Can a hotel modernize its technology without turning hospitality into another automated transaction? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Mark Hollyhead, Chief Transformation Officer at Aven Hospitality, about the systems behind thousands of hotels and the operational decisions that affect both employees and guests. Mark brings experience from British Airways, Heathrow Airport, Expedia, and travel management before joining the company carved out from Sabre with support from TPG.
His argument begins with a distinction that many technology programs miss. Guests rarely remember the property management system, API, or data pipeline behind a stay. They remember whether somebody knew their name, solved a problem, explained when the room would be ready, or prevented them from repeating information after a long journey. Technology matters because it can remove the administrative work surrounding those moments. Mark wants frontline employees to have time to be hospitable, especially when a situation requires empathy or judgment. That means looking beyond the promise of convenience and asking whether a system gives staff better information, reduces repeated work, and leaves them free to focus on the person in front of them.
Mark shares an example from a hotel he visits regularly in Dallas. Different employees recognized a few preferences from previous stays, including his connection with Seattle, a request for two bottles of water, and a preference for a corner room. None of those details required the hotel to know everything about him. They gave the employee enough context to make the interaction feel personal.
The example also illustrates the boundary between thoughtful personalization and an experience that feels intrusive. Mark's test is whether the customer would be surprised by what the company knows. If the guest begins wondering how the information was obtained, trust has already weakened. Hotels hold identity, payment, preference, and location data, including the place where somebody is sleeping, so that responsibility deserves careful treatment. For technology investment, Mark begins with friction rather than a product category. He looks for employees rekeying information, building spreadsheets because systems do not communicate, switching among screens, and developing improvised techniques to complete ordinary work. Across one property, five unnecessary minutes may appear minor. Across thousands of employees and repeated tasks, those minutes become expensive.
This approach changes how transformation is measured. Mark says another login, dashboard, or screen usually indicates that software has been added without changing the underlying work. He asks what has disappeared after a release. Fewer clicks, calls, handoffs, and repeated explanations provide clearer evidence than the launch itself.
Hotels also depend on a large network of systems covering reservations, property management, payments, distribution, loyalty, revenue management, customer relationships, and housekeeping. When definitions differ across those systems, employees become the integration layer. Data quality problems then appear at the exact moment a guest expects a simple answer. Mark believes the arrival of agentic commerce will make trusted and consistent information even more important. Travelers who have spent decades filling out search forms may increasingly describe what they need through a conversation. The AI agent will expect accurate room attributes, availability, rates, preferences, and policies from connected sources. Conflicting answers will damage confidence quickly.
The episode also challenges the familiar debate between digital and human service. Mark argues that people do not wake up choosing one or the other. They want an easy experience suited to the circumstances. A traveler arriving after a normal flight may prefer to go directly to the room. A traveler stranded in a snowstorm is unlikely to appreciate a chatbot repeating that it understands their frustration.
His operating principle is to automate predictable work and make it simple. When a situation becomes ambiguous, emotional, or unusual, a person should be able to step in with the context already available. The handoff matters as much as the automation because the employee should not force the guest to repeat the entire story. This has implications for frontline adoption. Mark rejects the assumption that resistance means employees dislike change. People often dislike bad change, especially when a new system makes the job harder and the response is a lengthy training session explaining why it should feel better. Aven involves frontline staff earlier so their knowledge can influence workflows before technology is introduced.
AI can also help prioritize work by showing employees the next action that deserves attention. That does not eliminate human judgment. It can give staff the information and authority required to resolve the most important problem without searching through several systems while an increasingly frustrated guest waits.
The opportunity is a hospitality operation where technology works quietly, reliable information travels with the guest, and employees have greater capacity to create memorable moments. The risk is adding automation to disconnected processes, collecting personal information without a clear purpose, or mistaking another launch for an improved experience.
Where would removing five minutes of friction create the greatest difference for your employees and customers? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts.
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[00:00:26] Can hospitality technology remove friction without removing the human moments that guests remember? Well, today I'm delighted to be speaking with Mark Hollyhead, Chief Transformation Officer at Aven Hospitality.
[00:00:47] We're going to talk about the systems that operate behind thousands of hotels and the choices that determine whether technology supports staff or adds another screen or delights customers or frustrates them and adds friction. Mark will explain today why he begins with repeated work, re-keyed information, disconnected spreadsheets,
[00:01:10] and the five unnecessary minutes that could become expensive across an entire global portfolio. And we'll also discuss how trusted guest profiles can support thoughtful personalization without getting creepy and why automation should make predictable tasks easy. And when emotional or unusual situations will always require a person with that complete context at hand.
