Ask a hotel tech founder how deals were won in 2019 and the answer is usually a list of places: the trade show stand, the brand conference, the reseller who knew every general manager in the region. Ask the same question about 2026 and the answer is a list of screens: a review profile, an integration marketplace, a chatbot answer the vendor never saw. The buyer is the same person with the same budget pressures. The route to the shortlist has moved almost completely.

This timeline walks through how hotel software buying changed stage by stage, from 2019 to 2026, using published research at each point. Some of the data is hotel-specific and some covers B2B software buyers in general, and each section says which. Each stage left behind a habit that still shapes your next deal.

Stage 1, 2019: the rep-led, event-led market

In 2019 a salesperson found the property, booked a demo and walked the general manager through features. Discovery happened at events, through brand vendor lists and through word of mouth. Review sites were one input among many.

What hotels wanted to buy was already shifting. In a survey of 789 hotel tech buyers published by Hotel Tech Report in March 2019, revenue-related software accounted for 30% of near-term demand across the top 12 categories, and 14.9% of respondents named the property management system as the top software under evaluation. The same survey noted that cloud-based property systems made up the lion's share of demand for operations software. Hoteliers wanted the cloud; the buying process around it was still old-fashioned.

The habit it left behind: vendors built sales teams around demos and events, and many still measure pipeline that way even though buyers stopped behaving that way years ago.

Stage 2, 2020 to 2021: the pandemic reset

The pandemic broke the event-led model overnight. Trade shows stopped, properties closed, and the people who used to evaluate software were often gone. Hospitality Investor's 2021 review of hotel tech reported that around 40% of hotel IT personnel were laid off, which changed leadership and decision-making in the technology space. The same review noted that only 10% of the world's hotels had moved their IT systems to the cloud, and pointed to the Accor and Mews partnership, which made cloud PMS accessible to Accor's portfolio of more than 5,200 hotels, as a sign of what was coming.

With no stands to visit, hoteliers moved their research online. During the three-month 2021 HotelTechAwards period, Hotel Tech Report says 318,466 hoteliers visited the site and contributed 10,227 verified new product reviews.

The habit it left behind: buyers learned they could build a shortlist alone, and leaner hotel teams meant fewer people with time for long evaluations.

Stage 3, 2022 to 2023: integrations become the test

As properties reopened with fewer staff, the question shifted from "what does it do" to "what does it connect to". The same Hospitality Investor review described open APIs as central to hotel tech and named integration hubs such as Impala and Hapi that connect legacy systems to newer software. Buyers began to ask for a vendor's integration list before they asked for a demo.

This is the stage where a weak integration story started to lose deals quietly. A hotel that runs a specific PMS filters out every tool that does not connect to it, often before any vendor knows the property was looking. We cover why in why integrations sell hotel software more than features do.

The habit it left behind: marketplaces and integration directories became a discovery channel in their own right.

Stage 4, 2024: chains move to the cloud and reviews reach scale

In January 2024 Oracle announced that Marriott International had selected OPERA Cloud PMS and Sales and Event Management for its Luxury, Premium, Select Service and Midscale properties. When a company the size of Marriott commits to a cloud platform, every vendor that sells into those hotels has to work with that platform's integration rules.

The same year, review data reached a size that made it hard to ignore. In May 2024 Hotel Tech Report announced it had passed 50,000 verified product reviews and described its HTScore ranking as weighting ratings, review volume, review recency, partner integrations, customer support and company reach. A vendor's position on that list was now shaped by its customers' behaviour as much as by its own marketing.

The habit it left behind: review volume and recency became a ranking input, not just social proof. See why hotel tech review sites decide deals before you hear about them.

Stage 5, 2025: buyers prefer to skip the rep

By 2025 the general B2B research caught up with what hotel tech teams were seeing. A Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, conducted in August and September 2024 and published in June 2025, found that 61% preferred an overall rep-free buying experience. It also found that 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, and 69% reported inconsistencies between information on a vendor's website and what sellers told them.

That last figure matters: when a hotelier reads one price model on your website and hears another on the call, trust drops before the deal reaches your CRM.

The habit it left behind: the website, pricing page and review profile now do the first two meetings' work.

Stage 6, 2026: AI builds the first shortlist

The latest change is the fastest. G2's April 2026 research, based on a March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers, found that 51% now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% in April 2025. It also found that 69% chose a different vendor than planned because of chatbot guidance, and that 45% named citations from software review sites as the most confidence-inspiring signal in an AI answer.

Review sites did not lose ground to AI. In G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, review sites (38%) became the top source shaping which vendors make a buyer's shortlist, just ahead of AI chatbots (37%). Finance involvement in software decisions jumped from 31% to 46% in a single year.

Sellers still matter, but later. A Gartner survey of 646 B2B buyers published in March 2026 found 67% prefer a rep-free experience and 45% used AI during a recent purchase. In a May 2026 release Gartner added that 69% of buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales reps. The rep has moved from the first conversation to the one where the buyer checks what the machine told them. Our analysis of how hotels get their AI shows the same pattern from the hotel side.

The timeline at a glance

What did not change

Two things held steady across all six stages. First, hoteliers still trust other hoteliers more than vendors; every stage simply gave peer opinion a bigger stage, from conference corridors to review profiles to the sources an AI cites. Our post on why hoteliers trust peers more than vendors covers that in depth. Second, the final decision still involves people outside the first conversation: owners, finance and, for groups, a management company.

What to do with this timeline

• Audit what a buyer sees before they talk to you. Search your category in two chatbots and on the main review sites, and note whether you appear and what is said.

• Make your public information consistent. Pricing logic, integrations and implementation time should read the same on the website, in reviews and on the call.

• Treat review volume and recency as a pipeline input. Put a steady review request into onboarding, not a once-a-year campaign.

• Move your best sellers to validation. Train them to confirm, correct and add context to what buyers already believe.

• Rebuild your funnel stages. If your CRM still starts at "demo booked", it starts after most of the decision.

These changes sit inside a wider go-to-market system, which our hotel tech GTM strategy guide lays out end to end, and they connect to how hoteliers actually buy software today.

If you suspect deals are being lost before your team ever hears about them, a free revenue leak audit will show where buyers are dropping you from the shortlist.

Frequently Asked Questions