Why Your Hotel Tech Isn’t Being Used, And What You Can Do About It.

A competitive hot-potato game cracked the code on behavior change. Now I’m using it to transform hotel-tech adoption for both vendors and hotel teams.

Imagine a hotelier rolling out a shiny new hotel-tech platform…only to discover two weeks later that half the staff still don’t know how to use it. Sound familiar?

In the veterinary world, I spent most of my time coaching teams on how to provide superior client experiences: “unreasonable hospitality,” you could say. In the 250+ interactive workshops I designed and facilitated, I learned quickly that if training doesn’t answer “What’s in it for me?” and “How does this help me do my job?”, it simply won’t stick.

Beyond those questions, what trainees really needed was help making a habit change and for that they needed to practice. What’s the best way to practice – via games of course!

Hospitality tech leaders face the same barrier every day. According to a HotelOperations.com survey, 92% of respondents reported having experienced a failed technology implementation at some point in their careers. Furthermore, 48% of hoteliers feel that technology companies don’t fit their needs.¹ This is likely in large part because hotel tech companies don’t take the time to train all team members appropriately.

Meanwhile, a SiteMinder survey of ~700 hoteliers found that 79% of respondents spend 11+ hours per week on tasks that could be automated, and 56% believe better-integrated systems could unlock at least 6% more annual revenue.²

Translation? The technology exists. The adoption gap is still huge.

Why? Because vendors aren’t building Customer Success strategies that actually drive adoption, so churn quietly creeps in.

The good news: the same methods I used with veterinary teams can be adapted to help hotel-tech companies drive real adoption, behavior change, and measurable impact.

Edouard:

I’ve set up tech stacks on two occasions and onboarded dozens of SaaS tools for both my own business and for companies I’ve worked with. One pattern shows up every single time: vendors do an exceptional job during the sales process: They diagnose the problem well, they position the solution perfectly but once the contract is signed, the onboarding rarely matches the energy or quality of the sales stage.

The first onboarding session is almost always underwhelming relative to what was sold. Follow-up is inconsistent, training drops off quickly, and integration issues get pushed back onto the client with a simple, “Our support team is available 24/7.” But 24/7 support doesn’t fix adoption. It doesn’t teach teams how to use the product to its full potential. And it definitely doesn’t solve the “last mile” problem of getting busy hotel teams to build new habits.

Tech vendors often assume hotels will somehow figure out internal adoption themselves but that’s not how hospitality works.

From interviewing hundreds of candidates across HotelTech and hotel operations, I see the same pattern: Hotels want to adopt technology, but they simply don’t have the bandwidth. Front desk teams rotate frequently, GMs are juggling dozens of priorities, and revenue managers are often managing multiple properties at once. Any training that isn’t simple, habit-forming, and repeatable evaporates the moment a busy shift hits. Vendors consistently underestimate this reality.

The solution isn’t just better onboarding, it also involves alignment.

There needs to be a mutually agreed adoption plan with buy-in from all stakeholders:

• what success looks like,
• who owns what,
• how habit-building will happen,
• how follow-up will be structured,
• and how both parties will course-correct when challenges appear.

Adoption shouldn’t be accidental. It needs to be designed together.

Kassandra:

As Ed emphasizes, the adoption plan must be co-designed with the hotel GM and leadership team, built around a long-term success framework focused on measurable outcomes. Because adoption isn’t about showing cool features; it’s about changing habits.

That’s where gamification comes in.

In my workshops, I used buzzers, hot-potato-style role-play, and habit-changing practice to drive adoption. Now, I partner with HotelTech vendors to utilize the same approaches.

Here’s why it matters: only 21% of hotel professionals report their current technology is fully effective.³ Without investing in behavior change and habit-building, even the best tech under-delivers. Customer Success doesn’t end at install or go-live, it begins there.

Edouard:

Here’s a real example from my time supporting Numa (an apart-hotel scaleup expanding rapidly across Europe). At the time, Numa was opening properties at a pace where the old process simply couldn’t keep up. Project management lived across Slack threads, WhatsApp groups, random spreadsheets, and Google files nobody could ever find. There was no single source of truth, no clear ownership, no timeline visibility, just chaos. A genuine operational mindfuck (excuse my french).

That’s when Asana was introduced as the central project management tool for all future hotel openings.

