Over two intense, energising days - 17-18 September 2025, at ICC Sydney - I had the privilege to meet with hundreds of hoteliers, customers and partners at NoVacancy 2025.
There was more than "just another trade show" in the air this year. The tone was sharply focused on transformation - of technology, operations, guest experience and sustainability. I returned with clearer conviction about where our industry is headed, what hoteliers urgently need now, and how our platform and team can help lead and serve.
Guests now expect more than clean rooms and functional service - they want choice. The majority of business and leisure travellers expect a connected, intuitive experience, blending personalisation with frictionless communication. From smart room settings (locks, lighting) to pre-arrival messaging and flexible check-in/out, these are no longer luxuries - they are competitive differentiators.
In conversations with hoteliers - from large enterprises to boutique operators - it was clear that labour, supply, and energy costs are no longer just "issues" but breaking points.
Everyone is looking for ways to reduce friction in daily tasks: managing inventory, synchronising rates across channels, streamlining housekeeping, and accelerating guest check-in/out. Many are still carrying technology debt: older PMS, manual integrations, fractured data flows. That's why cloud systems, modern APIs, and tighter integrations are no longer "nice to have" - they're table stakes.
One phrase I heard repeatedly at NoVacancy - in panels and prospect conversations alike - was "single source of truth."
Hoteliers are drowning in duplicate data: multiple profiles for the same guest across PMS, channel managers, CRM, and marketing systems.
At RMS, we see the evolution of our Golden Guest Record as a key driver of a truly unified, automated, and intelligent guest experience - not just a database of reservations, but the living memory of the relationship between a property and its guests. Enhanced with automation and AI, the Golden Guest Record ensures hoteliers can:
It's also a theme that resonated in SiteMinder's partnership conversations. Distribution and revenue management are only as powerful as the data that feeds them. If you can sync inventory in real time but your guest records are fractured, you're leaving value on the table.
An independent hotel operator told me that while they love top-end features (guest apps, IoT, automation), what they really need is reliability, simplicity, and local knowledgeable support. They are trying to flatten their tech stack and spend, focusing on core solutions and partners that have strong integrations with the key systems they need to lighten their load.
Prospects exploring their PMS options were very interested in our innovative product roadmap: not just new features, but how we’re solving complex guest experience and payments problems with game changing automation, supporting compliance, data privacy, and scale without paying for "enterprise" premiums when they are still growing.
Our Partners echoed the same: they see opportunity in helping hotels "close the gaps" - whether between PMS ⇄ channel managers, between operations and guest communications, or even between sustainability metrics and cost savings.
One of the highlights of NoVacancy this year was announcing our new strategic partnership with SiteMinder. Through SiteMinder's new UltraSync connectivity capabilities, RMS will be one of the first PMS platforms to deeply integrate with their next-generation revenue platform.
This integration connects the RMS PMS directly with SiteMinder's Dynamic Revenue Plus, synchronising rates, restrictions, and reservations in real time. For hoteliers, this means fewer manual updates, fewer errors, and far more confidence that pricing decisions are consistent across every channel. We are collapsing the tech stack between decision and distribution.
What excites me most is how this partnership empowers independent hotels, groups, and resorts, who often operate with leaner teams and fragmented systems. By automating pricing and reservation processes, we're helping operators respond to demand shifts in real time, improve accuracy, and reclaim time that would otherwise be lost to admin.
It's another step toward our broader vision: a future where hotel technology is seamlessly connected, agentic, and designed to put hoteliers back in control.
NoVacancy also confirmed a larger pattern we see accelerating across hospitality technology:
NoVacancy 2025 reaffirmed for me that we are in an inflection point.
The era of siloed systems, of patchwork integrations, of premium features that only the luxury end can afford - those are being challenged.
For RMS, I'm more committed than ever to ensuring our roadmap reflects this direction - to making integrations seamless, democratize data, to empowering hoteliers small and large, to bringing insight that matters, and to continuing to strengthen what our partners bring to the table.
Thanks to all customers, partners, prospects I met at NoVacancy. As always we are focused on building a stronger, more profitable and sustantiable industry for all hoteliers, with Your Guests at the heart of Our Mission.
- Adam