’t turned on.
Discovery and booking channels. You already know AI is becoming a real channel for how guests find and book you. The audit question is narrower: map where your bookings actually come from today, and ask each provider where they stand on AI channels. You can’t measure a shift you haven’t baselined.
Process readiness. This is the one operators overlook, and the one I’d flag hardest. AI amplifies whatever process it sits on top of. If a workflow already works, automating it makes it faster and cheaper. If it’s broken, automating it just means you’re doing the wrong thing faster, at scale, with less visibility into why. So before you put AI anywhere near a process, the honest question is whether that process actually works today without it. If it doesn’t, fix that first. AI won’t rescue a struggling operation. It’ll expose it.
Team readiness. Technology is only part of the picture. Does your management team have enough understanding of AI to evaluate vendor claims, spot AI-washing, and make informed decisions? This is the gap that shows up most consistently. It’s the most fixable of the five, but only once the process underneath it is sound.
None of this requires a big budget to begin. It requires a half-day with the right people in the room asking the right questions. Plenty of operators can make a real start on this themselves, and I’d encourage you to. Where I come in is when you want it done properly: a structured, vendor-independent assessment across all of it, with a prioritised plan at the end rather than a longer to-do list. That’s what the readiness audit is. But the first move is yours, and it’s cheaper and more useful than most people expect.