SYSTEM: ADVISORY OPEN  ·  VENDOR-AGNOSTIC  ·  30+ YEARS HOSPITALITY TECH  ·  NL / EU-BASED, GLOBAL CLIENTS  ·  EN / NL
● PATRICK VAN DER WARDT — HOSPITALITY TECHNOLOGY ADVISOR

Hospitality technology, explained without the sales pitch.

I've spent 30+ years building, selling, and now independently advising on hotel technology — from founding a PMS company to leading strategy at Amadeus and Mews. Today I help hoteliers, owners, and investors make sense of their technology stack, with no vendor to sell you.

See how I can help → Book an advisory call
30+
Years in hospitality tech
3
PMS & platform companies built or led
0
Vendors I'm paid to sell
EU
Based, working internationally
About

From founder to independent advisor

I co-founded Brilliant Hotelsoftware, one of the first Windows-based property management systems, and grew it into Itesso before it was acquired by Amadeus in 2015.

From there I moved inside the big platforms myself: senior international roles at Amadeus Hospitality, then VP Sales Mid-Market at Mews, one of Europe's fastest-growing cloud PMS companies. I left Mews in 2024 to go independent, because the advice hoteliers, owners, and investors actually need is advice with no commission attached to it.

As The Hotel IT Guy, I now split my time between two things: helping hotel teams get a realistic, non-hyped start with AI, and advising owners and vendors directly on platform and vendor strategy. I write and speak on LinkedIn in both English and Dutch, for a European audience of GMs, owners, and CDOs.

Working principles

What "vendor-agnostic" actually means in practice:

  • No retainers or commissions from PMS, distribution, or guest-tech vendors.
  • Category precision over hype — I won't blur guest experience platforms, distribution tools, and PMS just to make a bigger story.
  • Structural questions first: what does PMS-native bundling mean for this category, in this deal, for this hotel group?
The manifesto

Hotels weren't being advised on technology.
They were being sold it.

I spent 30 years inside the hotel technology industry — co-founding one of the first cloud-native PMS platforms, watching it get acquired by Amadeus, then helping scale Mews. I sat in hundreds of vendor demo rooms, on both sides of the table. Inside any vendor, the best advice I could give always had a ceiling: the ceiling of what my employer built, what was on the roadmap, this quarter's targets. So I stopped selling anything.

  • No vendor relationships
  • No referral commissions
  • No preferred partners
  • No agenda except the hotel's

Hotels don't need more technology. They need better decisions about technology.

Read the full manifesto on LinkedIn →
Services

Two ways to work with me

Each engagement starts from the same place: no vendor allegiance, and a straight answer even when it isn't the one you were hoping for.

VS-01

Vendor & technology strategy

Independent guidance for hotel groups and owners choosing, replacing, or consolidating their technology stack — PMS, distribution, guest messaging, upsell, and the platforms around them.

Hoteliers & owners
SP-02

Speaking & thought leadership

Talks and panels on hospitality technology, PMS-native bundling, and agentic commerce for hotel distribution — delivered in English or Dutch.

Conferences & private events
Track record

A career logged like a PMS, because that's the industry

Every stop, status-checked.

Stay dates
Role
Property
Status
2024 —
PRESENT

Founder & Advisor

Vendor-agnostic hospitality technology advisory.

The Hotel IT Guy
IN PROGRESS
2023 –
2024

VP Sales, Mid-Market

Scaled the mid-market sales organisation at one of Europe's leading cloud PMS platforms.

Mews
CHECKED OUT
2015 –
2022

Senior international roles

Following the Itesso acquisition, led commercial and strategy functions across Amadeus's hospitality division.

Amadeus Hospitality
CHECKED OUT
— –
2015

Co-founder

Co-founded Brilliant Hotelsoftware, an early Windows-based PMS, later rebranded Itesso and acquired by Amadeus.

Brilliant Hotelsoftware / Itesso
FOUNDATIONAL
Insights

Straight answers to the questions I get most

Short, direct notes — no gated PDF, no email required.

12 AUG 2026

What is PMS-native bundling, and why does it matter?

PMS-native bundling is when a property management system vendor builds guest messaging, upsell, or distribution tools directly into the core platform and offers them at little or no extra cost, rather than a hotel buying those tools separately from specialist vendors.

For hotel owners, the short-term effect looks like savings: one contract instead of five. The structural effect is different. Once a feature is free inside the PMS, the standalone vendor selling that same feature has to out-innovate a bundled, zero-marginal-cost competitor indefinitely — a fight most specialist vendors eventually lose or get acquired to avoid. If you're choosing a point solution today, the question isn't just "is this the best tool right now," it's "is this category likely to be absorbed into the PMS within a contract cycle." That changes which vendors are worth a multi-year commitment.

12 AUG 2026

Should a hotel group build or buy its guest messaging stack?

For almost all independent hotels and small groups, buy. Building only makes sense past a scale where the cost of maintaining custom software is smaller than the cost of paying vendor margin across enough rooms — typically a few thousand rooms under one brand, with an in-house engineering team already in place for other reasons.

The more useful question underneath "build or buy" is usually "buy or wait" — because guest messaging is exactly the kind of category exposed to PMS-native bundling. Locking into a three-year contract with a standalone vendor in a category your PMS provider is actively building into its core product is a different risk than locking into one that isn't. Ask any vendor directly whether their category appears on their PMS partners' public roadmaps, and treat a vague answer as an answer.

12 AUG 2026

Where should a hotel actually start with AI?

Start with the operational task that already has clean, structured data behind it — dynamic pricing, demand forecasting, or reply drafting for guest messages — not with a general-purpose chatbot bolted onto the website. The data quality of the starting point determines whether the result is useful in month one or month twelve.

Most hotel AI disappointment traces back to the same mistake: buying a feature before the underlying data — PMS records, historical rates, guest profiles — was clean enough to make that feature reliable. A realistic first step is a short internal audit of where your data already is clean versus fragmented, then picking the AI use case that sits on the clean side. That's a smaller, less exciting first project than most vendor demos promise, and it's the one that actually compounds.

Contact

Start with a short call

Tell me what you're deciding on — a vendor question, a strategy review, or a speaking engagement — and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.

Book a meeting → Email instead
  • Vendor & strategy advisory — for owners and technology vendors
  • Speaking & thought leadership — for conferences and private events