Scaling hotel guest experience across dozens or hundreds of properties – in different countries, cultures, and compliance environments – is one of the most complex challenges in hospitality today. The question is not just how to deliver a great stay. It is how to deliver it consistently, at scale, without losing what makes each property feel distinct and human.
That was the focus of Duve’s recent webinar, Scaling the Guest Experience: How International Hotel Groups Create Consistency Across Properties and Regions. The session brought together two leaders with complementary perspectives on this challenge:
- Francesco Sforza – Global Guest Experience & Product Development, Radisson Hotel Group
- Jeremy Atlan – Co-Founder & Chief Business Development Officer, Duve
Together, they explored what consistency actually requires across an international portfolio, where friction tends to build, how to evaluate the right technology, and what makes adoption succeed or fail across diverse markets.
What “scaling hotel guest experience” actually means
The conversation opened with a question that sounds simple but reveals a great deal of complexity: what does scaling hotel guest experience actually mean in practice today?
For Francesco, the answer comes down to a clear principle: it is not about copying the same experience everywhere. It is about making sure the basics work consistently across the portfolio, and then leaving hotels the freedom to adapt locally. At Radisson, they call these the “brilliant basics” – the global pillars of a Radisson hospitality experience that apply cross-brand and cross-region — on top of which each property, brand segment, and region can layer its own identity.
Jeremy added a second dimension: the role of automation in making personalization possible at scale. The challenge with scaling guest experience is not just delivering consistency. It is delivering personalized, meaningful moments for every individual guest without doing it manually. This is where guest communication automation becomes essential – removing the manual burden so teams can focus on what guests actually remember.
Key takeaway: Scaling hotel guest experience does not mean uniformity. It means defining clearly what must always be consistent – the quality, the reliability, the brand feel– and then giving properties the room to express that in ways that fit their market. The two are not in conflict. They are complementary.
Scaling guest experience is the junction between automating repetitive mundane tasks and, in parallel, maintaining that high standard of personalized experience for each and every one of your guests.
Jeremy Atlan
Co-Founder & Chief Business Development Officer
Duve
The challenge of consistency across properties and regions
A central tension in the discussion was how hotel groups create a recognizable brand experience everywhere while leaving room for local differences. Both panelists agreed: the line between what must be standardized and what must be localized needs to be drawn deliberately.
Francesco put it clearly: all hotels need to welcome guests upon check-in. But the way you greet a guest varies by geography and culture. The fact that the guest needs to be welcomed, recognized, and checked in quickly must be consistent. The expression of it is where local identity comes in.
Jeremy framed it from the guest perspective. The reason guests return to the same brands is because they know what to expect, whether they are staying at a Radisson in Lisbon, Paris, or New York. But within that framework, each property needs the freedom to put its own identity into the experience, shaped by the region, the guest segment, and the type of hotel.
As Francesco noted, no one knows their guests better than the properties themselves. That local knowledge is an asset, not a problem to be solved.
Key takeaway: Before investing in any standardization initiative, hotel groups should draw a clear, written distinction between what is non-negotiable and what is intentionally flexible. Without that line, teams either over-standardize and lose local relevance, or under-standardize and lose brand coherence. Getting this framework right is the foundation everything else is built on.
Where complexity shows up first in multi-property hotel operations
When asked where hotel groups feel the biggest friction when trying to standardize the guest journey, Francesco pointed directly to systems. Large hotel groups are often the result of different evolutionary stages and different technology acquisitions across different parts of the business. When you try to align processes across regions, or even across properties in the same region, the fragmentation in tools and integrations becomes a real blocker. And crucially, that complexity is not invisible to guests. Chaotic operations translate into slow service and wrong communications.