[00:01:38] And Mark will also share a refreshingly ruthless test for transformation. What disappeared after that new system arrived? If it was clicks, calls, logins, and confusion remain, the business could have installed software without improving the experience for anyone involved. This is where thoughtful transformation needs to start earning its keep. But enough scene setting for me.
[00:02:06] Let me introduce you to Mark right now. So thank you for joining me on the show today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Thank you, Neil. Thank you for having me. I'm Mark Hollyhead. I'm the Chief Transformation Officer here at Avon Hospitality. We carved the business out with support from TPG as the investors, private equity, last year from Sabre. And we're sort of 12 months into our journey.
[00:02:35] And we provide technology that sits behind 37,000 hotels, everything from the world's largest hotel groups to some of the most fantastic boutique hotels across the world. My role specifically is I look after product, engineering, service delivery. But most of my job is looking at what hospitality needs from that sort of intersection of technology and humans.
[00:03:03] And I think we're a really interesting point because I come into this role with a background in having been through a number of these paradigms. I was part of Expedia for a long time, building out the Agencia TMC business, which is sort of stealing the model from the traditional TMCs and moving more towards the consumerization of the enterprise. And then even further back, I was involved in the transformation of British Airways to being online.
[00:03:31] I ran Heathrow Airport on the passenger services businesses for four years, opening Terminal 5 into what was this sort of hybrid of online, offline, delivering a truly fantastic service through the airport. So I come into this one in a new era of technology, really looking forward to this opportunity about a year in now. Incredibly cool. I do spend a lot of time at Heathrow for tech conferences and things. And the technology there has really enhanced the experience right across.
[00:04:01] In fact, it's everywhere. And one of the reasons I was excited to get you on the podcast today is every day I explore a different area and get people thinking a little bit differently about areas that they might not associate with technology and how it surrounds them and how it improves both our lives, work and even world very often. And the problem may be with hospitality technology, though, is it often promises convenience, but guests still remember how they were treated.
[00:04:28] So where does technology improve that experience and where can it get in the way? I suspect you've had these kind of conversations many times over the years, but tell me more about your experiences there. Yeah, indeed. I think we all share the joys of the consumer experiences where we can call upon where things promise things, but perhaps they're not as labeled.
[00:04:49] I've got a pretty simple test for technology in hospitality and frankly, more broadly in travel, where we know we're trying to corral a pretty chaotic system. You know, no product is ever the same because of us involved. People involved in the process means everything is unique. So trying to, you know, make things simple.
[00:05:11] I want to make sure technology and the application of technology is giving the people at the front line and those engaged with making it easy for people time to be hospitable, to give, to be at that point that matters. Giving what technology can't and what a human emotion can do at any given point in a journey.
[00:05:33] So, yeah, it's often been said by many that nobody goes home from a great hotel and says, you know what? I really loved that property management system or that API connectivity. They remember something where there was that moment of personalization. Somebody knew my name. Somebody sorted something out when it went wrong. My expectations are managed when the room was ready or when it was going to be ready.
[00:06:02] And they didn't have to explain themselves. Right. We find ourselves, I think, believing technology is brilliant and it does. It makes things in the moment much easier and it should remove the administration surrounding hospitality. But we've got to get back to, I think, removing the friction around the technology process and make sure that any involvement from people is truly adding value to the moment. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:31] And as I said a few moments ago, when I do travel a lot and one of my biggest frustrations or bug bears is you book a hotel, you provide your car details and passport info. Then you arrive after an 11 hour flight and still have to queue up in line and still have to go through the identification theater again. So I'd love to hear a more positive slant. I don't know.
[00:06:52] I don't have to name any names here, but can you share maybe a guest experience that changed how you think about the role of technology, data or even automation in hospitality? What strikes me always with hotels is how often you know that they've got an enormous amount of data about the person in front of them. And I have the experience of staying in hotels pretty regularly. Yeah.
[00:07:49] So for example, they knew I was from Seattle. So there's a reference to the Seattle Seahawks. Next time I checked in there, I don't like American football, but that was, you know, it was good. A good reference point that it was a, it was something that engaged me. I think the second thing was I'd asked for two bottles of water when I checked in the last time. So they gave me two bowls of water. And then the final thing was they gave me the corner room, which again, there's a preference that I told the person at front desk last time.
[00:08:15] You know, it's not, is that using the abundance of data or is that just really cool that they've taken sentiment and applied it to a few touch moments at the hotel to make me feel that they not only know who I am, but they recognize the things that I specifically been proactive about asking for last time. So if you've got the data, being able to just apply those special moments is, is where it feels good to me. And that's not about knowing everything.
