March 2020: We had $1.8M in ARR from hotel tech customers, a healthy pipeline, and a board presentation showing 3x growth projections.
April 2020: Our ARR dropped to $400K as hotels canceled contracts, stopped paying invoices, and went into survival mode. We laid off 60% of our team.
I thought we were done. The travel industry looked dead.
But by January 2023, we'd rebuilt to $3.2M ARR—not just recovering to pre-COVID levels but growing past them with fundamentally different customers, different positioning, and different sales motions than pre-COVID.
The recovery taught me something critical about vertical GTM strategy: when your vertical gets disrupted catastrophically, you learn which aspects of buyer behavior were permanent and which were artifacts of market conditions.
Some assumptions we held pre-COVID were completely wrong. Others we thought were dead turned out to be just hibernating.
Here's what actually changed about travel tech GTM post-COVID, and what only appeared to change.
What We Got Wrong: "Digital Transformation" Didn't Accelerate in Travel
Every analyst report from 2020-2021 predicted COVID would accelerate digital transformation in travel. Hotels and travel companies would embrace technology to reduce costs and operate with fewer staff.
We built our recovery strategy around this assumption: position our technology as cost-reduction and automation to help hotels operate efficiently with smaller teams.
It failed completely.
Hotels didn't want automation—they wanted staff back. As travel recovered, hotels faced massive labor shortages and focused on hiring and retention, not on replacing workers with technology.
The "digital transformation acceleration" we expected never materialized in travel the way it did in retail or logistics.
What actually happened: hotels returned to pre-COVID operational models as quickly as they could. They wanted to restore the guest experience they'd offered before, not reinvent it with technology.
This meant our "reduce headcount through automation" positioning fell flat. Hotels weren't trying to operate with fewer staff—they were desperate to hire enough staff to meet demand.
We pivoted our positioning from "reduce labor costs" to "help your existing staff serve more guests and reduce burnout." Same technology, completely different framing.
Instead of "automated check-in reduces front desk staffing needs," we positioned as "automated check-in lets your front desk team focus on high-value guest interactions instead of administrative tasks."
This shift acknowledged the reality hotels were living: they had staff shortages and needed technology to help the staff they had be more effective, not to replace staff they couldn't hire anyway.
What Changed Permanently: Business Travel Buying Patterns
Pre-COVID, our customer split was roughly:
- 40% business-focused hotels (conference centers, airport hotels)
- 35% leisure-focused hotels (resorts, vacation destinations)
- 25% mixed (urban hotels serving both segments)
Post-COVID recovery, that split became:
- 15% business-focused hotels
- 60% leisure-focused hotels
- 25% mixed
Business travel recovered slower than leisure travel and plateaued at 70-80% of pre-COVID levels. Many companies permanently reduced travel budgets and shifted to hybrid events and virtual meetings.
This fundamentally changed our target customer profile.
Pre-COVID, business-focused hotels were our highest-value customers. They had larger budgets, faster sales cycles, and higher willingness to invest in technology that improved operational efficiency.
Post-COVID, business hotels were struggling with lower occupancy and had zero appetite for new technology investments. Meanwhile, leisure-focused hotels were dealing with unprecedented demand and needed technology to handle volume.
We restructured our entire sales and marketing strategy around leisure travel:
Instead of targeting airport hotels and conference centers, we targeted resort destinations, boutique hotels in tourist areas, and vacation rental management companies.
Instead of positioning around efficiency and cost reduction (business hotel priorities), we positioned around guest experience and revenue optimization (leisure hotel priorities).
Instead of ROI framing based on "reduce operational costs," we reframed around "increase RevPAR through better guest personalization and upsell automation."
This shift was painful. We had deep expertise in business travel and had to build new expertise in leisure travel dynamics. But the market had shifted permanently, and we had to shift with it.
What Stayed the Same: Hotels Still Won't Pay for Unproven Tech
During COVID, we thought hotels would become more willing to try innovative technology because the old ways had failed.
Wrong.
Hotels became more risk-averse, not less. They'd lost massive revenue for 18 months and couldn't afford to waste money on technology that might not work.
Pre-COVID, we could sell pilots and POCs relatively easily. Post-COVID, hotels demanded proof before they'd even consider a pilot.
The buying criteria shifted from "show us how this could work" to "show us this already works for hotels like us."
