By Lissa Marten, CEO, Visual Matrix
I came into hospitality as a software operator, not a hotelier. That distinction has shaped my first 90 days as CEO of Visual Matrix. I’ve spent my career building vertical software businesses, but hospitality has its own rhythms, pressures, language, and most of all, its own culture.
I’ve spent these first months listening. I’ve talked with owners and operators, spent time with our customers and team, and gone into hotels to watch people work. I still have a lot to learn, but a few things have already changed how I think about building technology for this industry.
Hospitality runs on relationships
One of my favorite surprises has been how relationship-driven this industry is. People pick up the phone. They text each other. Problems get solved because someone knows the person who can help.
Coming from software, where we can over-index on making everything self-service, that’s refreshing. Hospitality is a people business, and its technology shouldn’t engineer the human element out. It should give people more time and better information to do what they already do best. The measure of good hotel technology isn’t how sophisticated it is. It’s whether it makes someone’s job easier.
You can’t understand hotel technology from a conference room
This may be my most important lesson so far. Watching a hotel operate gives you a completely different view of software. A general manager isn’t sitting in front of a dashboard all day. A housekeeper isn’t working from a laptop. A front desk agent might be checking in a guest, taking a call, and solving another problem, all at once. Technology has to work in that reality. Every unnecessary click matters, and every new workflow competes for an employee’s attention.
It’s also given me a much greater appreciation for what it means to change a hotel’s core technology. Changing a PMS touches nearly every part of the operation, so if we’re asking an operator to change something that fundamental, the value on the other side has to justify it.
Hotels don’t have a data problem. They have a connection problem.
Hotels generate an extraordinary amount of information: reservations, occupancy, housekeeping, maintenance, guest feedback, labor. The challenge was never another report. It’s connecting what hotels already know.
Everyone looks at the same hotel through a different lens. A GM wants to catch today’s problem before it becomes tonight’s complaint. A regional leader wants to know which properties need help. An owner wants to see how operations translate into financial performance.
The next generation of hotel technology has to get the right information to the right person at the right moment. That means moving beyond reporting and toward intelligence: knowing what’s changing right now matters more than knowing what happened last month.
This is where AI gets interesting
There’s no shortage of AI conversation right now, but hospitality doesn’t need AI for AI’s sake. What excites me is using it to connect dots humans don’t have the time, or the visibility, to connect themselves.
Imagine catching an emerging issue by connecting housekeeping activity, occupancy, and guest feedback automatically, or helping an owner spot which properties need attention without digging through five systems and a dozen reports. That’s when AI stops being a feature and starts being useful. The goal isn’t another tool to manage. It’s making the tools they already have easier to understand and act on.
The more sophisticated technology gets, the more valuable simplicity becomes
That might sound counterintuitive from someone who’s spent her career in software, but simplicity is about to become one of the biggest competitive advantages in hotel technology. Hotels will keep adopting technology and generating more data. AI will unlock new capabilities. What won’t change is that the hotelier’s day won’t get any less busy. ur job is to absorb that complexity, not hand it to the customer.
That’s part of why I’ve gotten so hooked on this industry. It has genuinely interesting technology problems but solving them well means understanding the humans on the other side of the screen.
My first 90 days have reinforced something I believed before I got here and understand a lot better now. The best vertical software doesn’t just know the technology. It knows the work. In hospitality, that means getting close enough to the people doing it to understand what actually matters, then building technology that lets them spend less time on software and more time being great hoteliers.
The next 90 days and beyond
That’s what has made my first 90 days in hospitality so energizing. I came into this industry knowing software. I’m quickly learning that building great hospitality software requires something more: understanding the people, relationships and daily realities that make a hotel work.
I still have a lot to learn, and the closer I get to this industry, the more convinced I am that the future of hotel technology won’t be defined by who builds the most features or generates the most data. It will be defined by who can make that technology feel simpler, more connected and more useful to the people running hotels every day.
That’s the kind of software company I want us to continue to be: software-led, hospitality-obsessed, and always learning from the people we’re here to serve.
Hospitality Software Built for the Way Hotels Actually Operate
More than 3,000 properties in 40+ countries worldwide choose the Visual Matrix hospitality operating platform to optimize hotel operations and serve guests from reservation to return stay. Our system includes a game-changing PMS supported by powerful features and key integrations that are easy to use, including revenue management with automated rate tiering, a fully integrated channel manager, and a mobile app for tracking performance on the go. The Visual Matrix MOP housekeeping and maintenance tool automates routine tasks and streamlines communication to keep the front desk, housekeeping, and maintenance staff focused on guests It also includes a built-in panic button as an Emergency Safety Device (ESD) to help keep hotel staff from harm. For more information, visit visualmatrix.com.