[00:08:44] It's not about being creepy. It's not about trying to have every kind, every touch point personalized. It's just making me feel a bit different to the process that you're often going through that we commonly associated with parts of hospitality and travel. Yeah, a hundred percent with you. I have a similar experience with Virgin Atlantic there. They know my preferences. I'm an aisle seat guy. They will also introduce themselves to me and thank me for traveling with them and almost single me out there.
[00:09:11] None of it feels creepy or, or feels above board and makes you feel special, which is why you keep going back. But when you look at, I don't know, operational problems, what is it that creates the clearest business case for introducing technology across a hotel portfolio? I tend to start with, as I mentioned in the previous answer, I tend to start with friction rather than technology.
[00:09:38] You show me, I want to know about the people and the processes that are repeats, they're rekeying information. I want to see where we're building spreadsheets because systems don't work together.
[00:09:53] I want to see where hotel employees are moving and clicking between screens and using this, this almost ninja like approach to their role to navigate this awfulness that my organization is giving me and expecting me to navigate those things. I think they're all evidence of friction in the system that stopped me giving a great service or a great experience to the guest in front of me.
[00:10:18] So friction, I found both in building out experiences with British Airways, with Expedia. If you keep moving towards where is their friction booking system in the airport, in a hotel guest, in setting up inventory and rates for a hotel, that's normally where the money is. And across a portfolio of hotels, small amounts of friction become really big really quickly.
[00:10:46] So the five unnecessary minutes in any one part of the ecosystem may sound small, but the thousands of employees who are trying to give a great service on shift every single day become highly valuable to the guest in feeling great, but also highly valuable to the businesses who are serving the guest.
[00:11:08] I think AI is notably interesting at this point around friction because, you know, we've got used to automating what we know is fairly predictable processes. But, you know, now with AI, I think we can dive even deeper into the ambiguity of something and infer things that allow us to build new aids for our frontline staff and frankly across the whole hospitality industry.
[00:11:35] So I'm never into the idea of how do we, you know, how do we make things faster? I want to make sure the person involved in the task feels that their job is aided by technology so they can always deliver the special moment. And those are wonderfully disruptive ways of approaching hospitality because if you can free people up to deliver things that people remember, that's where the magic really lies.
[00:12:01] And as an ex-IT guy that was raised on that mantra of you can only improve what you measure, I'm curious, how do you measure whether a new system is actually helping staff serve guests rather than adding another screen, a process or that dreaded friction that you mentioned a moment ago? Yeah, I'm pretty ruthless about this. If I'm giving somebody another screen or another login or another dashboard, I know I'm not transforming anything.
[00:12:30] I think I may have just added some software to them. So I want to know what's disappearing, what's not there anymore as a result of a new process. How many clicks have disappeared? How much time has gone? How many calls aren't happening around this thing anymore because you've made things more seamless?
[00:12:51] So I want to know when those things have gone as a measure of you've moved things on rather than just built technology around the current process. I think when I think about releases, which clearly we're trying to do as much as we can to keep the experience more and more upgraded, oftentimes product has been associated with launching things. That's great, but nobody really cares about launching things.
[00:13:18] I think you've got to be paranoid and ruthless about what's changed as a result of a new product upgrade or proposition that's being introduced. And when we look at any hotel anywhere in the world, they all depend on many systems and multiple suppliers. So where do integration and data quality, it's always data quality when talking about technology, but where do these things cause the most practical trouble? What kind of experiences have you had there?
[00:13:45] Well, we spent decades creating an extraordinary amount of technology. And then asking hotel employees to act as integration. Yeah. And again, it's very common across the travel landscape. And I think he's a reason why so many people stay in it because the challenges are fascinating because my day is never the same. But it's also a problem from a technology perspective.
[00:14:11] You know, you've got CRSs, PMSs, payments, distribution, loyalty, CRMs, revenue management systems, housekeeping systems. If you looked at the ecosystem of suppliers who are trying to serve different sort of thin verticals of what's going on, it's obviously a very complex being to deliver what is a relatively simple proposition.
[00:14:32] So if the definitions around simple things like what attributes do rooms have, if those definitions aren't consistent across all the systems, then, you know, you've got a problem. I think AI can help us and the application of AI can get us to better sources of truth and ensure that you're always testing for where you've got what I described as rubbish data.
