By 2030, hotels should no longer have to search for technology, says Ralph Melis, co-founder and COO of ExploreTECH. Instead, AI agents will proactively monitor each hotel's tech stack, track new and updated solutions from vendors, and flag what is worth changing.

ExploreTECH, which Melis co-founded with CEO Mona Faraj, helps hotels find and compare technology vendors. By his count, it lists more than 1,500 vendors with over 2,750 solutions across 135 categories.

Since 2025, ExploreTECH has been growing its enterprise solution as well, a centralised white-label hub for approved technologies, contracts, implementation guides, internal documentation, governance policies and organisation-specific knowledge. Global Hotel Alliance signed on as the first enterprise partner in April 2025, and hotel groups like Rotana are also clients.

Previously, Melis worked in hotels and sold technology to them. In 2008, he went door to door across the Gulf signing up hotels for Booking.com.

We spoke at Future Hospitality Summit (FHS) World in Dubai about what it will take to get hotel tech discovery to the next level, from how hotels buy technology today to what slows AI adoption.

From manual search to always-on agents

If ExploreTECH achieves everything it set out to do by 2030, what does buying hotel tech look like?

Ideally, hotels won't be searching for technology at all. Each hotel's tech stack will be recorded, and an AI agent will analyse and optimise it. Whenever a vendor adds or updates a solution on ExploreTECH, the agents working for our enterprise customers will know about it.

Most of that news won't matter to you, and the agent filters it out. But when something fills a gap, it tells you why. This new tool could replace two point solutions you run separately. Or this is a category you don't have yet. One example is tools that check whether your hotel can be found and booked through ChatGPT or Claude. If I ran distribution at a hotel, I'd want to know about that today.

The agent also knows your contracts. Nine months before one ends, it asks whether you're happy. If not, here are alternatives that work with the rest of your stack. It's a digital employee who is always listening, so your team doesn't have to spend hours searching.

And how do hotels find and buy technology today?

Usually, without the knowledge to do it well. Most decision makers in hospitality are not tech people. Even a hotel group's IT leaders tend to be experts in specific areas, like networking or infrastructure. So, some of the more niche solutions may not be on their radar.

As a result, when a hotel has an operational problem, it isn't always clear which vendors exist or how they compare. Some people hold back because they don't want to seem unfamiliar with a technology in front of colleagues or a vendor. Or they worry about taking a risk on a solution they've never implemented or handled before. In some hotels and hotel groups, progress stalls.

Some vendors, while a relatively small percentage, will sell the world to a hotel to get a signature. The good ones ask questions and would rather not sell than sign the wrong client. The others say, "Yes, we can do that, just sign." Once the hotel signs, the implementation runs into trouble. Sometimes the whole IT project fails, and the hotel is left with a bad investment.

From sales pitch to guided discovery

How does ExploreTECH change the way hotels buy today?

We cover the journey from the moment a hotelier has a problem or an idea to the moment they sign. That means search, discovery and comparison. If you know one or two names in revenue management or IPTV solutions, we show you who else is out there. A vendor partnership is usually a long one, so you want to choose the right partner from a range of options, not just the one or two you've heard of.

We also publish news and run Tech Matchmaker webinars, where hoteliers get a quick overview of new solutions. If they want to talk to a vendor, that's their choice. We don't hand over their details so they get 50 sales calls the next day.

You also bring vendors to events like FHS on a shared stand. Why?

Because for smaller vendors, being at an event isn't just a financial investment. It also takes time and resources they don't always have. We handle the stand, the logistics and the content on stage. They show up and take their meetings.

But our TECH Pavilion works for vendors of every size. Sometimes a larger vendor doesn't want to invest big and sees the value in joining forces with other vendors at an event. With us, vendors pay a smaller amount and get a bigger presence.

Partners on the stand also benefit from collaborating. They open doors for each other. Yesterday we went through the attendee list together. One vendor might know someone at a hotel another is trying to reach. You can't do that walking around alone, and a face-to-face introduction counts for more than an email.

From PDFs and emails to one platform

How do your enterprise clients use ExploreTECH today?

Since last year, hotel chains, associations, asset managers and tourism boards can have their own version of ExploreTECH. It runs on our platform but carries their brand, and they choose which vendors appear in it.

One of our enterprise customers, uses it as a digital record of all the technology across its hotels. For each solution, they log the vendor, the contact person, the contract and its start and end dates. Their corporate team are the admins. They decide who gets access – IT, commercial, or the GM of a specific property – and they keep the information current.

So if a hotel IT manager in Turkey needs to reach Oracle, they log in and find the local contact. A colleague in Saudi Arabia finds a different one. Nobody has to send a PDF or 50 emails to work it out.

Where are you now in terms of growth, and what's next?

The growth we're really looking for now is at enterprise level. We're having more discussions with hotel chains, organizations and associations that want a central place to manage technology knowledge and support better decisions across their hotels.

Global Hotel Alliance is already an enterprise customer through G-Tech. It gives its member brands a shared environment to explore relevant solutions, access vendor information and expertise, and benefit from member commercial terms. Those offers are one part of the value. The wider opportunity is to give hotels better information and guidance when evaluating technology.