Michael Sivashinski, the Senior Project Manager at the time, took ownership of the entire rollout. He built a full Asana onboarding playbook from scratch: every task required to open a property, mapped clearly by department, with deadlines, dependencies, and stakeholders. On paper, it was brilliant. In reality, not everyone was using it. Some were intimidated, some didn’t see the value yet, and others simply stuck to old habits.

That’s where the real adoption work began and where Michael did something exceptional.

1. He aligned with every department

He met leaders one-on-one to validate tasks, dependencies, and workflows. This created cooperation and ownership rather than resistance.

2. He created Asana “Champions”

A dedicated Slack channel was set up for Asana adoption, and each department nominated their own champion. These became the internal experts, the people who answered questions, encouraged usage, and reinforced the habit.

One of our project managers, Matthew Robbie (a legendary meme-maker), turned the champions into internal celebrities. He started nominating the top performers the “Asana Queen” on slack channels complete with memes and shoutouts. The company loved it. Adoption and engagement became contagious and skyrocketed. We eventually referred to Michael as the “Asana God”

3. He gamified everything

Within the project management team, Michael split everyone into two groups: Carrots vs. Cakes  and introduced scrum poker scoring. Each completed task contributed points. At the end of each month or quarter, the winning team received a small prize (company mugs, swag, etc.). It sounds simple, but it worked. Adoption became measurable, visible, and fun. If Michael had full control, he would’ve turned it into a bonus structure too.

4. He built feedback loops into every hotel launch

After each opening, all stakeholders rated collaboration, ownership, and bottlenecks and committed to improving something for the next launch. It wasn’t always comfortable, but it created non-stop improvement, faster delivery. But everyone could see that those who adopted Asana the most had more clarity on the projects and usually scored the best.

The Results

The transformation was huge:

• Cohesion and morale dramatically improved
• Properties opened faster, with fewer mistakes
• Bottlenecks were identified early and resolved quickly
• Cross-department alignment became easier
• Asana became “how we work,” not “another tool we have to use”

What this taught me about tech adoption

If you want a team to fully adopt a new tool, you need:

• Stakeholder buy-in from the start
• Gamification
• Clear accountability and champions
• Feedback loops that reinforce progress
• And above all… it has to be fun

This is what turns a tool into a habit, and a habit into real business impact.

Kassandra:

Just like Michael’s gamefying everything made adoption measurable, visible, and fun in Ed’s example, I’ve used gamification to drive adoption and build lasting habits, first with veterinary teams, now with hotel staff.

Here’s how everyone’s favorite game works:

I line up participants in two teams facing each other in a single file. Then I hand them a buzzer that acts as a hot potato. Whoever holds the buzzer role-plays with me on the spot, the buzzer creates just enough urgency to keep energy high and focus sharp.

For hotel teams, I play the guest.

An example of this training for a reputation management company:

If they’re poolside team I may want them to ask me to write a review on their cabana service. “Sounds like you really enjoyed your time by the pool today, would you be open to leaving us a review? Here’s a QR code that takes your right to our review platform.”

If they’re front desk, they would practice asking me to write a review about my check in experience. “Your check in went really fast, could you please leave us a review about it? We’re always looking to improve your experience, just follow this QR code, it takes 2 minutes.”

Every scenario is tailored to their actual role, so they’re practicing the exact words they’ll use on the job and the phrasing becomes habit. I give real-time feedback, then they pass the buzzer across to the facing team.

The catch? When the buzzer goes off, that team loses a point. No one wants points in this game. And yes, there’s always a small prize for the winners.

The result? What felt like play became practice. What started as a game became habit. And adoption stopped being a directive from above, it became something the team actually wanted to do.

Small Steps that can be implemented today:

1. Map the current onboarding/training path. Where is it “feature demo” vs. “behavior change”?
2. Add one gamified role-play exercise for the next client rollout.
3. At 30 days post-go-live, measure one behavioral adoption metric.
4. Document mini-case studies and outcomes: “Your hotel  reduced manual task time by X% thanks to our software” and “your guest experience has improved by Y, thanks to our software.”
5. Consistently communicate those outcomes through impact messages to hotel management and all software users.

With these changes you become a trusted partner, not just a vendor. Strategic partnerships drive renewals, referrals, and upsells: exactly what retention-focused hospitality tech companies need. Remember that hoteliers are fiercely competitive but they talk about the tools they use with their peers (good and bad).

So when is the next time you’ll be playing competitive hot potato with your hotel customers?