Jeremy added a layer to this: guest expectations in 2026 have shifted. Guests now expect everything to feel automated and natural. If they are used to communicating via WhatsApp, they want WhatsApp. And to meet that expectation, hotels need to present one seamless front-end experience while connecting to eleven different backend tools – different PMSs, different POS systems, some on-premise, some cloud. The mess in the backend directly undermines the experience in the front end. According to Skift Research, fragmented tech stacks remain one of the top barriers to delivering consistent digital guest experiences across hotel portfolios.
Francesco summed it up well: there is no longer a meaningful distinction between the physical hotel experience and the digital one. In guests’ perception, there is just one experience, and increasingly, what happens on their phone feels more physical than the hotel itself.
Key takeaway: Operational complexity is a guest experience problem, not just an IT problem. When systems are fragmented, the effects show up in slow response times, inconsistent communications, and staff who cannot close the loop on simple requests. Before evaluating new technology, it is worth auditing where your current systems break down and what that costs in terms of guest perception.
In the guest's perception, there's just one unique experience. There's no differentiation between the digital and physical environment anymore.
Francesco Sforza
Global Guest Experience & Product Development
Radisson Hotel Group
What to look for when evaluating hotel technology for a multi-property portfolio
The discussion around technology selection was refreshingly practical. Francesco’s first criterion is fit into the pre-existing system. Solutions in the market today are generally good. The real exercise is understanding how a solution integrates into your specific environment. But beyond integrations, he highlighted something less often discussed: the employee-facing interface. Guest-facing interfaces tend to be well-designed. Dashboards for operations teams are often complex, hard to navigate, and require extensive training. The easier the employee experience, the better the rollout will go.
Jeremy pushed this point further. You could have the best solution in the world and it would still fail without staff buy-in. He also flagged something many hospitality leaders miss: hotels often ask the wrong questions when evaluating solutions. They ask about features. They do not ask how the solution integrates into the way they actually operate — not just the tech stack, but the workflows. Two hotels can use the exact same PMS in completely different ways. A solution needs to behave the way your team behaves when they interact with that system. If it does not, things break, and staff disengage.
Duve’s hotel guest app is built with this in mind – designed to be as intuitive for staff managing requests as it is for guests making them.
Key takeaway: When evaluating guest experience platforms, add two questions to your assessment process. First: how intuitive is the staff-facing interface, and what does onboarding actually look like for front desk and operations teams? Second: can the vendor show you how their solution behaves specifically with your PMS configuration, not just a generic integration demo? These two questions will reveal far more than a feature comparison.
You could have the best solution in the world and it would not work in your hotel if you don't have the buy-in of the staff. At the end, it's a partnership.
Jeremy Atlan
Co-Founder & Chief Business Development Officer
Duve
What makes hotel technology truly scalable across properties and countries
Jeremy outlined three things that make a solution genuinely scalable across properties, teams, and countries.
The first is flexibility. A scalable solution should be a toolkit, not a tool – something hoteliers can manage, adapt, and optimize entirely themselves without going back to the vendor for every change. The solutions that have won across other industries, from project management to website builders, succeeded because they gave customers full control.
The second is proof of regional deployment. Before signing, check that the solution is already live and working in the regions where you operate. If it is, the vast majority of localization challenges have already been solved by someone else. If a vendor claims to work globally but cannot show live accounts in your region, that is a red flag.
The third is multi-property management capability: an enterprise layer, a brand layer, and a property layer, so that configurations, authorizations, and user management can all be handled at the right level. Without that architecture, a multi-property company ends up working for the solution instead of the other way around. Duve’s hotel analytics and segmentation tools are built around exactly this layered model, giving portfolio managers visibility across all properties from a single dashboard.
Francesco added something equally important: scalability is not really about rolling out a platform. It is about adoption. A tool can be deployed across an entire portfolio while each property continues using it differently — that is not scalability. True scalability is when every property is actually using the solution consistently, and that requires teams to understand and genuinely believe in the value of changing how they work.
