The kickoff meeting is the first hour a new hotel customer spends with your onboarding team, and it sets the pace for everything after it. Run it well and the property leaves with a go-live date, named owners and a list of homework. Run it as a friendly introduction and you spend the next six weeks chasing room type lists and OTA logins.

This post gives you a copyable 60-minute agenda for a hotel software kickoff, the pre-work email to send beforehand, the questions to ask, and a recap email to send the same day. It is written for hotel tech vendors: PMS, channel managers, booking engines, revenue and guest messaging tools. Adapt the blocks to your product, but keep the structure.

What leading hotel tech vendors put in the kickoff

You do not have to invent this from scratch. Several vendors publish their onboarding process: Cloudbeds' onboarding guide, Mews on PMS onboarding and Hotelgest's onboarding page. The overlap is instructive.

Three patterns repeat. The kickoff produces a dated go-live target. The hotel names an internal owner. And the vendor collects operational information before configuration starts, not during it.

Before the kickoff: the pre-work email

Send this two to five working days before the meeting. Cloudbeds asks properties to gather property details, room types and occupancy, images, policies, taxes and fees, reservation sources and OTA accounts, and the team members involved in daily operations. Ask for the equivalent for your product.

Subject: Your [Product] kickoff on [date]: three things to bring. Hi [Name], we are looking forward to the kickoff on [date] at [time]. To make the hour count, please have ready: 1) your room types, rates and policies (an export or spreadsheet is fine), 2) logins or contacts for your OTAs, channel manager and payment provider, 3) the name of the person at the hotel who will own this project day to day. Please also invite whoever makes the final call on go-live timing. If you are entering a busy period soon, tell us now and we will plan around it. [Your name]

The 60-minute kickoff agenda

Copy this into your calendar invite. Times run from the start of the call.

Notes on each block

• Why they bought. Read back what the salesperson recorded and ask the hotel to correct it. If the goals in the CRM do not match what the owner says, you have found the gap early. Our post on the sales to onboarding handoff covers what that record should contain.

• How the hotel runs today. Ask about check-in and check-out, night audit and the reports they rely on, pre-arrival emails, group bookings and how payments are collected. These come from Cloudbeds' published kickoff discovery questions, and they work for most hotel software.

• Integrations and data. Decide how existing reservations will move: manual entry, a self-serve import or a paid service. Cloudbeds, for example, offers an optional Reservation Import Service. Agree this now, not on go-live day.

• Plan and dates. Ask "Are you going through a busy season now?" and "What does your availability look like in the coming weeks?", both also on Cloudbeds' list. Book every session before the meeting ends.

• First value and homework. Agree the moment the hotel will feel the product working, such as the first direct booking through the new engine or the first night audit run in the new PMS. Then list homework with names and dates.

Kickoff questions you can paste into your notes

1. Who at the property will own this project day to day, and how many hours a week can they give it?

2. Who else must be trained, and do they work across different shifts or departments?

3. Is this your first time using a [PMS / channel manager / tool like ours]?

4. Which reports do you use every day, and can you send us copies?

5. Which systems must connect to us, and who holds the logins?

6. Are you part of a group, collection or management company with its own IT standards?

7. When is your next busy period, and which weeks are off limits for go-live?

8. What would make you say, a month from now, that this was the right decision?

Who should be in the room

Mews recommends that the hotel appoints its own project manager to connect the vendor's implementation manager with the rest of the team, and notes that sales, accounting, revenue and front office should each be involved in the parts that touch them. For a small property that may be one person. For a larger hotel, invite the GM, the person who will own the project, and the head of the department that will use the product most. Keep the vendor side small: the onboarding lead, plus the account executive for the first ten minutes only.

Small properties with no IT staff need a lighter version: fewer attendees, shorter sessions and more work done for them. See onboarding properties with no IT staff for that variant.

The same-day recap email

Subject: [Hotel] and [Product]: kickoff recap and next steps. Thanks for today. Here is what we agreed. Goals: [goal 1], [goal 2]. Project owners: [hotel name, role] and [vendor name, role]. Go-live target: [date]. Sessions: [date 1, topic], [date 2, topic], [date 3, topic]. First-value milestone: [milestone] by [date]. Your homework: [task, owner, due date]. Our homework: [task, owner, due date]. Blackout dates: [dates]. Reply to this email if anything is wrong; otherwise we will see you on [date].

Why the kickoff deserves this much structure

Onboarding is where hotel software revenue is either secured or put at risk. Rocketlane's State of Customer Onboarding 2025, based on more than 950 onboarding and implementation professionals, found 54.5% of companies were looking to price onboarding as a premium service, over 40% said customers request or prefer personalised onboarding, and 34% had re-onboarded customers to introduce advanced features or ensure long-term value. A hotel that pays for onboarding, or is asked to pay for implementation, expects the first hour to be organised.

The kickoff also anchors your activation metric. If the first-value milestone is written down on day one, you can measure time to first value against it and spot slow accounts before they become churn risks. For hotel groups, run one kickoff for the group and a shorter one per property, as covered in our multi-property rollout guide. Onboarding is the activate stage of the hotel tech GTM system, and the kickoff is its first step.

If customers sign but go quiet after the kickoff, the free GTM leak audit will show whether the leak is in onboarding or earlier in the sale.

Frequently Asked Questions