Moderating at Hospitality Tech Expo 2026
Why some hotel technology performs and some just gets worked around
We were delighted to put together a panel for Hospitality Tech Expo last month, bringing together our client InnPractice with two of its partners: Dean Crews of InnPractice, Michelle Daniel of OSS-Systems and Dan Barnes of Flourish Hospitality. The session was Beyond the Tech Stack: Turning Systems into Hotel Performance, thirty minutes in Keynote Theatre 3, and I had the pleasure of moderating.
Facilitating this kind of conversation is a large part of what we do at Halo, whether that is a conference panel, a leadership workshop or an episode of our own podcast. The work is mostly invisible if it goes well. Get the question right, get the preparation right, and three specialists will do something on stage that none of them would have done alone.
Setting a question worth thirty minutes
The question we built the session around was maybe a little uncomfortable for a technology expo. Hotels are not short of technology. The show floor proves that. So why do some investments change how a hotel performs, while others become expensive systems the team works around?
That question has no single owner, which is the point. An operator sees one part of it, a systems specialist sees another, and the person responsible for how teams actually behave sees a third. Our job was to make those three views meet rather than run in parallel, and to protect the room from three monologues.
We ran a preparation call a fortnight out. Not to script anything, because scripted panels are flat, but so each panellist knew the territory and I knew where their best material was. Panels fail when the speakers meet the questions for the first time on stage.
Three things the room took away
Start in the building, not the brochure. I asked Michelle how a hotel can tell whether it needs a new system, better integration, or simply better use of what it already has.
"I have to sit down and say, can I take a walk of your building. That's the first thing I ever do." Michelle Daniel, OSS-Systems
Cabling specified years ago, in-room hardware that cannot meet a current brand standard, and the mobile signal that almost every new system quietly assumes. Most hotels are also carrying more systems than they realise, chosen at different times by different people, each for a sensible reason, with nobody responsible for the result.
Treat resistance as information. When adoption stalls, the reflex is to call it resistance to change. Dan's argument is that the resistance tells you how the change was introduced. A chef who has used the same ordering system for fifteen years is not being difficult, and training completion proves nothing about confidence.
"It's not a fear of the technology itself. There's that fear of looking stupid by not being able to use the system correctly." Dan Barnes, Flourish Hospitality
Adoption is owned by the people using the system. Dean was clear that accountability does not sit with IT, whose job is to make a system work and perform, but with operations. If a housekeeping team finds a system difficult, they will work around it, and the investment is lost before it starts.
"The adoption of it is only successful by the people who are using it, not necessarily the people who are making the decisions to buy it." Dean Crews, InnPractice
Where we kept pulling the thread
Our interest in this subject sits in a specific place: the distance between what a hotel promises and what a guest actually experiences.
That is where the panel landed too. Nobody argued for a frictionless hotel. Remove the friction that wastes everyone's time, certainly, but be careful with the moments that are doing the work. Dean described an over-automated arrival as taking away the friction and creating tension instead, which is the neatest summary of the risk I have heard. Technology that hands a manager five hours a week can turn into better service or simply into more tasks, and what decides it is not the software. It is the operating model, and what you tell your team the system is for.
The guest never experiences your PMS, your workflow platform or your training programme. They experience whether you remembered them, resolved the problem and made them feel welcome.
Thank you to Dean, Michelle and Dan for the quality of the conversation, and to the team at Hospitality Tech Expo for the platform. It was good to spend two days with the industry in one building, and better still to meet properly a number of people we had only ever dealt with on a screen.
Conversations like this sit close to the work we do every day at Halo: launches and rebrands, from positioning through to launch-day delivery; guest experience, service culture and CRM, turning the guest journey, loyalty and data into direct revenue and lasting relationships; and fractional marketing director support, senior marketing leadership embedded in your business, scaled to what you need.
Almost everything the panel raised lands in one of those three places: what you promise, how your team delivers it, and whether the systems behind it are helping or getting in the way. If that is a conversation worth having about your own property, get in touch.
And if you are planning a panel and need a moderator or a panellist, or you think you would make a good guest on The Halo Effect podcast, we would love to hear from you.
