Let me be candid and am sure most here would agree - Hotels are sheer laggards when it comes to technology. They were the leaders decades back, but since then, hotel-technologists entrenched themselves in tech solutions which were on-premise and mammothian. Only now they are looking towards on-cloud solutions(hesitantly, due to the heavy legacy). 

This happened with the banks in early 2000s, and happened with Consumer goods and Retail industries in the 2010s. Each of their business heads said, "Technology is not our business, let the CTO take care of it. We are in the business of Money, or customer service, or distribution, or sales." All of them had to pivot and respond to the digital savvy new entrants. Technology has been seen as an enabler by the Hospitliaty industry. Thats Wrong. Its a value creator. 

Right now, in front of us is a Leapfrog moment. A stage where we can let go of intermediate stages of evolution of tech and jump to the next stage, bypassing it. Blockchain Technology is that Leapfrog opportunity. 

Am doing gross injustice by bucketing everything into the same bucket here, cos the solutions enabled via blockchain and the possibilities have varying ranges of impact, efficacy, costs and timeline to fructify.

While there are huge opportunities on loyalty, identity, self-checkin solutions, and other customer facing applications, the RoI on the underlying distribution restructuring is massive, with benefits around Pricing and distribution control.

Tokenized distribution - While there are tokenized and non-tokenized distribution models for hotels, Tokenization provides the maximum bang to buck! 8-10% increase in RevPAR. Ability to tokenize each piece of your asset (Each room-night) is massive with huge opportunities.

Distribution control - This enables you to open up your distribution channel to the whole world, while exerting control on who can access it. Something like Youtube - You can share your hotel rooms to the whole world, but you can also decide if you dont want a resident of a particular country to view it. Imagine as a luxury property, you want to sell to Luxuryescapes.com, but never ever want your inventory reaching BargainHotelDeals.com. Today, no fool proof solution exists as inventory can seep through via bedbanks, DMCs and multiple other invisible intermediaries. When you can control where your inventory is selling, you control the type of guests who walks in, which will reflect in your ancillary revenue as well. Tokenized inventory distribution can help here.

Pricing Control - Today, pricing control is enabled by pricing contracts. Long and arduous process that takes weeks to establish, and  months to identify deviations and quarters to penalize the intermediaries who didnt comply. Tokenized inventory can enable granular price control, enforced in every transaction, not monitored(post mortem), but enforced. Imagine giving a key to every empanneled partner of yours, which unlocks a special price, a special rebate and a special rate code, only when the key is used. Any other key when used, only get access to the pricing that they have. So your star distributor gets a 20% discount, while your not-so-great Bedbank is restricted with a 10% discount, when he tries to access the SAME inventory. Again, enforced at point of purchase/booking, not at point of billing, settlement or payment.

Bye Bye Price Parity - And when you have price control, Price parity decisions move to the hotels' control. Hotels now are in control of  floor price and ceiling price that a particular token(Room-Night) can sell at. Not just during primary sale, but every secondary, tertiary or any transfer of this token as it happens for perpetuity. Blockchain can enable this. Imagine you  as hotelier mandating an OTA to not sell below a certain price; Not requesting by a legal agreement or email, but mandating it programatacially, failing which the booking never confirms. Imagine how much time-money you would be freeing up in terms of legal, accounting calculations, settlements and fines, when you have the strength to programmatically enforce. Not monitor and perform corrective actions, but ensure that never happens in the first place. This itself is huge savings. 

Proof of Stay - Tokenized stay can also solve the huge problem around reputation management online & loyalty distribution. How many $ do you spend annually, on reputation management solutions, which actually check if the online-reviewer stayed in your property or not, perform the matching and evaluating corrective action. With tokenized stays, we can create a Proof-of-Stay- A verifiable online transaction which can identify each guest, their stay and their reviews. NO more competitor botching up your ratings or bad players increasing their own ratings, without any legit stays. Each stay can be "Verified" automatically based on the presence of Token(Room-Night stay NFT), thus no more verification tools. 

The savings that would come in eliminating the above mentioned softwares from application landscape itself can make it to huge savings. All of the above can be implemented with near zero-technical upgrade or costs! 

Huge potential savings & margin improvement lie for hoteliers who choose to leapfrog ahead.