We rebuilt our sales approach around proof:
Case study requirement: Every sales conversation now starts with case studies from similar hotel types. If we're selling to a 150-room beach resort, we need proof from other 150-200 room beach resorts, not from business hotels or large properties.
ROI guarantees: We started offering ROI guarantees tied to specific metrics (occupancy improvement, RevPAR increase, direct booking conversion). If we don't hit the metrics, the customer gets a refund.
Reference customers: We built a reference customer program where prospects could talk directly to current customers operating similar properties. This peer validation mattered more post-COVID than any vendor marketing.
The sales cycle got longer (more proof required) but close rates improved because buyers who made it through our process were highly qualified and committed.
The Channel Shift Nobody Predicted: Property Management Systems as Gatekeepers
Pre-COVID, we sold directly to hotels and integrated with their Property Management Systems (PMS) through APIs.
Post-COVID, the major PMS vendors (Opera, Protel, Cloudbeds) started building competitive functionality into their platforms and restricting third-party integrations.
This created a "platform versus point solution" problem similar to retail tech.
Hotels were consolidating vendors to reduce complexity. If the PMS offered "good enough" functionality for guest messaging, upsells, or automation, hotels would use the native PMS capability instead of integrating a specialized third-party solution.
We had three options:
Option 1: Compete head-to-head against PMS platforms. This meant positioning our specialized functionality as superior to PMS native capabilities and convincing hotels to integrate despite the added complexity.
Option 2: Partner with PMS vendors. Become an approved partner in their marketplace and position as the premium upgrade to their native functionality.
Option 3: Build for PMS-agnostic deployment. Create functionality that didn't require deep PMS integration and could operate independently.
We chose Option 2 (PMS partnerships) for mid-market customers and Option 3 (PMS-agnostic) for independent boutique hotels.
For mid-market hotels using major PMS platforms, we became a certified partner in their app marketplaces. This gave us distribution through the PMS sales channel and reduced the "integration complexity" objection.
For independent boutique hotels using simpler PMS solutions, we built standalone functionality that didn't require deep integration. These hotels wanted best-in-class guest experience tools and were willing to manage multiple systems.
This dual-track strategy required building different product variations but let us serve both segments effectively. For travel tech companies navigating PMS ecosystem dynamics, platforms like Segment8 offer partnership positioning frameworks for both direct sales and marketplace channel strategies.
What Surprised Us: The Vacation Rental Explosion
Pre-COVID, vacation rentals (Airbnb, VRBO properties) were a small, fragmented segment we largely ignored. We focused on traditional hotels because they had bigger budgets and more sophisticated technology needs.
Post-COVID, vacation rentals exploded. People wanted private accommodations instead of shared hotel spaces. Property managers who were operating 5-10 vacation rentals pre-COVID were suddenly operating 50-100 units.
This created a new buyer segment: professional vacation rental managers who needed hotel-grade technology but at vacation rental economics.
The opportunity was massive but required different positioning:
Hotels: Large properties (50-500 rooms), established operations teams, PMS infrastructure already in place, higher budgets, longer sales cycles.
Vacation rental managers: Dispersed properties (50-200 individual units across a region), lean operations teams, minimal technology infrastructure, lower budgets, faster sales cycles.
We built a vacation rental-specific product tier:
- Lower price point ($X per unit vs. $X per room at hotels)
- Simplified setup (no PMS integration required)
- Multi-property management (one account managing dispersed units)
- Self-service onboarding (vacation rental managers don't have IT teams)
This segment grew from 0% of revenue pre-COVID to 35% of revenue by end of 2022. It became our fastest-growing segment.
The key insight: vacation rental managers needed the same core functionality as hotels (guest messaging, upsells, automation) but delivered through a completely different product experience and pricing model.
The Pricing Model That Broke Post-COVID
Pre-COVID, our pricing was per-room per-month: $X per room across the property.
This model broke post-COVID because occupancy was unpredictable. Hotels didn't want to pay for 200 rooms when they were only booking 80 rooms.
We shifted to usage-based pricing: $X per occupied room-night instead of $X per room per month.
This aligned our revenue with the hotel's revenue. When occupancy was low, they paid less. When occupancy recovered, they paid more.
Hotels loved this because it eliminated the risk of paying for technology they weren't using.
We hated it initially because it made our revenue unpredictable. But it became our competitive advantage.
Competitors still charging per-room-per-month pricing struggled to win deals. We won deals specifically because our pricing model acknowledged the occupancy uncertainty hotels were facing.
