I was talking to someone in the industry last week about the state of hospitality technology, and he asked what I actually thought. This is roughly what I told him.
How the independents get squeezed
The big players are squeezing the independents out of this market. They do it in two ways. They buy the products that are winning, or they have the money to build their own version and bundle it in. DoorDash bought Deliveroo and SevenRooms. Uber made an offer for Delivery Hero in July. American Express has owned Resy since 2019, bought Tock, and in June agreed to buy TheFork from Tripadvisor. It isn’t new in travel either. When Sabre tried to buy Farelogix, the US Department of Justice called it a dominant firm’s attempt to eliminate a disruptive competitor. A US court let it through, but the UK competition regulator blocked it. A startup with something better struggles to compete with a product or feature that ships free inside a contract the operator has already signed.
It’s also harder to break into this market than it looks from outside. A reservation system won’t displace an incumbent unless it talks to the POS and the CRM. A POS won’t win a group without integrating with the reservation system, the CRM, and often stock and procurement too. You can ship a minimum viable product in weeks now with AI, but an MVP isn’t a whole product. An operator won’t switch until it fits with everything else they run. AI has made building integrations faster, but the slow part is usually the commercial negotiation, and the company you’re negotiating with is often also a competitor. As more of those systems end up under the same roof, that only gets harder. Unless the new product does something nobody else can, adoption stays low and the money runs out first. So most independents sell, or slowly run out of road.
Much of what the big players are buying is data. Every booking, order and visit tells a platform something about a guest: how often they eat out, what they spend, where they go next. Spread across thousands of venues and dozens of vendors, it’s fragmented. Pull it into one place and it becomes the most valuable thing the acquirer owns, and AI only makes it worth more. When American Express agreed to buy TheFork, I wrote that the booking revenue was a rounding error at that size, and the dining data wasn’t. When DoorDash brought SevenRooms and Deliveroo together, the operator got the booking and the platform got the guest.
I’m not a neutral observer. I led ResDiary through two acquisitions, by Reef in 2022 and Access Group in 2023. Access had already bought DesignMyNight, so I’ve seen consolidation from the acquirer’s side too. I understand why founders take the offer. Selling software to hospitality is hard, capital is scarce, and AI has just raised the cost of staying competitive. Consolidation can bring investment and stability that some products would never have had on their own.
Who pays for it
But I think operators end up paying for it, usually at the next renewal.
With fewer credible alternatives, the vendor holds the leverage at every renewal. Prices don’t usually go up in one go. It’s new fees, bundles you didn’t ask for, AI tiers, and terms that make leaving harder. In the US, OpenTable has added a 2% service fee on deposits, no-show charges and prepaid experiences. It has also changed its terms to require restaurants to make it their system of record, and a Seattle business group asked the state attorney general to look at whether that restricts competition.
For the extreme version, look outside our industry. After Broadcom bought VMware, the cloud company Civo surveyed 1,000 current and former VMware customers. Almost half said they were paying more than before the acquisition for the same features. Of that group, about half had seen their costs double, and 15% had seen them rise tenfold. Those customers had built their operations around the product and couldn’t easily leave.
Operators are in exactly that position with reservations, POS and guest data. Your team is trained on the system, your guests live in it, and nobody wants to switch mid-season. Every acquirer knows what that is worth.
My view is that a market with only two or three big players starts to behave like a monopoly. When operators have nowhere else to go, those players can squeeze pricing, however good their platforms are.
What operators can do
Keep your data portable, because it’s the thing everyone else wants. Independent tools like Tenzo and Tahola-AI from Ometis pull sales, labour, stock and bookings out of each system into one place you control, so no single vendor holds the whole picture. Agree exit terms before you sign, not at renewal. Be careful with long auto-renewing contracts. And look beyond the big names. There’s a lot of good work coming out of smaller companies right now, and HTE was full of it. When an independent product is better, back it, because that choice won’t survive if nobody does.
Consolidation isn’t going to stop. How much choice operators have left when it settles is partly up to them.