4 days, 6,100+ hospitality professionals, and 400+ exhibitors.
The innovation, energy, and conversations at HITEC 2026 in San Antonio did not disappoint. Over a busy week, our team connected with operators, GMs, IT leaders, and a ton of fellow vendors, and we came home buzzing about where the industry is going.
Here's what people were talking about, what they're eager to solve, and where things are heading next.
The Hot Topics that Came up Again and Again
A few themes dominated our conversations:
- AI, but make it useful. AI was in every conversation. Some of it was the eye roll kind, because it's everywhere right now. But a lot of it was serious. Operators weren't asking "should we be using AI," they were asking "how does this actually make my team more efficient," and not just in operations. People are thinking about AI across sales, guest engagement, and reporting too.
- CapEx and preventative maintenance. This came up over and over. More and more operators are looking to invest in CapEx and preventative maintenance tools to protect their assets, get ahead of surprise costs, and keep tighter control of their budgets. The interest in leveraging CapEx the right way was hard to miss, and it is only growing.
- Best of breed is winning. All in one sounds appealing on paper, and we heard some interest in it. But the more telling theme was the pushback. PMS providers are rolling out their own housekeeping and ops modules, and operators kept telling us those bolt on features just are not cutting it.
What people actually want is the best tool in each category working together, all integrated cleanly. A jack of all trades is a master of none, and more and more teams would rather connect best in class tools than settle for one platform that claims to do everything. - Accountability and visibility. A lot of the conversation came back to the fundamentals: SSO, device policies for room attendants, GM scoring tied to metrics, and clearer reporting. The throughline is an industry wide push toward cleaner control of the operation, with real visibility across every property and the data to hold teams to a consistent standard.
The Pain Points Operators are Feeling
When people talked about what's frustrating them, the same handful of problems surfaced:
- No visibility across a portfolio. Multi property leaders want to see what's happening everywhere, not log into five different systems to piece it together.
- Too much manual labor. PMS integrations that actually reduce manual work were a top ask. People are tired of double entry and workarounds.
- No real handle on time. Operators want to track how long tasks actually take and how long rooms actually take to clean, instead of guessing.
- Accountability gaps. Holding team members to a standard is hard without the data to back it up.
- Tools that overpromise. A recurring frustration: software that doesn't deliver on what was sold. Trust is earned, and operators have long memories.
Where the Industry is Headed
Reading between the lines of every conversation, here's where the bets seem to be going:
- Toward simpler, practical, connected solutions. Operators are done with tool sprawl. They want systems that work together and actually deliver results, not a shelf full of point solutions.
- Toward predictive intelligence. The interest wasn't just in AI as a buzzword. People leaned in on predictive capabilities, machine learning, and real data on tasks, rooms, and issues.
- Toward guest facing operations. Guest messaging, guest engagement, and even concierge functionality kept coming up as things people want folded into the same operational platform.
- Toward open, connected ecosystems. Integration is no longer a nice to have. Operators are choosing tools based on how well they play with the rest of their stack, and they expect those partnerships to be real and well supported, not a logo on a slide. The vendors leaning into open integration are the ones winning trust.
On the Hotel Operations front
The conversations our team kept having all week came back to the same things. People wanted to run leaner without dropping the ball on guest experience, and that pulled the talk toward housekeeping efficiency, getting the tools they already use to actually work together, and cutting out the manual busywork that eats up everyone's day.
When those conversations turned to what we do, the curiosity was consistent. Our team fielded a lot of questions about how Optii fits into a current setup, how it helps teams move faster (especially in housekeeping), how it connects with PMS systems, and what our AI agent and real time dashboards look like day to day. The practical, data driven side is where people leaned in hardest.
The biggest takeaway from the whole show: operational efficiency is top of mind right now, and teams are actively shopping for tools that help them run better and prove the results.
Didn't get the chance to meet us at HITEC or want to continue the conversation? Grab a meeting here and we'll show you what Optii can do for your operation.
