New Opportunities for the Small Hoteliers

The Industry and the Problem(s) for Small Hotels

The hotel industry is every man for himself.

The ecosystem has a lot of stakeholders, both old and new: hotels (large chains, mid-size groups, and independents), guests, tour operators, online travel agencies (OTAs like Booking.com or Expedia.com), hotel software companies covering all kinds of functions (PMS, RMS, CRS, GDS, POS, you name it), and more.

A lack of vision, collective and otherwise, limited the big chains' ability to build their own technology infrastructure, especially when it came to discovery. That gap opened the door for outsiders to develop that technology and gain an almost incomprehensible amount of power over the industry. Today, around 50% of hotel bookings worldwide go through OTAs. No question, these platforms brought real opportunities — they made life easier for guests by putting endless options in one place, and they gave small hotels a global window they never had before. But it's not free, of course. OTAs charge an average commission of 20%, which means a 10-room hotel with an average rate of $120 and 65% annual occupancy is handing over roughly $20,000+ a year in commissions alone, and that number scales proportionally with every room you add.

The big chains eventually woke up to the threat. They pushed hard on direct booking strategies through loyalty programs, rewarding guests who came straight to them. They overhauled their user experience with e-commerce thinking. And with their volume, they had real negotiating leverage with the OTAs — pulling back inventory, pushing back on guest-funded discounts, and pouring money into SEO and Google Ads.

The ones who couldn't keep up were the small guys. No financial muscle to go head-to-head with OTAs, no structure to build loyalty programs or invest in search positioning or Google advertising — they got swallowed whole. And the OTAs showed no mercy, charging the same commission rate to a 500-room hotel in New York as to a 12-room family property in Oaxaca.

Meanwhile, hotel management software kept getting better and better. Every part of running a hotel — purchasing, staffing, task management, guest relations, reservations, events, food and beverage, accounting — all of it moved into software, whether built in-house, outsourced, or purchased as a service.

The "All in One, Everything is Possible with AI" Phase

And now, with data everywhere and technology adoption at record levels, we've entered a new phase. The next step is connecting all the systems running inside a hotel so information flows freely, processes move faster, less staff is needed to manage the tech, and business opportunities get surfaced constantly — through more personalized guest offers, smarter pricing, and tighter cost controls. The dream is hotel AI assistants that handle whole workflows on their own, autonomously.

Everyone is racing toward that future. The ones with a head start are those who invested early in modern infrastructure — cloud native, AI native — and understood from the beginning why integrations matter. They're moving fast, rewriting code, testing, and deploying quickly. Others are facing a harder reckoning, having to rethink both their technology and their business model. Offering a single function won't cut it anymore. Being listed in a PMS marketplace won't be enough. Deeper partnerships will be required — sharing clients, sharing data, becoming part of something bigger.

All of this is happening while thousands of hotels around the world are still checking in millions of guests who, let's not forget, should always be the center of attention.

The Reality of the Smallest Hoteliers

Hotels are operating across all kinds of styles and models, where classic and traditional collide with modern — and sometimes "modern" gets misread as an excuse for indifference, to the detriment of the guest experience. And through all of it, the reality of the smallest hoteliers gets almost completely ignored. Their operations are genuinely different from mid-size or large hotels. There's no department head to squeeze every last drop of value out of each specialized software tool, and no budget to hire for those tools, let alone build them in-house.

We talked about what OTAs have cost and given to the small end of the industry. The same conversation applies to hotel management technology. There are solutions today that would have been unthinkable ten years ago — a PMS with a channel manager, for starters — but it's impossible to ignore that these tools weren't built with the small hotelier in mind. The disconnect has been expensive, not just because the software adds little real value, but because of the feeling of being dismissed by the big hospitality tech companies. "Too small." "ADR too low." "Not enough rooms."

That's Changing

The new wave of technology brings enormous opportunities for small hoteliers. At Amiqa, we know this problem because we are active hoteliers. We understand this industry at every level, and we've made a deliberate choice to focus on the small ones, designing from their perspective. Because yes, small hoteliers run their businesses from the trenches: they're in the kitchen, in the rooms, with the guests, managing everything at the same time.

We're proposing a new framework built from our own experience and from conversations with dozens of small hoteliers. As a starting point, we keep coming back to this: