A waitress remembered our order. No system prompted her.

I’m just back home after spending a few nights in La Caleta last week, a small village on the Costa Adeje coast that’s turned itself into a bit of a food destination.

We went to the same brunch spot twice, two days apart, and on the second visit the waitress reeled off our full order before we’d opened the menus. No app prompted her. No CRM flagged a returning guest. She just remembered, and it made us feel like regulars somewhere we’d been twice.

The same trip, the most expensive place we went to had good food and the worst service of the lot. They came to take the food order before anyone had asked about drinks, it drifted through the meal, and vanished entirely when we wanted to pay. Two other places were good until the same final stretch, where you end up catching eyes across the room trying to settle the bill.

I spend most of my time now thinking about technology, and in particular, AI in hospitality, and this is the part that tends to get lost. Every vendor is selling guest intelligence and personalisation, remembering who your guests are and what they like. That brunch waitress was doing all of it, by hand, for nothing. And the venue most likely to have bought the systems still couldn’t sequence an order or close a table.

AI amplifies what is already there. It doesn’t install a service instinct that was never present. Point a guest data platform at a place that can’t get the basics right and you get the basics done wrong, faster. The brunch spot isn’t behind on technology. It’s the thing the technology is trying to copy.