Most hotel tech companies start by selling to independent hotels. At some point a hotel group shows interest, and the team treats it as a bigger version of the same deal: the same demo, the same proposal, just with more rooms on the quote. That is usually where the deal starts to stall.

Selling to a single hotel and selling to a hotel group are different sales. The product is the same. The buyers, the cycle, the proof and the risk are not.

Who is buying

At an independent hotel, the decision usually sits with one or two people: the owner, the general manager, and sometimes a revenue or front office manager who will use the product daily. They can see the problem, they feel it personally, and they can decide in a single conversation if the fit is obvious.

At a group, the buying committee is wider and less visible. There may be a head of revenue, a head of IT, a regional operations director, finance, and the GMs at each property who will live with the decision. Some of these people never join a call. Many of them can say no without ever being able to say yes.

The first job in a group deal is to find out how the group actually decides. Some decide centrally and roll out. Some approve a shortlist and let properties choose. Management companies often need each owner to agree. I cover these differences in more depth in the piece on independents, chains and management companies, but the practical point is simple: if you do not know the decision model, you do not know who you are selling to.

What they are worried about

An independent hotel is mostly worried about whether the product will work at their property and whether their team will use it. The risk is operational and local.

A group is worried about all of that, multiplied, plus things an independent rarely thinks about. Will this integrate with the PMS and systems used across the portfolio, which may not be the same at every property? Will it pass an IT and data security review? What happens if it fails at five hotels at once? Who supports twenty properties across time zones? Can we get out if it does not work?

The questions are different because the cost of being wrong is different. A GM who picks the wrong tool has a bad season. A regional director who picks the wrong tool for twenty hotels has a career problem.

What proof they need

Independents respond to proof from hotels like theirs: similar size, similar market, similar setup. A reference call with a peer GM often does more than any case study.

Groups need proof at portfolio level. They want to see that you have run across multiple properties, handled a rollout, and kept performance consistent. A single-property case study, however strong, does not answer the question they are asking. This is where a deliberate reference property programme pays off, because it lets you point to a group customer, or at least a multi-property one, rather than a scattered set of independents.

If you have no group customers yet, be honest about it and offer a structured pilot instead. Pretending to have portfolio experience you do not have is the fastest way to lose the deal in the security or operations review.

How the cycle runs

A single-property sale can close in weeks. A group sale often takes months and follows a pattern: an initial conversation, a demo to a central team, a pilot at one or two properties, a review of the pilot, procurement, and then a staged rollout.

The pilot is where most group deals are really won or lost. Treat it as a sale in its own right. Agree what success looks like before it starts, who will judge it, and what happens next if it succeeds. A pilot with no agreed outcome tends to drift, and a drifting pilot quietly becomes a no.

The cycle also runs on the group's calendar, not yours. Budget cycles, openings, acquisitions and peak seasons all shape when a decision can happen. Group deals that are forced to close at quarter end often end up discounted or delayed anyway.

How pricing needs to change

A price list built for single properties can hurt you with groups. Multiply the per-property price by the portfolio and the full rollout looks expensive before anyone has seen results.

Groups expect a portfolio view: a pilot price, a clear path to rollout, volume tiers, and predictable cost for each property added. The pricing model you chose for independents, whether per room, per property or flat, shapes how easy this is, which is why the choice of pricing model matters more than most early teams realise.

Consider a guest messaging vendor

Picture a hypothetical guest messaging vendor with a strong base of independent hotels. A regional group of twelve properties asks for a demo. The team runs its usual demo to the group revenue director, sends a twelve-property quote, and waits.

Weeks pass. It turns out the group's IT lead has concerns about data handling, two properties run a different PMS, and the GMs were never consulted. The quote sits unanswered.

A group-aware approach would have started differently: mapping the decision model in the first call, bringing IT and one GM into the process early, proposing a two-property pilot with agreed success measures, and pricing the rollout as a path rather than a lump sum. Same product, very different sale.

Deciding whether to chase groups

Groups are attractive because one decision can bring many properties. They are also slower, more demanding and more expensive to win. For most early-stage hotel tech companies, independents and small groups are the better place to build references, integrations and support capacity first.

If you are already selling to both and not sure which segment is leaking the most revenue, the 12-point leak audit takes about twenty minutes and gives you a first ranking of where revenue is escaping.

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