The response I heard most often during BD was not confusion.
It was recognition.
The few operators willing to sit down and talk already knew that OTA commissions were high, that guest data did not really belong to them, that loyalty was hard to build, and that paid marketing was becoming more expensive and less precise.
The problem was not hidden.
What I did not understand early enough was that recognition and movement are two different things.
I had assumed that if the pain was real enough, and the solution made enough sense, the market would eventually lean towards it.
After a full round of BD, a handful of MOUs, and more “yes, this is a real issue, but not now” conversations than I care to count, I stopped believing that.
In hospitality, especially in smaller and more independent businesses, the existence of a pain point and the likelihood of adoption are not the same thing at all.
This was not a problem I invented in a slide deck
Independent properties sit in an awkward position.
OTAs remain powerful distribution channels. They bring global demand and visible bookings. For many independent hotels, they are the most immediate and dependable path to occupancy.
The problem is what comes with that convenience.
Once traffic, ranking, pricing pressure, member perks and even parts of the customer relationship are bundled through an intermediary, it becomes harder for the hotel itself to turn guests into anything durable.
That is where loyalty starts to break down.
Large chains can absorb this more easily because they usually have their own membership systems, CRM infrastructure, direct booking habits and long-term marketing budgets. Independent hotels often do not.
That is why alliance models and shared loyalty infrastructures kept catching my attention. The exact mechanics vary, but the direction is similar: helping fragmented brands regain some of the capabilities that chains take for granted.
That was the heart of what I thought Nites Alliance could become.
What we were actually trying to build
Nites Alliance, in its more mature form, was not meant to be another OTA.
It was not just a marketing tool either.
The easiest way to describe it is as an alliance layer for independent hospitality businesses.
A guest checks into a property and scans a hotel-specific QR code at the front desk. Their information flows directly into the hotel’s side and into our system. The front desk avoids paper forms and manual entry. The guest fills things in once rather than repeating the same ritual at every property.
From there, the hotel regains something it usually struggles to keep: a usable relationship with the guest. It can offer repeat-stay incentives, direct booking discounts, and more intentional communication. On our side, the data can be processed into a structure that supports better targeting. When a hotel wants to promote a campaign, a seasonal offer or a specific room type, the system can look at prior stays, travel patterns, preferences and other signals, then send something more relevant than the usual broad and wasteful blast.
The reason I believed in that model was not that AI happened to be fashionable. It was that hospitality marketing for independents is often scattered, imprecise and structurally weak. AI, RAG and agentic workflows finally made it possible to imagine cross-property targeting as a product rather than a concept slide.
Technically, this was buildable.
The problem was not whether it could run.
The problem was that adoption made it deeply uncomfortable to run.
The wall was not technical. It was behavioural
This was one of the most expensive lessons in the whole venture.
I had assumed that once hotel operators understood the proposition, at least a meaningful subset would move quickly.
Instead, a different set of questions appeared almost immediately.
The first was brutally practical.
Can you bring us guests now?
If the answer was not immediate, interest often started sliding backwards.
That is not irrational. An OTA may be expensive, but it is also familiar and legible. If you arrive with a new system, a new workflow and a longer-term promise, but no instant occupancy benefit, you are asking them to redirect scarce attention away from something predictable and into something that may be strategically better yet operationally uncertain.
The second issue was friction.
Front desks are busy. Customer service teams are busy. Smaller hospitality businesses are usually understaffed. If your product requires extra explanation, extra training or a visible process change, it becomes vulnerable very quickly. Plenty of outbound emails never reach the real decision-maker. And even when they do, something often evaporates between “this is worth considering” and “this belongs in our priorities this quarter”.
The third problem was more subtle.
When I explained the alliance idea, some people lit up at first. But the moment the conversation moved towards data, members and cross-property activity, another thought often surfaced in the room.
If these guests enter the alliance, are they still my guests?
That concern was not irrational either.
I had designed loyalty and re-engagement loops with the hope that the alliance would not simply create guest drift, but actually strengthen direct return paths. Still, from the hotel’s point of view, the first thing visible was not the flywheel in my head. It was the possibility of losing control.
And then there was the platform question.
A lot of independent operators know they are dependent. They know the economics are unhealthy. They know the relationship with OTAs is asymmetrical. But knowing that does not mean they are willing to test a new path while their cash flow still relies heavily on the old one.
That is when I started saying it more plainly to myself.
I was addressing a real problem, but not one that would be adopted simply because it was real.
The working rule I came away with
This is not a universal law. It is a judgement sharpened by that particular experience.
For conservative B2B markets, especially those entangled with two-sided dynamics or network effects, early adoption usually depends on at least three conditions.
First, the short-term value needs to be direct. It does not have to mean immediate revenue, but the customer needs to feel that something visible improves soon: occupancy, repeat bookings, conversion, operational time, something.
Second, implementation friction needs to stay low. If it asks too much of staff behaviour, process change or front-line training, it becomes vulnerable early.
Third, the risk needs to feel light. The customer cannot feel that by adopting your product they are also volunteering to absorb platform risk, workflow risk, customer service risk or data risk.
If even one of those three conditions feels too heavy, the product may not die on demand. It dies on adoption.
In my case, all three were touched.
The value was not immediate enough.
The workflow friction was not trivial.
The perceived risk was too high.
That was also why I eventually began questioning whether B-side-first was really the right opening move. The moment a hotel asks, how many users do you already have, the situation is already telling you something. In products like this, the B-side is often not buying your roadmap. It is buying evidence that someone else has already moved.
In other words, it is buying an existing fact pattern.
None of this is universally true
It would be too neat if I stopped there.
If the product had been a direct occupancy tool rather than a loyalty layer, the response could have been completely different. In tougher seasons, hotels may become more willing to try new channels. If the entry point had come through PMS vendors, channel managers, consultants or a stronger distribution partner, the friction would also have looked different. And if I had already controlled a meaningful consumer base, the alliance narrative would have landed more easily.
So I do not write this as “the market was foolish” or “hoteliers refuse to change”.
The more honest version is that I was solving a real problem, but my chosen entry path, trust levers and adoption sequence were not strong enough yet.
Timing played a role. Resources played a role. My own judgement limitations played a role.
The dry conclusion I am left with
What I distrust now is the comforting belief that large pain points naturally educate the market.
Many markets are not painless. They are just painful in ways people have learnt to survive.
Many customers do not reject value because they cannot see it. They reject it because someone has to carry the risk first.
And many B2B products are not defeated by competition so much as by the current state being familiar, stable enough, and not important enough to justify another internal meeting.
That is why my relationship with Nites Alliance remains complicated.
I still believe the underlying problem matters. I still believe independent hospitality needs stronger loyalty and relationship infrastructure than most operators currently possess. What I no longer believe is that a true problem causes motion by itself.
It does not.
Movement begins only when the customer feels that change will not be too painful, the downside will not land on them first, and ideally there is something tangible to taste fairly quickly.
If that order is wrong, even a very strong vision can remain trapped inside a deck.
The next piece is more personal. It is about why I finally paused the venture, not because I stopped believing in the problem, but because there are times when staying alive is the more mature decision.