IT & AI in Hospitality

Book one — IT in Hospitality

The systems behind every good stay — explained for the people who run them

Every smooth check-in, every poolside cocktail charged to the right room, every payment that simply works is several systems co-operating in the background. When any of them fails, the guest notices immediately — even though they never knew it was there. IT in Hospitality is a plain-English, vendor-neutral guide to those systems: what they are, how they fit together, where they fail, and what ordinary discipline prevents.

Written from fifteen years of designing and building technology for hotels and resorts — from five-villa hideaways to two-hundred-room properties and small chains — it names no products and sells none. Every recommendation is scaled honestly by property size, so a six-room guesthouse takes what applies to a six-room guesthouse, and a resort takes the rest.

Inside IT in Hospitality

Eight parts, from foundations to what's coming next

1. Foundations — why hospitality IT is different
2. Understanding today's guest
3. Hardware, front of house to comms room
4. Software — PMS, POS, channels, CRM
5. Infrastructure & architecture
6. Compliance & security
7. Managing IT as a business function
8. Looking ahead — AI and emerging trends

Plus twelve appendices of working material — checklists, sample budgets, a disaster recovery plan, decision trees, vendor scorecards, and extended case studies — and a full index. The templates are also free to download below, as ready-to-use spreadsheets.

From the pages of IT in Hospitality

A few excerpts

“That’s the paradox at the heart of hospitality IT. It works best when nobody notices it’s working at all. A well-run technology stack doesn’t announce itself; it simply lets the front desk check guests in without delay, lets the kitchen ring in orders without a queue forming, and lets a general manager see occupancy and revenue figures without having to chase five different systems for the numbers. The moment IT becomes visible — a frozen check-in screen, a Wi-Fi network guests complain about, a card reader that won’t connect — it has usually already cost the business money, reputation, or both.”

Chapter 1 — Why IT Matters in Hospitality

“A vendor advertising ‘99.9% uptime’ sounds impressive, but that still allows for roughly nine hours of downtime a year — worth asking about, and worth asking what happens operationally during that window. Push vendors on this during procurement: ask not just for the uptime percentage, but for a description of what actually happens when the system does go down.”

Chapter 3 — IT Concepts Every Owner and Manager Should Know

“When a 70-room hotel’s operations manager left for a competitor, his departure checklist covered keys, uniform, and payroll. It did not cover the PMS, because the front desk shared one login, which he knew as well as anyone still employed there. Eight months later, a suspicious pattern of a rival quoting against the hotel’s unpublished corporate rates prompted a vendor support ticket, which in turn led to the access logs… Nothing about the intrusion was sophisticated: a valid password, used remotely, by someone entitled to it right up until the day he wasn’t.”

From the field — Chapter 32, Security Fundamentals

Book two — AI in Hospitality

Nearly every hotel now uses AI — almost none can point to what it's earned them

That gap, between adoption and value, is where AI in Hospitality lives. It's a practical, evidence-based guide to what the technology actually does, where it pays for itself, and where it can quietly cost a great deal more than the licence fee — written for people tired of vendor hype in one direction and blanket scepticism in the other.

This isn't a book about chasing the future; it's about sequencing the present: which foundations have to be in place before a chatbot is worth deploying, which of your existing systems have quietly run AI for years, and which of the loudest trends — agentic booking, humanoid robots, emotion-reading sensors — are still mostly marketing. Every claim is sourced and dated, and the trade-offs are honest: chatbots that invented policies in their hotel's name sit alongside the places AI genuinely earns its keep. It's the companion volume to IT in Hospitality.

• What "AI" actually means — machine learning, language models, and agents, untangled
• Where the proven returns are — revenue management, predictive maintenance, staff scheduling, fraud detection, food-waste reduction
• Where the risk sits — chatbot liability, deepfake fraud, and regulation across the EU, UK, US, and Asia-Pacific
• How AI is reshaping discovery and booking — when travellers ask a machine where to stay
• A full toolkit — vendor question sheets, guarded prompts, a one-page AI policy template, a pilot evaluation framework, and a roadmap by property size

Free downloads

Every template and checklist from IT in Hospitality, as working spreadsheets

Twenty-one ready-to-use Excel workbooks — no macros, no sign-up. The budget workbooks and the vendor scorecard calculate their own totals, so you can put your own numbers in and watch the arithmetic take care of itself. Purchasers may adapt all of them freely for use within their own property or group.

Every file below lives in /book/downloads/ — direct, free, and unchanged. No sign-up.

The author

Mark Townsend

Mark Townsend has spent fifteen years designing, building, and running technology for hotels and resorts across South East Asia and beyond — from five-villa resorts to two-hundred-room hotels and small hotel chains. He is the founder of Resort Manager Solutions and the developer of Resort Manager, a property management system in continuous production use for fifteen years. He trained as an Engineer in the Royal Navy; the family pub and restaurant taught him what technology looks like when the people using it are mid-service and the room is full.

IT in Hospitality on Amazon →
AI in Hospitality on Amazon →