What Hospitality Cities Get Wrong
The Director of Operations for a mid-sized restaurant group in Central Florida keeps a running list on her phone — not tasks, but problems. Technology problems. Specifically the gaps between systems, the workarounds that have been in place long enough that the staff has stopped thinking of them as workarounds and started thinking of them as the actual process. Her counterpart, the person whose title is “Head of IT Systems” but whose actual job covers considerably more than that phrase suggests, has been keeping track of the same problems with timestamps attached, a record of how long the distance between knowing something is broken and being able to do anything about it can stretch.
Their group runs over a dozen and a half locations across Central Florida — multiple concepts, several hundred employees on any given shift, enough operational complexity that the management team functions more like a small corporate structure than a family business. They have a loyalty program that doesn’t communicate with their reservation platform, a labor scheduling tool that predates their current point-of-sale configuration and has never been properly reconciled with it, and a guest feedback process that begins each week with good intentions and ends most weeks in a shared spreadsheet that three people update with varying degrees of consistency.
They know what these gaps cost them — they feel it in service inconsistencies, in the labor inefficiencies that compound across a busy weekend, in the guest who mentions at checkout that she said the same thing six months ago and nothing seemed to change.
Founders are building solutions that address most of what’s on that list. The problem is that finding the right fit, evaluating it with real confidence, and implementing it without risking a bad quarter on an unproven integration is itself a substantial undertaking — one that requires time and attention that the Director of Operations and the head of systems have already committed elsewhere, to the multiple locations that are open tonight and need to run well.
I have been thinking about this kind of team as I try to understand a pattern that appears consistently across hospitality markets and has, I think, been hiding in plain sight.
New York City generates $79 billion in tourism economic impact and still sustains one of the most productive innovation ecosystems in the world, largely because hospitality is one consequential sector among many in a $1.35 trillion economy — the startup community there doesn’t depend on hospitality to set its terms.
Las Vegas has no such diversification. Gaming and hospitality are the organizing principle of that economy, which makes it genuinely striking that StartUpNV, the region’s most active startup accelerator, regularly has to correct the assumption that they fund gaming and hospitality companies. The most fundable startups emerging from Las Vegas are in artificial intelligence and enterprise software — categories that could be located anywhere.
The ecosystem grew by looking past the city’s dominant industry, not because that industry is unimportant, but because dominant industries in hospitality cities don’t reliably generate the structural conditions that produce technology founders. This pattern holds wherever hospitality is the economy rather than a part of it, and Orlando is no exception.
Running a restaurant group or a hotel portfolio in a market like this one requires physical presence, continuity, and a disciplined focus on protecting margin that leaves almost no room for experiments with uncertain timelines — and that structural reality shapes not just what operators can do, but what the region’s innovation infrastructure produces and what it leaves unaddressed.
The service culture that accumulates inside hospitality organizations here is one of the most sophisticated in any industry anywhere: the attentiveness to guest experience, the operational judgment developed across thousands of interactions, the institutional knowledge of what a room or a meal or an event needs to feel right. UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management has spent decades studying and cultivating exactly that culture, working to understand where the gap lies between what the industry knows about serving guests and what its technology infrastructure is actually equipped to deliver in support of that service.
The restaurant group team we imagined — with the loyalty platform that can’t talk to their reservation system, the feedback process that can’t tell them whether last month’s service problem recurred this month — lives inside that gap every day. The knowledge is deep and real and almost entirely embedded in people rather than systems, which means it moves out of organizations when those people move on and starts over with whoever arrives next. The professional structure of hospitality has never organized itself around the possibility that building a company is something an operator might do with what they know, and so it mostly doesn’t happen.
That gap has no obvious public remedy, and Orlando is not unusual in that regard. Orange County collected nearly $400 million in Tourist Development Tax revenue in 2025 — a record, driven partly by Epic Universe’s arrival and its ripple effect across the region’s hotels and restaurants, including the ten locations the director of operations runs. That money is doing genuine and necessary work: it funds the marketing infrastructure that makes visitors arrive in the first place, the convention capacity that sustains the business travel calendar, the venue investments that keep the region competitive against other major markets.
The marketing engine that fills Orlando’s hotels and restaurants is not self-sustaining, and the operators who benefit from it understand that clearly.
But tourist development taxes are designed to generate visitor activity — that’s what they’re built for, and it’s the right thing to build them for. The innovation infrastructure that would help operators translate their domain knowledge into better tools and better businesses falls entirely outside what any such fund was ever designed to address. This isn’t a gap unique to Orlando. It’s a gap that exists in every hospitality city, and it reflects something more fundamental than a policy choice: no one has yet built the mechanism that fills it.
Then there are the two behemoths in the room, the ones that most visitors associate with Orlando before they associate it with anything else.
An Oxford Economics study commissioned by Disney measured Walt Disney World’s annual economic impact across Florida at $40 billion in fiscal year 2022. Universal’s theme parks reported nearly $11 billion in revenue in 2025, their strongest year on record. Both organizations’ profits ultimately flow to parent companies headquartered in Burbank and Philadelphia, which is the ordinary arithmetic of how multinationals work.
What matters more for this argument is what their scale demonstrates locally. Both operate technology and innovation infrastructure that almost no other hospitality organization can approach: internal engineering teams, data operations, design studios working continuously against real guest environments at a volume that generates learning unavailable to anyone smaller.
They know what’s broken because they have the organizational capacity to find it, measure it, and build toward fixing it. The director of operations and her head of systems know what’s broken because they live inside it every Tuesday afternoon. The difference between those two situations is not a gap in knowledge or seriousness or care. It is a gap in infrastructure, and it is a gap that nobody has yet built a deliberate solution to for operators at their scale.
What doesn’t appear in that accounting at all — and what may be the most underappreciated fact about this region — is that Central Florida is also home to a Modeling, Simulation, and Training industry representing more than $11 billion in annual economic activity, $6 billion in government contracts, with over 150 companies developing the tools that teach complex systems to human beings before those human beings encounter them in the real world.
The technology those companies build — high-fidelity environment simulation, behavioral training systems, real-time performance feedback — has spent decades flowing between the defense sector and the theme park industry, each borrowing techniques from the other. Whether any of it has something to offer the hospitality innovation problem is a question this series will take up shortly. But it is worth noting here, at the opening of this argument, that the technology exists, that the people who build it are already in the region, and that they mostly don’t think of themselves as adjacent to hospitality at all.
Our intrepid restaurant group team will be back at it next week, working through the same list, and the week after that. The solutions they need exist somewhere in the market. The people building those solutions are trying to reach operators like them. What’s missing is the environment where those two things find each other reliably and early, before the sales cycle and the implementation risk turn a solvable problem into a gamble. Whether that environment could be built here — whether this region has the specific and somewhat unlikely combination of ingredients it would require — is where this series turns next, and for the first time in these pages, the answer is not obviously no.
Scott Hill is the Founder and Executive Director of The Proxenia Foundation and the founder of the Proxenia Accelerator programs in Central Florida.
