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…
Previously we imagined a general manager running a 200-room hotel on a 4% net margin. She gave a tech solution entrepreneur forty-five minutes, then sent him away with “let me think about it.” Her hesitation was structural — the economics of her business made deferral the rational choice, year after year. We followed a single…
If you’ve spent any time inside the hospitality industry, or adjacent to it watching from the technology side, you’ve probably developed a working theory about where innovation comes from. Outsiders, most people say. Founders who looked at the industry from a distance and saw problems that operators, buried in operations, couldn’t see clearly enough to…
Imagine a general manager at a 200-room hotel. She has been running this property for eleven years. She knows its rhythms — the winter conference season, the summer leisure surge, the shoulder months that require a different kind of discipline. She has watched every major technology wave move through the industry: the migration to online…
What most people experience as a trip is, in reality, the coordinated output of dozens of independent technology systems that were mostly built separately, by different companies, for different purposes, and asked to work together after the fact. Pick a trip. Any trip. A long weekend, a conference, a family vacation. It doesn’t matter where…
Walt Disney World employs roughly 80,000 people, making it the largest single-site employer in the United States and one of the largest concentrated workforces anywhere in the world. It operates through a dedicated district that manages its roads, power and water utilities, transportation systems, information management, and emergency services. It coordinates with county governments, federal…
Central Florida sits at the intersection of two enormous economies that rarely talk to each other. One is tourism. Visit Orlando puts the regional hospitality economy at roughly $100 billion annually — hotels, restaurants, attractions, conventions, and the vast operational infrastructure that makes all of it run. Tens of millions of visitors a year. One…
