Right Technology, Not More Technology: A Hotel Group's Actual Standard

At a Hoteliers’ Voice roundtable in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Celtic Collection’s Declan Bloomer, Head of Systems and Support, described his group’s approach to digital transformation as identifying “the right people and right technology” — a modest-sounding standard that’s actually a rebuke of how most hotel tech buying happens. The Hospitality Net podcast episode, featuring Kings Court Hotel owner Harpreet Saluja, Oracle’s David Hayward, HOSPA’s Amanda Brown, and hospitality consultants Sian Smith and Alessandra Leoni, framed the conversation around sequencing: which systems to migrate to cloud first, how to weigh vendor claims against actual integration cost, and how independent hoteliers without dedicated IT departments can build infrastructure that doesn’t need replacing again in two years.

That “right technology” standard lines up with a sharper argument hospitality futurist Simone Puorto made on Cloudbeds’ “The Turndown” podcast the same week: the industry’s real technology problem is oversaturation, not scarcity. Puorto’s claim is that hotels have accumulated fragmented, poorly integrated point solutions and dashboards, and the fix is consolidation and better data quality, not another AI layer stacked on top of an already-strained stack. Celtic Collection’s framing — pick the right technology, not more technology — reads as that argument put into practice by an operator rather than a commentator.

It also echoes the unresolved tension from July’s closed-door PMS roundtable, where hotel CIOs and PMS vendors couldn’t agree on how open their own systems really are — CIOs said only 4 of 7 vendor platforms were genuinely open, vendors claimed 4 of 5 offered cost-free integration. For a group like Celtic Collection making live vendor-selection decisions, that gap between vendor claims and operator experience is precisely the risk “right people and right technology” is meant to manage — and precisely what a roundtable of peers, rather than a vendor pitch, is positioned to surface.