Why we started Six Hoteliers
It started at ITB Berlin, spring 2024. Six of us at a bar in Charlottenburg after the conference hall closed, doing what hoteliers do when you put them together with beer: complaining about software.
Not about the software itself (though there was plenty of that too) but about trying to find honest information before buying it.
The problem
Search for a hotel software review online. Go on, try it now. What you’ll find is this:
Review sites where the ranking depends on who pays the highest placement fee. Affiliate blogs where every product scores 4.5 out of 5 because the commission only arrives if you click “start free trial.” Comparison pages built by the vendors themselves, which is a bit like asking a barber if you need a haircut. And G2 reviews that are either written by the vendor’s sales team (“Absolutely transformed our operations!!! 5 stars!!!”) or by someone who had a terrible onboarding call (“Nothing works. 1 star.”).
None of this answers the questions we actually have when we’re deciding whether to spend money on something our hotel will depend on. Questions like: can my summer staff learn this in a day? Where is the data physically stored? Does the PMS integration actually work or is it a one-way data read that someone in marketing labelled “full integration”? What’s the real cost after setup, training, and the features you inevitably need but that live behind the premium tier?
You can’t answer those questions from a thirty-minute demo. You can’t answer them by summarising a features page. You answer them by installing the software, paying for it yourself, training your staff on it, running it for a season, and forming an opinion the slow way.
Why there are six of us
One hotelier’s opinion is just that. One opinion, shaped by one hotel, one market, one set of priorities. But the six of us happen to care about different things, and between us we cover most of what matters.
I look at whether technology improves or degrades the guest experience. Anna reads the data processing agreement before she reads the features page. Marc checks where the company is headquartered and who funds it. Elena hands the software to her newest hire and times how long it takes. Thomas opens the API documentation. Sophie opens a spreadsheet.
Separately, each of us has blind spots. Together, we cover the angles that matter when you’re choosing software your hotel will live with for years.
What this isn’t
We’re not a media company. Nobody invested in us. We don’t have a content calendar or a growth strategy or a plan to monetise anything. The word “monetise” makes Sophie uncomfortable and the rest of us aren’t far behind.
We’re not neutral. We have opinions. Marc will always be sceptical of non-European vendors. Sophie will always want to see the pricing before she’ll look at the features. Anna will always read the privacy policy. These aren’t weaknesses. They’re the same biases any real hotelier brings to a purchasing decision, stated openly rather than hidden.
We’re not comprehensive. We test what we can actually test in our own hotels, which means European-relevant tools, mostly. We’d rather review five products thoroughly than fifty superficially. If a tool isn’t here, it’s not because we think it’s bad. We probably just haven’t got to it yet.
The rules
Somewhere between the second and third round that evening in Berlin, we agreed on a few things:
- We pay for our own subscriptions. No free access, no vendor trials extended as a favour.
- No vendor sees a review before we publish it.
- No affiliate links. Not now, not ever.
- First names only. We’re not here to build personal brands.
- If we change our mind about a tool (because it improved, or because we were wrong) we update the review and say so.
- We disagree publicly. If Marc thinks a tool is unacceptable and Sophie thinks it’s excellent value, both opinions go up.
The moment you compromise on independence, you become every other review site. We’ve all read enough of those.
What comes next
We started with guest communication because that’s where the frustration was sharpest. Property management systems are next, then door locks, then revenue management.
It’ll be slow. We run hotels. This happens in the margins: early mornings, the quiet weeks in January, the occasional evening when we should probably be doing something else. Don’t expect a new article every week. Expect them to be honest when they arrive.
If you’re a hotelier who’s spent an evening reading software reviews written by someone who’s never had to explain to a guest at two in the morning why the key card system is down, this is for you.
- James, for all six of us