Choosing hotel technology that will still be there in five years

Feature lists are easy to write and easy to match. What separates systems that survive is how they behave when something goes wrong at 2am.

Ask what happens when the connection to your PMS drops. If the answer is vague, the events are being dropped. If the answer includes retries, backoff and a visible dead-letter queue, somebody has thought about your data.

Ask whether the system writes into your operational data. Anything that writes into reservations or folios becomes a dependency of the front desk, and dependencies are what make migrations impossible later.

Ask how you leave. A vendor confident in their product will tell you plainly how to export your data and disconnect.

Finally, ask who you speak to when it breaks. For an independent hotel, a named person matters more than a status page.