Key takeaway: Ask any vendor you are evaluating for references from hotels in your specific regions, on your specific PMS. Ask how many layers of management the platform supports and how properties can be configured independently within a group account. And ask what their definition of a successful rollout looks like — if the answer is focused only on deployment rather than adoption, that tells you something important.
Scalability is not about rollout. It's about adoption. If each property is using the platform in a different way, that's not a scalability scenario.
Francesco Sforza
Global Guest Experience & Product Development
Radisson Hotel Group
Compliance, regulations, and regional realities
Scaling across multiple countries means navigating compliance requirements that are easy to underestimate. Data privacy legislation, payment rules, and guest registration requirements vary significantly by country, and they keep evolving.
Francesco’s recommendation is to select solutions with modular architectures that can adapt to local requirements without rebuilding from scratch. But he was also candid about limits: sometimes compliance requirements add so much friction to the guest journey that a digital solution simply is not worth implementing in a particular market. If ordering a burger requires four different codes and eight data fields, calling reception is just the better experience.
Jeremy reframed the broader point: hotel groups should not be looking for vendors. They should be looking for partners. Once you start working with a guest experience platform, that company is effectively managing part of your guest relationship. That requires deep alignment – on legislation, on operational workflows, on long-term ambition. If your goal is to grow internationally, you need a partner with the same international reach and orientation toward scale.
Key takeaway: Compliance is not something to evaluate after you have chosen a platform. It should be part of the initial shortlist criteria. Ask vendors directly how they handle data residency requirements, guest registration rules, and payment legislation in each of your active markets. A vendor that cannot answer this with specifics is likely to slow you down post-implementation.
Where guest journey standardization helps most – and where flexibility matters
The panel was clear on this. The parts of the guest journey that benefit most from standardization are the administrative tasks: collecting data, processing payments, routing service requests to the right department. These are tasks that are the same everywhere, carry zero experiential value for the guest, and consume significant staff time. Automating them frees up the team to do what actually builds loyalty – interacting with guests, personalizing their stay, and bringing the brand to life.
Jeremy made the point with a vivid example: there is no reason a guest should stand in line for five to ten minutes at check-in to complete a process that could have been done from home. Duve’s online check-in solution is designed to handle exactly this – removing the queue without removing the welcome. On the operations side, Jeremy uses the number of integrations a hotel has as a proxy for operational efficiency. Each integration represents an automation – digital keys, task management, F&B ordering – and each automation removes manual steps from the staff’s day.
Key takeaway: A simple way to identify what to standardize first is to ask: does this task require any human judgment, or is it the same every time regardless of who the guest is? If the answer is the latter, it is a candidate for automation. Start there, free up your team, and let them redirect that time toward the moments that actually require a human touch.
Driving hotel technology adoption across distributed teams
On adoption, both panelists returned to the same theme: technology does not drive adoption. Value does.
Francesco described Radisson’s approach: create networks of local champions at the property level. When a hotel already using a solution shares its experience – including what is not working – with a property just beginning implementation, it accelerates trust and learning in a way that corporate training cannot replicate. He also stressed the importance of accessible support during peak operational moments. If something goes wrong at the height of check-in and a staff member has to spend ten minutes raising a support ticket that will not be seen for two hours, adoption suffers immediately.
Jeremy reframed who the real customer is in this equation: the staff. The same effort that goes into creating wow moments for hotel guests needs to go into creating wow moments for the team. A sign of genuinely healthy adoption, he noted, is when staff start demanding more from the solution – requesting new features because they are relying on it every day.
The aspiration at Duve is for the solution to be so well-integrated into daily operations that staff do not even notice it running – a receptionist who simply knows that tasks are handled, the loop is closed, and manual follow-up is no longer needed. Duve’s generative AI agents are built around exactly this idea: handling guest inquiries automatically so the team can focus on the moments that matter.
Key takeaway: Before launching a new platform across your portfolio, identify one champion per property – ideally someone on the front desk or operations team, not just a manager. Equip them to become the internal go-to person, and create a channel where champions across properties can share what is working and what is not. This peer network will do more for adoption than any top-down training program.
