Why Big Hotel Groups Need Small Task Forces

Chief Commercial Officers and hotel revenue leaders know the frustration: large hotel groups, for all their resources, often move at a glacial pace compared to nimble independent hotels. A boutique property can pivot its strategy in a week, while a global chain might take months of committees and approvals. It’s a classic tortoise-and-hare scenario, the big brand has the heft, but the little guys often outrun them in implementing new ideas.

Industry observers note that independent hotels thrive on flexibility, unburdened by the rigid structures that slow down large chains.

Big Brands vs. Indie Hotels

Let’s face it; size can be a double-edged sword. Large hotel groups dominate on scale and resources. They have centralised tech, big loyalty programs, and loads of data. Yet those same advantages can breed bureaucracy. Layers of hierarchy, complex legacy systems, and fear of rocking the boat all conspire to make big chains slow to change. Meanwhile, an independent hotel (or a small chain of five to ten) can try something new on the fly without seeking approval from ten departments. As one industry report put it, “flexibility is a major strength of independent hotels”, whereas “large chains with rigid structures” struggle to respond quickly. We’ve all seen it. A boutique hotel adopts the latest guest messaging app or ups its sustainability game well before the big brands catch on.

Why does this agility gap matter? Because the hospitality playing field is shifting rapidly. New channels, new guest expectations, and new technologies are emerging every day. In previous articles, we discussed how generative AI is changing search; what we dubbed “GPT Engine Optimisation.” Essentially the new SEO for AI-driven travel search. Travellers are starting to ask ChatGPT or voice assistants for hotel recommendations, meaning if you’re not quick to adapt your digital strategy, you risk invisibility. Early adopters of these AI-focused strategies are already gaining a competitive edge by showing up in conversational search results. The point is, the landscape can change overnight. Large hotel groups cannot afford to remain lumbering giants while more agile players (or tech-savvy newcomers) sprint ahead in response to trends.

Task Forces: Pilot, Iterate, Scale

Instead of rolling out a massive initiative across your whole portfolio in one go, assemble a small, cross-functional task force to pilot it on a limited scale first. Think of these task forces as your internal start-up teams or SWAT units for innovation. They’re nimble by design, usually a handful of people pulled from different departments (e.g. operations, marketing, IT, revenue management) with a clear mandate to test a specific idea quickly and cheaply.

For example, say you want to implement a new AI-driven pricing tool or a guest mobile app. In a big chain’s normal mode, this would involve RFPs, corporate IT integrations, months of planning, and a global rollout. Instead, the task force approach would launch it in one pilot hotel first. The team might pick a single property and launch the new tool there in a real-world environment. Crucially, they operate with start-up-style freedom: cut the red tape, run with a minimal viable product.

Fast feedback loops are a major benefit of this approach. The task force can gather real guest and staff feedback within days or weeks. If something’s not working, they’ll know early and long before you’ve hardwired it into 100+ hotels. This iterative pilot mentality is common in tech companies, and it’s high time large hotel groups embrace it. As one hotel tech leader famously said, “When you’re deciding on a technology, you have to test and learn... You’ve got to pilot something small and if it works, figure out how to industrialise it.”

Let’s break down how this might look in practice:

• Stage 1: One Hotel Pilot. A task force rolls out the new initiative at a single location. They keep it scrappy and focused, gathering data on what works and what doesn’t in a real hotel environment. Maybe it’s one city-centre property testing a new upselling algorithm or a resort piloting a contactless check-in kiosk.

• Stage 2: Five Hotel Trial. If the pilot shows promise (key metrics move in the right direction, and operational kinks are ironed out), expand the experiment to a handful of diverse hotels. This is important. Choose a mix of properties (e.g. different regions or service levels) to see how the idea adapts in varying contexts. The task force might grow by a person or two here, but it’s still a small, tight-knit crew driving the project.

• Stage 3: Full Portfolio Rollout. Only after success in stage 2 do you commit to group-wide implementation. By now, you have evidence and playbooks from the pilot hotels, and the rollout will be smoother. The task force can transition into a training and support squad for the broader organisation as the initiative scales to all properties.

  
  

This phased approach turns transformation into a sequence of small wins instead of one huge bet. It’s essentially “test early, fail small, succeed sooner.” Notice that at each stage, there are go/no-go decision points. If the pilot flops or reveals a fatal flaw, you’ve lost maybe a couple months and one hotel’s effort, not a year and a multi-million dollar budget blown across your entire brand. If it succeeds, you’ve built momentum and internal buy-in naturally.

Lower Risk & Faster Learning

Traditional top-down rollouts in large hotel groups are often high-stakes affairs. With big investments, long timelines, and all-or-nothing outcomes. It’s no wonder they inspire fear. A lot can go wrong when you change everything everywhere overnight. By contrast, the task force pilot method is inherently lower risk. Industry best practices in tech rollouts back this up. A phased pilot deployment is “less risky than a Big Bang” because you can catch issues early and make improvements on the fly. Think of it as pressure-testing in a controlled environment. A limited pilot means that if one piece of the new tech or process fails, it doesn’t wreak havoc on your entire organisation. You contain the blast radius.

As an additional (or main) perk, these fast feedback loops accelerate learning. In a traditional rollout, you might spend a year building a system, only to learn after launch that employees hate it or a crucial feature is missing. Too late, you’ve already rolled it everywhere. With a small task force iterating in real time, you get a continuous stream of insights from the field. Maybe the new guest app confuses international travellers; the pilot hotel’s front-desk team discovers that in week one and the task force tweaks the interface. Perhaps the AI pricing tool initially over-discounted weekends. The revenue manager on the task force catches it and refines the algorithm before broader deployment. These quick corrections are only possible when you have a tight feedback loop.

