The demo went well. The front office manager loved it, the general manager asked good questions, and everyone agreed it would save the team hours each week. Then the deal went quiet for six weeks, and when it came back it came back with a question nobody in the demo would have asked: who is responsible for the data if the contract ends? Somebody else had been reading the proposal.

Hotel software purchases have more approvers than most vendors expect, and most of them never attend a demo. They sit behind the general manager, they review the paperwork rather than the product, and they can stop a deal without ever speaking to you. Here are the seven I see most often, roughly in order of how often they cause a stall.

1. The financial controller

In most hotels above a certain size, the controller or the hotel accountant reviews every recurring cost. They check it against the budget the owner approved months ago, they read the payment terms, and they ask whether the new system will post correctly into the accounting software. They rarely say no outright. They ask for a breakdown, a different billing date or a confirmation from the vendor, and each request adds a fortnight. A controller who has seen the full cost early, including setup and staff time, is much less likely to slow things down.

2. The owner

The owner is the obvious approver and still the one most often left out until the end. In an owner-operated independent, they may be the general manager. In a managed hotel, they are a person or a fund that sees the property through monthly reports and approves anything that changes the cost base. They do not want the features. They want to know what it costs, when it pays back and who is accountable. How to write a business case a hotel owner will approve sets out the one page they actually read.

3. The asset manager

Larger owners employ asset managers to watch performance across a portfolio on their behalf. The asset manager compares this property with others they oversee, questions any cost that the comparable hotels do not carry, and often has a view on which systems the portfolio should standardise on. If you are selling into a hotel owned by an investment group, assume an asset manager exists until you are told otherwise.

4. The management company

When a hotel is run by a management company, the general manager is the management company's employee, not the owner's. Regional directors, corporate revenue teams and corporate IT may all have a say, especially if the company already has a preferred system it uses across its hotels. A deal that looks like a single property is sometimes a portfolio decision in disguise. The mechanics of that are covered in the difference between selling to a hotel and selling to a hotel group.

5. The brand

A franchised hotel answers to its brand on anything that touches reservations, distribution, loyalty or guest data. Many brands maintain a list of certified or approved vendors, and a property that wants something outside the list has to ask for an exception. That request goes to a team you will never meet, on a timeline nobody at the property controls. It is the most common reason a deal that was verbally agreed at the property never reaches a contract.

6. The outsourced IT provider

Small and mid-sized hotels rarely have an IT department. They have a contractor who looks after the network, the servers and the workstations, and who will be asked whether your product is safe to install. They worry about access, passwords, data location and who gets the call when it breaks. They are usually reasonable, but they are cautious, and an unanswered security question from them can sit unread for weeks.

7. The department that loses time

Every new system takes time from someone during the changeover, and that someone is often not the person who asked for it. If the product saves the revenue manager hours but adds a step for reservations or the night audit, the head of that department will object, sometimes loudly and sometimes by quietly not using it. They do not sign anything, but the general manager listens to them.

How to find them before the deal stalls

None of these people are hidden on purpose. The champion simply does not think of them, because they are thinking about the product. Asking a few plain questions in the first or second call brings most of them into view.

• Who signed the last software contract here, and who else reviewed it?

• Is the hotel owned and operated by the same company, or is there a management company or a brand involved?

• Who looks after your IT, and will they need to review anything?

• Does your controller or accountant need to see the costs before this goes to the owner?

• Which departments will change how they work if this goes ahead?

Write the answers down against the opportunity. Then make sure each approver gets what they need in their own format: a cost breakdown for the controller, a payback figure for the owner, a security summary for IT and a changeover plan for the department that loses time. This is the same pattern described in how hoteliers actually buy software, where the decision is spread across people who each see a different part of it.

The takeaway

A hotel software deal is not decided in the demo. It is decided by the controller, the owner, the asset manager, the management company, the brand, the IT contractor and the department that loses time, most of whom you will never meet. Find them in the first two calls, give each one the document they need, and the six-week silence after a good demo becomes much rarer.

If good demos regularly turn into stalled deals, the 12-point leak audit takes about twenty minutes and shows whether the leak is in your sales process or somewhere earlier in the funnel.

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