The best customers we have are the most demanding ones. Because when they're demanding, it means they're driving value from the solution.
Jeremy Atlan
Co-Founder & Chief Business Development Officer
Duve
Measuring the impact of guest experience technology across a portfolio
On measurement, both panelists came back to data, but were specific about what kind.
Francesco’s framework is to look at operational data and guest experience data in parallel, identify patterns, and establish thresholds that indicate balance between the two. Response time, resolution time, and usage rates on the operational side. Online reviews and satisfaction scores on the guest side. When both are trending in the right direction, the solution is working.
He shared a concrete example from Radisson’s resort portfolio: the rollout of an e-concierge solution that let guests book services, order food, and request items directly from their phones. On the guest side, satisfaction scores climbed. On the operations side, the impact was equally significant. Before the solution, a guest requesting a towel triggered a chain of manual calls – from reception to housekeeping manager to floor attendant – with no visibility on delivery. With the platform, the request routed automatically and the loop closed at every step.
Jeremy added that the most revealing data is often the data you were not looking for. He described a hotel that was convinced its spa was the star attraction. Once the platform started logging guest behavior, around 50% of guests were searching for information about parking – something the hotel had completely overlooked. The hotelier rented spaces across the street, listed them on the platform, and they became the hotel’s best-selling item. They also realized later that guests had been choosing not to book at all because of the parking issue. Data does not just measure what you already know is working. It surfaces the things you did not know you were missing.
Key takeaway: Do not wait for end-of-stay review scores to tell you something went wrong. Identify two or three operational metrics that serve as early indicators – response time, task completion rate, online check-in conversion – and track them weekly per property. When operational performance improves, guest satisfaction tends to follow. Build the habit of reading both together, not in separate dashboards.
If the operations are chaotic, guests will perceive this. Slow service, wrong communications - this complexity at system level is very much perceived by your guests on property.
Francesco Sforza
Global Guest Experience & Product Development
Radisson Hotel Group
Where to start: first steps for scaling hotel guest experience
The webinar closed with a practical question: if a hotel group wants to make meaningful progress right now, what are the first steps?
Francesco’s recommendation was to map the customer journey in granular detail, and in plural. Map the ideal experience and the disrupted experience: what happens when check-in goes wrong, when room service fails, when a guest’s expectation is not met. Assign scores to identify the highest-friction points for both guests and staff. Then focus there first, before adding any new layers of innovation. Get the basics working consistently, and only build on top of them once that foundation is solid.
Jeremy added one more dimension: map the types of guests, not just the journey. Different guest segments – OTA bookers versus direct bookings, families versus business travelers, weekday versus weekend guests – have fundamentally different experiences at the hotel. Digitalization gives hotels the ability to treat each guest individually. But that only works if the solution covers 100% of guests. If 20% fall outside the automated journey, you still need a receptionist handling the full 100%. There are no blurry lines.
His final piece of advice: ask better questions before choosing a solution. The worst outcome is choosing the wrong platform, implementing it across a portfolio, and realizing six months later it was never the right fit. Do the harder work upfront – understand how a solution actually integrates into your operation, not just your tech stack – and the rollout will go far more smoothly. Duve’s integrations directory is a good place to start understanding what a connected tech stack actually looks like in practice.
Key takeaway: Start with a pain audit, not a technology search. Gather input from both guests (through reviews and feedback) and staff (through direct conversation) to identify the two or three friction points that cost the most in time, satisfaction, or missed revenue. Then evaluate technology specifically against those problems. This keeps the decision grounded in operational reality rather than feature excitement.
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About the author
The Duve team comprises hospitality experts specializing in guest experience personalization, operational optimization, and innovative hotel technologies. With deep industry knowledge, they help hospitality providers elevate service, enhance satisfaction, and drive growth.