[00:14:58] But I'm increasingly into how we make sure we architect the data correctly, ensuring that there's good visibility and transparency about the APIs. And, you know, increasingly for us, the priorities are making sure that we're building out a trusted profile.
[00:15:19] Because as we get into the advent of agentic commerce, we know that the training we've had for 25 years of filling out templates towards booking travel or a hotel is now moving more and more into a conversation. So I know I'm going to want to engage with the best and right information and a source of truth. And I think that's going to be a good test of whether all the systems work together if you can't get different information about the same question.
[00:15:48] And there's an old saying, especially relevant in hospitality, that the last experience or last best experience we have anywhere becomes the standard expectation for what we want to see everywhere. And I remember a few years ago, I was in the Wynn Encore in Vegas and they got the certain, well, we'll say, I don't want to set any assistants off at the moment. The Amazon digital assistant and you could use it for all the lighting or open the, to go a bit American and ask them to open the drapes every morning.
[00:16:17] It was a very cool experience. But of course, we are all completely different. I would love that highly digital stay. Whereas my wife, she's less techie than me and wants more of a personal service. So how do you begin to design for both of those kind of personality traits there without creating two separate operations? Yeah. Well, how long have we had this debate now? Right. Yeah.
[00:16:40] I think we, and I've come to, I think I've come to terms having had three big episodes in airlines, in travel intermediaries and OTAs and TMCs, and then more latterly with even hospitality, that the framing isn't digital versus human. Yeah. I just think it's the wrong debate. I don't think I wake up in the morning and think today I'd like a digital experience. Yeah. I think I, I wake up going, I think I just want an easy life.
[00:17:07] And that might be different depending on the circumstance I face. So if I get off a flight from New York to Dallas, where our head office is, I might want to go straight to my room. But if my flight's canceled and I'm, you know, I'm now searching around for how I can find a hotel reservation stuck at the airport in the snow, then the last thing I want is a chatbot telling me it understands my frustration.
[00:17:31] So I just think that the trick is not choosing whether something's digital or person to person. It's understanding how you build systems to switch between those two things. Automate always because, you know, automation is a good indication of understanding a process to the degree where you can make it simpler and more repeatable, which is generally good, but also make the predictable things very, very easy.
[00:17:57] But as soon as something becomes ambiguous, emotional or unusual, and if you take those three words and associate them with travel, you know, if that's a constant battle we all have, I just think making it incredibly easy for a human to step in with all the context already there, it is why we've got this lovely intersection opportunity between the advent of, well, technology, the advent of AI as our next frontier,
[00:18:23] but also the role of people in making, you know, the human connection of why we all choose to travel or why we all choose to stay in hotels and on business or pleasure. So I'm certainly not trying to automate the human out of things. I'm trying to automate and make sure that we've got the best and most repeatable process around them.
[00:18:45] And earlier in our conversation, you were talking about a superior experience that you have experienced there, but it didn't feel creepy or intrusive. So for people listening, any tips or advice on privacy or trust concerns that hospitality leaders might want to address as personalization becomes more detailed and not overstepping that mark and accidentally drifting into creepy territory?
[00:19:12] Yeah, I think we've all got to be careful because there's a lot of, everything is moving so fast at our fingertips. An idea that might look good on paper, you can now have an abundance in the next hour. You and I could go around, you know, a workshop in the next 10 minutes of 10 things and realize that these are really great ideas. Now let's get on with them. So I do think we've got to be careful about what is technical, technically possible and whether it's socially acceptable. We've got to be more paranoid about this one.
[00:19:42] We know, you know, my test is if the customer would be surprised when you explained you knew something, then that feels odd. And I know, because I want to put it into context of people. When somebody knows something and I have to think, how did they get that information? I'm not comfortable with that.
[00:20:06] So that's a litmus test for us on, are we building a product that is actually going to the territory of it's understandable? We might want to go down that path, but it's not necessarily flying in the sweet spot of people trusting where we're taking things. So I just think obviously trust is becoming an increasingly valuable currency in everything that we now build. But I think hotels have something very powerful.
[00:20:31] Guests always trust them with their identity, their payment information and literally where they're sleeping. And we've got to take that information and ensure that we are being very responsible with it and hopefully constantly checking ourselves that we are pleasing people, putting smiles on their faces rather than suggesting that they question, why am I asking that or what do I actually know about them at any given time?
[00:20:57] And you also said a few moments ago, you're not interested in replacing people with tech and automation, which is both refreshing and reassuring to hear. There's a lot of debates around that at the moment. But when technology changes that frontline work, what kind of support helps staff adopt it without losing the human judgment that the guests are looking for and ultimately rely on? Yeah.
