I’ve spent five years building secure web, mobile, and API systems. The work has been good. But I’ve been looking for an industry where engineering craft can make a visible difference to people in the real world not just to metrics on a dashboard.
Hospitality technology is running on infrastructure built in the 1990s and 2000s. The guest experience most hotels deliver through technology is genuinely poor not because the industry doesn’t care, but because the switching costs are high and the talent pool that understands both hotel operations and modern engineering is small.
The opportunity
The segment of the market that is switching independent hotels, new builds, aparthotels is growing. The APIs are getting better. Cloud-native PMS systems are gaining ground. And the bar for what counts as “modern” is low enough that someone with solid engineering fundamentals and genuine curiosity about the domain can make a real contribution quickly.
Why now
Three things have converged to make this moment interesting:
The API layer is improving. Five years ago, building on top of a PMS meant dealing with SOAP APIs, XML message formats, and on-premise systems. Today, Mews, Apaleo, and Cloudbeds all have REST APIs with webhook support and reasonable documentation. The integration surface is still complex, but it’s no longer hostile.
Guest expectations have shifted. The pandemic accelerated contactless technology adoption in hospitality. Guests who had never used a digital key in 2019 were using them in 2021 because they had to. That adoption is sticky. Hotels that want to meet guest expectations now need the technology infrastructure to support it.
The talent gap is real. Most hospitality technology companies are not full of engineers who came from high-growth tech environments. The craft API design, mobile architecture, security patterns is underrepresented. That’s an opportunity for someone who brings it.
The bet
I’m not walking in pretending to know how a hotel runs. I have no hotel clients. I have engineering depth, a set of deliberate demos, and a genuine curiosity about the domain. I’m betting that combination is useful to the right company and that the right company is out there.
That’s the bet.