By Kevin Rohani
Third-party delivery platforms offered hotels a practical way to meet guest dining expectations without expanding kitchens, adding labor or building new service infrastructure. The model quickly became a normal—and expected—part of the hospitality landscape, giving guests more dining options while reducing operational burden for hotel teams.
For some hotels, third-party delivery helped offset the complexity of operating F&B programs. For others, particularly limited-service properties that were never designed with on-demand service infrastructure, it filled a gap that had always existed.
For a while, that made sense.
But as dining became a larger part of the guest journey and hotels invested more heavily in connected guest experiences, many began taking a closer look at where third-party delivery fits within the broader hotel ecosystem—and whether it was doing more harm than good.
The operational impact shows up on property
Even when the hotel isn’t managing the service, the experience is still unfolding inside the property, altering its operations—little by little.
Delivery drivers circulate through guest areas. Lobbies become pickup points. Staff spend time managing access questions and helping resolve confusion. While guests may see a simple ordering experience, hotels often absorb the operational burden that comes with it.
But, most importantly, guests rarely separate their experiences with third-party delivery services from the stay itself.
When a delivery arrives late, the guest is unlikely to distinguish between the platform, the restaurant and the property. The experience happened at the hotel, so it unfortunately becomes part of the hotel’s overall impression whether the property controlled it or not.
Over time, those disconnects add up. Dining becomes even more separate from the stay experience, making it harder for hotels to maintain visibility, deliver consistency and strengthen guest relationships.
And the issue extends far beyond food delivery. Part of the guest experience now operates outside the hotel’s ecosystem while still shaping how guests experience the stay.
Dining moved outside the hotel ecosystem
Third-party delivery changed more than how guests order food. It allowed hotels to meet guest service expectations without building their own service infrastructure, but it also changed where part of the guest experience takes place—and who owns the visibility into it.
At the brand level, dining activity often happens outside the systems hotels use to understand and engage guests. As a result, a meaningful part of the stay can occur without the context hotels rely on to shape future interactions and build stronger guest relationships.
Operations teams experience the effects most directly. Hotels remain accountable for the guest experience even when they’re not managing the transaction. Yet some of the interactions taking place inside the property occur outside the systems hotels use to understand and serve guests. Despite remaining responsible for the overall guest experience, hotels end up losing visibility into guest interactions that occur during the stay.
Ownership groups face a different concern. Dining spend that once flowed through the property can shift elsewhere, along with opportunities to engage guests while they are on-site. The impact is rarely tied to a single transaction but instead accumulates gradually as more guest interactions occur outside the property’s visibility.
The result is a guest experience that spans multiple systems and providers, even though guests still view it as part of a single hotel stay. As those disconnects become more visible, hotels are looking more closely at how these experiences fit into the broader stay.
Hotels are reconsidering where the guest experience lives
Third-party delivery is not going away. Guests now expect convenience, flexibility and broad dining options. Hotels are no longer debating whether to support those expectations. The conversation is now focused largely on how those experiences connect back to the broader stay.
Across the industry, hotels are exploring ways to better connect these experiences to the broader guest journey. Some are rethinking room service models. Others are looking for ways to connect on-property service activity more closely with hotel operations and guest engagement efforts. But the common goal remains the same: gaining greater insight into experiences that shape the stay regardless of who ultimately fulfills the service.
The goal is not to eliminate convenience. It’s to ensure convenience remains connected to the hotel experience rather than operating alongside it.
As hotels invest more heavily in personalization and loyalty, understanding what happens during the stay becomes crucial. The more connected those experiences are to the broader guest journey, the easier it becomes to create a stay that feels intentional from check-in to check-out.
What began as a practical solution to a dining challenge is now influencing how hospitality leaders think about guest engagement during the stay. In an industry so focused on personalization and loyalty, the ability to turn guest interactions into meaningful engagement opportunities is becoming just as important as facilitating the service itself.
Kevin Rohani is founder/CEO of CAMO, the infrastructure platform powering hotel-branded room service. A hospitality executive with more than 15 years of experience, he previously led development for Accor’s Lifestyle portfolio and SBE and has held leadership roles at Dream Hotel Group and Gensler.
This is a contributed piece to Hotel Business, authored by an industry professional. The thoughts expressed are the perspective of the bylined individual.