Technology decides more guest experiences than most owners realise. The Wi-Fi that reaches the far villa. The booking that flows from the OTA into the PMS without a phone call. The check-in queue that never forms. Behind each of these is a set of IT decisions, made deliberately or made by default.
IT in Hospitality is a practical guide to those decisions, written for the three groups who have to make them together: the owners who pay for the systems, the managers who live with them every day, and the IT people who keep them running. It explains what the systems are, how they fit together, where they fail, and what ordinary discipline prevents.
The book covers the full stack of a working property:
The guest journey, and where technology touches itHardware, software, and networks matched to property size, from a five-room guesthouse to a multi-property groupCloud versus on-premise, weighed honestly rather than soldPCI-DSS, data privacy, and security that survives an auditThe unglamorous business side - budgets, vendors, contracts, and rolling out new systems without wrecking a Friday serviceIt closes with a set of working appendices: checklists, decision trees, worked infrastructure designs, a complete sample disaster recovery plan, year-one budget examples at three property sizes, and a vendor evaluation scorecard.
Nothing in it is theoretical. Mark Townsend has spent fifteen years designing, building, and running technology for hotels and resorts across Southeast Asia and beyond, from five-villa resorts to two-hundred-room hotels and small chains. Most of what's in this book was learned the hard way, some of it at two in the morning.
No hype. No jargon without a translation. Just the decisions, and enough understanding to defend them.