Before there were apps, there were innkeepers who remembered your name. Before there was a POS system, there was a bartender who knew what you ordered and had it ready before you sat down. Hospitality has always been personal — somewhere along the way, we started designing that out of the experience.

The US hotel industry alone is closing in on $805 billion in guest spending annually. The money is there. But the operators growing fastest right now aren't the ones with the most technology — they're the ones who figured out how to use technology to get back to what hospitality actually is. A human experience.

The question worth asking is: when did your venue stop feeling like a place and start feeling like a transaction?