For hotel groups such as Rotana, our Enterprise Solution also supports governance: bringing approved solutions, technology stacks, contracts, implementation guides and internal knowledge into one branded platform. It helps teams understand what they already have, what is approved and where there may be gaps.

What's next is connecting that knowledge more closely to ongoing decisions. As hotels map their technology stacks and manage their contracts, we can help them identify relevant alternatives, opportunities to consolidate systems, and capabilities they may be missing.

That also gives vendors a stronger reason to participate and keep their product information current. The more hotel organizations use ExploreTECH to support their decisions, the more valuable participation becomes for vendors—and richer product information makes the platform more useful for hotels.

From browsing lists to describing problems

What can ExploreTECH Pro, your AI tool, do that a search bar can't?

It's still in beta, but the idea is that you describe yourself and your problem instead of browsing categories. I'm a hotel in Dubai. I run Opera PMS and this finance system. Forecasting is hard because our properties use different reporting standards. What should I look at? The answer has to fit the tech you already run, or there's no point.

A GM who wants guests to order from their phone doesn't know which category that falls under, and shouldn't have to scroll through pages of vendors to find out. Today hotels pay consultants for 20 or 30 hours of this kind of guidance. Big chains can afford it. Independent hotels can't.

A hotelier can ask ChatGPT the same question. Why use ExploreTECH Pro?

Because we bring together structured, vendor-confirmed product information that often isn’t available on vendors’ own websites. We ask for detailed features, integrations, who their clients are, where they operate and what types of hotels they serve. We then use that information alongside the hotel’s needs and existing technology to identify relevant solutions. If you’re in Thailand looking for a chatbot, you need to know whether a vendor can support your property there, however good its marketing looks.

Vendors are responsible for confirming their product information and keeping it current, including what their solutions can and can’t do. That gives hotels a clearer basis for comparison and helps them ask the right questions before making a decision.

From AI procurement to operations

Beyond buying, where will AI change how hotels run?

In how fast they decide. A few weeks ago, two vendors showed BI tools on our webinar where you type a question and get a dashboard back. Picture a revenue meeting where the GM asks how MICE bookings look for Q1. Today someone spends two or three hours in reports and comes back later. With AI, the room sees the answer immediately and decides on pricing there and then.

The same goes for housekeeping rotas, which are still built in spreadsheets. A tool can forecast next month's occupancy, tell you how many people you need each day and whether you can approve that holiday request.

Banks and telecoms already handle customer calls with voice AI. When will hotels follow?

Within three years, most of the major global chains will have moved most routine inbound calls to voice AI. It's a resource-intensive service, and this leaves the employees there to handle more complex and sensitive requests. 

I worked in reservations. When the phones are red hot, a guest who just wants a room gets told to call back later, and that booking goes to another hotel. A new operator doesn't know when the gym opens and puts the guest on hold. An AI answers in two seconds, switches to Dutch or Arabic, and pulls up the sea-view room you booked last time.

It can upsell too. I used to train staff to listen for the right moment. A business traveller gets offered the club lounge, with a place to work and unlimited coffee. You don't need to teach an AI that.

What is slowing hotels down?

Three things. First, hotels are wary of anything new. The first question to any vendor is, who do you work with? If the answer is Jumeirah, a buyer relaxes, because Jumeirah's due diligence is rigorous.

Second, budget. A lot of hotels spend a small percentage of their budget on technology, and it grows slowly. Anything beyond core systems becomes a long strategic discussion. One vendor on our stand automates financial reconciliation and forecasting. Once a hotel is onboard, it works better. But onboarding a new client can sometimes take time, so technology decisions like this aren't instant.

Third, leadership. A lot of senior tech leaders come up through operations – IT manager, director of IT, cluster director, vice president after 15 years. They know how to keep systems running. Ask a hotel group what its guest experience will look like in ten years, and I'm not sure anyone could answer.

Independent hotels can decide quickly. Why don't more vendors target them?

Because the maths favours groups. Thirty single-hotel clients means 30 relationships and 30 sets of invoices to collect. Five groups with 50 hotels each means more revenue from five relationships. So independents get little attention.

Booking.com did the opposite. In 2008 I covered Qatar, Oman and the UAE outside Dubai for them. I'd fly to Doha, rent a car and walk into hotels one by one. If the GM wasn't in, I left my card and came back the next day.

Account managers like me were only part of the story, though. Booking.com invested heavily in making their platform as self-service as possible, which let them scale faster and reach more hotels around the world. That model made it much easier to serve thousands of independent hotels.

From building products to selling them

What do early-stage hospitality tech founders get wrong?

They build great technology, but they're tech builders at heart and often don't have the skill set to drive brand awareness and sales. They need to network and talk about what their solution does and which core problems in hospitality it addresses. And they need to do it in the language of hoteliers, not tech vendors.

If their product sits in a category hoteliers already know, they have to make clear what makes it so different from the established players. Why would a hotel leave a vendor it has worked with for years and switch to a startup? There has to be something much better. Otherwise, the risk is too high.

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