Most hotel tech vendors have a sorting problem, not a lead problem. A 12-room guesthouse looking for a free channel manager, a revenue manager at a 300-room resort on Opera, and a student writing a thesis all arrive through the same demo form. If they share one queue, the resort waits while sales talks to the student.

This post gives you a named, reusable model for sorting hotel tech inbound: the STAY Score. It scores each lead on three hotel-specific fit criteria and one intent criterion, then turns the result into bands with an action and response time for each.

Why generic lead scoring fails in hotel tech

Generic templates score employee count and annual revenue, which say little about a hotel. What decides a hotel software deal is how many rooms or units the property sells, what it runs today, who signs, and whether a brand or management company sets the standards.

Hotel tech vendors already know this, because their demo forms ask for it. Cloudbeds' demo form asks which best describes the business (hotel, hostel, vacation rental, technology partner, consultant or other), whether the property is part of a group or independent, how many rooms it has, its country and the person's job role, with options from Owner/C-Suite to Front Desk/Operations, IT and Revenue Management. Newhotel's demo page says: "Tell us how many rooms you have and which systems you use today." Visual Matrix promises to walk through its PMS "using your room count, your brand, and your current workflow." Hotelogix's readiness checklist for door-lock and digital key projects lists number of rooms, number of properties, current PMS and current door-lock provider.

The STAY Score in one line

Size and segment, Tech stack, Authority, Yes signals. The first three are fit: could this property become a good customer? The fourth is intent: is this person trying to buy now? HubSpot's lead scoring tool separates fit scores, built from property values such as job title or company size, from engagement scores, built from actions such as website visits, CTA clicks and form submissions. Its combined scores label records A1 to C3, where the letter is fit and the number is engagement, so a low-fit but highly engaged contact shows as C1. The STAY Score uses the same logic with hotel-specific inputs.

The scoring table

Fit is worth up to 60 points and intent up to 40. The weights below are a starting template, not a benchmark. Set them against your ICP; our post on choosing your ICP between independents, chains and management companies helps.

S: size and segment

Property type and room count are the two fields that most change deal value and fit. Score the range your product serves best, not simply more rooms. A booking engine built for small independents may lose money on a 500-room convention hotel. If pricing is part of the question, the Hotel Software Pricing Index shows how vendors publish per room and per property models.

T: tech stack

The PMS a property runs today tells you whether you can integrate, whether you are a replacement or an add-on, and how long implementation will take. Ask for it on the form as a dropdown of the ten or so systems you see most, plus "other" and "not sure". Our guide to the software stack an independent hotel really runs lists what to expect.

A: authority

Two questions: who is this person, and who decides at this property? A front desk manager can be a strong champion, but at a branded hotel the system may be set above property level. Forrester's B2B Revenue Waterfall argues for moving beyond individual marketing-qualified leads towards prioritising buying-group opportunities, and hotel deals fit that pattern: owner, GM, revenue manager and sometimes a management company. Score the person, then add points when a second person from the same property engages. For chain and group deals, check our checklist for selling to hotel chains before you score them like independents.

Y: yes signals

Intent signals decay. HubSpot lets you set score decay at intervals of 1, 3, 6 or 12 months, so a pricing page visit from last spring stops counting. Weight actions by how close they sit to a buying decision. Add negative points too. Salesforce's lead scoring guide lists neglecting negative lead scoring as a common mistake, with examples such as a generic email address or a country where you do not offer services.

Score bands and what each one triggers

Each band gets an owner and a response target.

The thresholds are arbitrary until you test them. Salesforce's method is a good check: calculate your baseline lead-to-customer conversion rate, then the close rate for each attribute, and give more points to attributes that close above the baseline.

Why the A1 response target is one hour

Scoring is wasted if the best leads still wait. In "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Harvard Business Review, March 2011), the authors sent test web leads to 2,241 US companies: 37% responded within an hour, 23% never responded, and the average response among those that replied within 30 days was 42 hours. In a separate dataset of 1.25 million leads, firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that tried an hour later. Socianet's trace of the figures notes that "qualify" there means a real conversation with a decision-maker, not a closed sale.

More recent tests show the problem has not gone away. RevenueHero requested demos on 1,000 B2B websites and received only 365 responses, with an average response time of 1 day, 5 hours and 17 minutes.

How to roll out the STAY Score in two weeks

1. Add the missing fields to your demo form: property type, rooms or units, current PMS, role, and independent or part of a group.

2. Build the fit and intent scores in your CRM as separate properties, then a combined band. If your CRM cannot do this, our post on choosing a CRM for a hotel tech company covers what to look for.

3. Score the last 90 days of inbound by hand and check the bands with sales.

4. Set routing rules and response targets per band, and put response time per band on your weekly dashboard alongside your other leading indicators of pipeline.

5. After a quarter, compare close rates by band and by attribute against your baseline and reweight.

Two common objections. First, longer forms reduce submissions. That is true, but ask for the fields that change routing and leave the rest for discovery. Your pricing page can also pre-qualify buyers before they ever reach the form. Second, small teams think they do not need scoring. They need it most, because one founder answering every enquiry is the slowest queue of all.

Lead scoring sits in the convert stage of the hotel tech GTM system, and it only works when segment and ICP decisions upstream are clear.

If good hotel leads are reaching your form but not your calendar, a free GTM leak audit will show where they are slipping.

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