By 2022, as occupancy stabilized, we offered hotels the option to lock in per-room pricing at a discount (15% off usage-based pricing if they committed to per-room annual contracts). 60% of customers took this option, giving us revenue predictability while maintaining usage-based pricing as our entry model for new customers.
What Stayed the Same: Implementation Bandwidth Determines Close Timing
Pre-COVID and post-COVID, the biggest obstacle to closing hotel tech deals isn't budget or ROI—it's implementation bandwidth.
Hotels operate with skeleton IT teams (or no IT team). Implementing new technology requires operational bandwidth from general managers and department heads who are already stretched thin.
We learned pre-COVID that hotels won't implement during peak season (summer for leisure, varies for business). This remained true post-COVID, except now hotels had even less bandwidth because they were operating with fewer staff.
The implementation windows:
Leisure hotels: October-February (post-summer season, pre-spring break)
Business hotels: June-August (between conference seasons) and December-January (holiday slowdown)
Urban hotels: January-March (post-holiday, pre-summer tourism)
We restructured our sales cycle to align with these windows:
Sell in Q3-Q4 for Q1 implementation at leisure properties. Sell in Q1-Q2 for Q3 implementation at business properties.
This created revenue recognition delays (contracts signed in Q4, revenue recognized in Q1 after implementation) but dramatically improved implementation success rates because we weren't forcing hotels to implement when they were slammed with guests.
The Consolidation Wave Nobody Saw Coming
2021-2022 saw massive consolidation in travel tech. Point solutions got acquired by platforms, PMS vendors acquired vertical-specific tools, and customers got exhausted managing 15 different vendor relationships.
This created a "build versus partner" decision for us:
Should we build a full platform (PMS + guest experience + operations + analytics) to compete with integrated solutions?
Or should we remain specialized in our core capability and partner aggressively with complementary tools?
We chose specialization + partnerships.
Building a full platform would have required $10M+ in product development and taken 2+ years. We didn't have the capital or time.
Instead, we built deep integrations with 12 complementary tools (PMS, booking engines, payment processors, review management) and positioned as "best-in-class guest experience layer that works with your existing stack."
This let us compete against platforms by offering superior functionality in our specialty while acknowledging that hotels needed integrated solutions.
The positioning: "Platforms give you everything. We give you the best guest experience tools that integrate with everything you already use."
This worked for hotels that already had PMS infrastructure and wanted to upgrade specific capabilities without ripping out their entire stack.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Travel Recovery
Travel tech recovery wasn't linear. It wasn't even predictable.
Leisure travel came roaring back in 2021. Business travel barely recovered. International travel stayed restricted through 2022 in many regions. Different segments recovered at different rates with different needs.
This meant our "recovery strategy" couldn't be singular—it had to be segmented:
- Leisure properties needed capacity management and guest experience tools
- Business properties needed cost optimization and hybrid event support
- International properties needed flexible cancellation and health/safety communication
The companies that treated "travel recovery" as one unified trend struggled. The companies that recognized it as segmented, asynchronous recovery with different needs per segment thrived.
What changed permanently:
- Business travel buying patterns (down 20-30% permanently)
- Channel dynamics (PMS platforms as gatekeepers)
- Vacation rental professionalization (new segment emerged)
- Pricing models (usage-based replaced fixed per-room)
- Consolidation pressure (point solutions vs. platforms)
What stayed the same:
- Implementation bandwidth constraints (hotels still won't implement during peak season)
- Risk aversion (hotels demand proof before pilot)
- Operational focus (hotels returned to pre-COVID service models)
- Seasonal buying windows (budget cycles didn't change)
What we thought would change but didn't:
- Digital transformation acceleration (hotels wanted people back, not automation)
- Technology adoption curves (hotels remained conservative buyers)
- Sales cycle length (still 3-6 months, sometimes longer)
The lesson from COVID recovery: don't assume disruption creates permanent behavior change. Some changes are permanent (business travel patterns). Some changes are temporary reactions that revert (automation replacing staff).
The GTM teams that thrived post-COVID were the ones who tested assumptions, measured actual behavior change, and adapted positioning to reality rather than analyst predictions.
Three years post-COVID, travel tech looks different than 2019 but not in the ways anyone predicted in 2020.
The opportunity is still massive. The market is still growing. But the playbook changed. And the companies still running 2019 playbooks are struggling while the companies that rebuilt for the new reality are thriving.