[00:21:22] One mistake I think technology companies always made is assuming resistance means people don't like change. Yeah. I think it's more people don't like bad change. We've all, I'm sure you have spoken to many people in your background. You know, when you put a bad system in your, your, your, your, your, your, the worst voters are the people who go, that's just the, sorry, the best voters are the people who are giving you the view. That just doesn't, that just doesn't work for me. Yeah.
[00:21:52] So I put that in the category of I refer to as bad change. If you've made somebody's job harder and then sent them on a three hour training course explaining why it's better, that's probably not the problem. So I think the adoption starts much earlier where we're choosing to get frontline employees involved in the workflow.
[00:22:12] So they can actually look at what the process diagrams say, so they can give their input into something we're going to choose to automate or choose to put in a brand new process where AI or the advent of new technology is allowing us to do for the first time. Yeah. Machines are becoming extraordinarily good at finding information as well.
[00:22:33] So we do spend more and more time on how we look at data to ensure that a person's day in their life is next best action. These are the priorities of the day based on what we saw yesterday or what we saw last week. And I think that's meaningful because it means somebody's work is now highly prioritized. So they feel they feel that they are adding value every day because the organization is working with me to say my shift is this.
[00:23:02] And therefore, I know what I should be doing in the next hour rather than tackling every every task with thinking it's the same value. So I don't see the goal as replacing hotel employees. I see it as giving them more power to act on the most important things that add the most value.
[00:23:19] And I just say, you know, imagine walking up to a guest and already understanding the context of what's happened with a problem, what they need, what you're what and what they're authorized to do without searching through four systems. And all they're doing is standing there getting increasingly annoyed. I think if you think about problems like that, the technology and the input required from the people who are in that situation married together can create some pretty terrific experiences.
[00:23:49] Well, I suspect that everybody listening will have checked into a hotel at some point. But I also suspect that many more listening will not know about how you're trusted by I think something like thirty five thousand hotels across one hundred and ninety countries serving that as that connective layer behind many of the world's most iconic brands. So I, for one, have really enjoyed having a little peek behind the curtain at some of the tech that we don't get to see and hear about.
[00:24:17] But for anybody in hospitality want to find out more about how you might be able to help them or start a conversation with you guys, where should they go? I think the easiest way is LinkedIn, Neil. So please look me up on LinkedIn, Mark Hollyhead with the usual comness and then even hospitality dot com. And we're notably interested in talking to people and partners and obviously hotels who are looking at the future with regards to how they deliver the guest experience.
[00:24:47] We're trying to build out a terrific commerce platform that retakes in what is going on at the top of the funnel in the demand side and ensuring that marries to what you need in order to optimize for your hotels. So look forward to talking to you and look forward to connecting. Yeah, I think as AI platforms increasingly rely on trusted inputs, context, I think hotels need infrastructure that can deliver accurate, consistent information at scale.
[00:25:14] And if anybody listening wants to learn more about that structured real time data, the importance there, how it could be a competitive advantage, please check out the links in the show notes. I will include everything. I'll even try and include a few videos and anything else I can find on everything that you're doing now. But more than anything, again, just thank you for letting us have a little peek behind the curtain of hospitality around the world and the technology that brings it all to life. Appreciate your time today. Thank you, Neil. Pleasure.
[00:25:42] I think Mark's experience today across airlines, airports, travel platforms and hotels all point towards a very simple rule. Begin with friction and then measure what disappears. Faster technology has little value if employees are still re-keying information, searching across four different systems or completing training just to tolerate a harder process.
[00:26:09] The better opportunity here is to make predictable work simple while giving people the context and authority to step in when a guest faces something emotional, unusual, frustrating or time sensitive. And when we talk about personalization, I think it's also important to highlight that that also requires a little restraint. So you don't drift in to creepy territory.
[00:26:34] A useful preference can make someone feel recognized, but unexplained knowledge could quickly feel intrusive. So that balance makes infrastructure a very quiet partner for hospitality teams. And a big thank you to Mark for showing us the technology behind hospitality and reminding us that guests rarely return home praising an API. But you can find Mark on LinkedIn. Learn more about the company through the website. Links will be in the show notes. But over to you.
[00:27:03] Which part of your customer experience creates friction that technology should remove first? Love to hear from you. TechTalksNetwork.com. I'd love to hear your stories, your experience, whether you're in hospitality or a guest in hospitality. I want to hear all sides of this one. So TechTalksNetwork.com. I'll be back again real soon with another guest. But thanks for listening as always. Bye for now.