Another benefit: user buy-in. Pilots let you cultivate internal champions at the hotel level who feel ownership of the project. Those front-line employees who helped improve the tool during the pilot become your cheerleaders when it’s time to train other hotels. Contrast this with the typical top-down edict (“Corporate says we have to use this new system starting Monday”) which often meets quiet resistance. By involving real users early, the task force approach turns skeptics into co-creators.

From a risk management standpoint, the approach is akin to the scientific method. You start with a hypothesis (e.g. “contactless check-in will raise guest satisfaction by 20% and cut queue times in half”), then test it in a mini-experiment. If the data validates the hypothesis, great, expand it. If not, you iterate or even abort the initiative without having sunk the entire ship. Sometimes the best outcome of a pilot is learning what not to do.

Bridging the Best of Both Worlds

Adopting small task forces and pilots doesn’t mean abandoning the advantages of being a large hotel group. Quite the opposite. The goal is to combine the agility of a startup with the power of scale that big brands enjoy. A well-run pilot can act as a bridge between the nimbleness of independents and the muscle of a global chain. Here’s how:

• Agility of Small Players: In pilot mode, your task force operates almost like an independent boutique hotel. They can make quick decisions, customise approaches, and pivot based on feedback without bureaucratic delays. This recaptures the creative energy and speed that big organisations often lose.

• Scale of Large Players: Once that pilot is refined and proven, the large group can deploy it at scale far beyond what any independent could. You have the capital, the infrastructure, and the market access to take a good idea and amplify it across dozens or hundreds of properties. It’s the “weaponised” version of the innovation, powered by your scale.

  
  

In essence, task force pilots let big hotel companies innovate like a small company, then scale like a big company. You’re leveraging your size as an advantage rather than a liability. Using one part of the portfolio as a testing ground that ultimately benefits the whole. It’s a way to sidestep the usual big-company inertia and institutionalise agility.

Just as we’ve encouraged hospitality leaders to question old metrics (for instance, we recently challenged the over-reliance on RevPAR as a be-all metric), we should also question the old ways of rolling out change. Why launch new initiatives like it’s 1995, when you can break them into modular experiments? Ensuring your organisation stays adaptable.

Importantly, this approach doesn’t undercut the value of standardisation or consistency that large brands need. Some hotel executives worry that doing things differently in one hotel will confuse the operation or dilute the brand. In practice, a well-managed pilot is contained and communicated as an experiment. Guests understand when one property is trialing a new service (often they love being “beta testers”), and staff at other hotels aren’t thrown off. In fact many will clamour “When do we get to try it?” if they see the pilot hotel getting great results. Once ready for rollout, the task force will have playbooks ready so the scaling is orderly and brand-aligned. You end up with group-wide change that has been battle-tested and fine-tuned, rather than something unproven being forced onto all properties at once.

Stress-Test Before You Invest

There’s another huge benefit to the task force pilot approach that hospitality leaders shouldn’t overlook: building a future-ready data strategy. In today’s world, data flows are the lifeblood of digital transformation, especially with AI and personalisation on the rise. But implementing new data pipelines, analytics platforms, or AI models at an enterprise level can be incredibly complex (and expensive) to get right. A pilot gives you a smart way to stress-test your data inputs and integrations on a small scale before committing them to your full enterprise stack.

We saw this principle in our “Getting Ready For AI” discussion. The importance of leveraging and preparing your data to be AI-ready. The task force pilot is where the rubber meets the road for that idea. It’s much easier to adjust APIs or data warehouses for a single hotel pilot than for 500 hotels after rollout. In fact, even the decision of 'what data matters' can be informed by pilots. You might hypothesise that pulling in weather data will improve forecasting for an AI revenue tool; the pilot will quickly tell you if that’s true or a red herring.

In short, task-force pilots de-risk the data side of transformation. They help ensure that when you do wire something into the enterprise tech stack, it’s been validated with real operational data and you’re not “hardwiring” assumptions that don’t hold up. Given how critical data and analytics are to everything from revenue management to personalised marketing (and feeding those fancy AI models we all want to use), this alone is a compelling reason to adopt a pilot-first mentality.

From Monoliths to Modular Experiments: A New Mindset for Transformation

Perhaps the biggest shift leaders need to make is a mental one: stop thinking of organisation-wide change as a monolithic push, and start thinking of it as a series of modular experiments. The old way of transformation in big hotel groups was like turning a huge cruise ship; slow and arduous. The new way is more like deploying a fleet of speedboats that can explore, chart a course, and then collectively tow the ocean liner in the right direction. It’s about creating a culture where trying, learning, and adapting trump lengthy planning and CYA (cover-your-ass) manoeuvres.

Large hotel groups don’t have to be slow-moving giants. By empowering small, agile task forces to pilot initiatives, you can harness the innovative spark of a boutique hotel and then scale it with the power of a global brand. It’s the best of both worlds. Fast learning, controlled risk, and ultimately, transformational change that sticks. In an era when technology and guest expectations are evolving faster than ever, this approach isn’t just nice to have – it’s essential. The future will belong to those who can learn fast and adapt faster. So break down those monoliths into modules, and watch your organization’s ability to change accelerate. Your tortoise of a hotel group might just turn into the hare after all.