A guest at a 240-room coastal resort, Wednesday afternoon at 2:14pm. He has checked in, dropped his bags, and is now trying to do five things: book two spa treatments (his, hers), reserve a tee time Thursday at 10, put the kids in tennis at 3, get a high chair for the 6pm dinner he has not booked yet, and figure out if the marina will rent him a paddleboard at 4.
He goes to the front desk because he does not know what else to do. The receptionist can answer one of these. She has to call the spa for the second. The golf tee time is on a different system entirely. Tennis goes through recreation. Dinner is on OpenTable. The marina is in a binder. Forty-three minutes later he has booked three of the five. The other two are still pending a callback that will not come before they need to leave for tennis.
He paid $680 for the room last night. He intended to spend $900 on the other five things by Friday. He will spend, in the actual outcome, $340.
This is the gap between the thing the hotel is selling and the thing the guest is trying to buy. And at most full-service and resort properties, it is where more than half of the operating theater is.
The room is the entry point. The rest is where the margin lives.
RevPAR, the metric every GM tracks, measures revenue per available room. It is a room-side metric. It was designed, reasonably, for an era when the rooms line carried most of the economics.
That era is over at the full-service and resort segment. CBRE’s July 2025 analysis of U.S. hotel operating data lays it out:
Food and beverage (F&B) departments have historically been the second-largest source of revenue in the industry. F&B revenue grew 3.8% in H1 2025, outpacing total revenue growth. Luxury and resort properties saw the largest F&B-per-occupied-room gains.
CBRE, Hotel F&B: A Bright Spot in 2025
F&B is not the line the property talks about when it talks about performance. It is the line that is actually growing faster than rooms. And at resorts, it is the line that closes the guest’s day: where the $680 room turns into $1,200 total spend.
Spa is the same story in a smaller column. CBRE’s separate analysis of 297 hotels with spas (222 resort-market, 176 luxury) finds:
Spa revenue averaged 3.4% of total revenue industry-wide, 4.2% at luxury, 3.5% at resort locations. Luxury spa PAR was $9,847, vs. $3,197 upper-upscale and $3,467 upscale.
CBRE, The Role of Hotel Spa Departments
Then there is golf (at the properties that have it), recreation, retail, parking, in-room dining, late-departure fees, and cabanas. None of these are a dominant line by themselves. All of them, composed, are the other half of the wallet. At a resort, they are often larger, per guest, than the room revenue that initiated the stay.
This is why the metric the industry has quietly been migrating toward is TRevPAR. Per the CoStar / STR definition:
TRevPAR assesses the total income a hotel generates on a per-available-room basis and accounts for revenue from all departments, including food and beverage sales, meeting space, spas, golf, parking and internet services. TRevPAR is often more relevant than RevPAR for full-service and resort segments.
CoStar / STR, What Is TRevPAR
The sentence “often more relevant than RevPAR” is doing a lot of work. It is STR’s way of saying: the metric you have been running the business on is, for a large slice of the industry, measuring the smaller half of the revenue.
The last mile is a software problem, and nobody has solved it
Here is what is structurally interesting. The industry has been willing, for decades, to run the rooms side of the business on a single system of record (the PMS) while letting the ancillary side run on a confederation of point solutions that do not talk to each other.
The typical ancillary stack at a full-service resort, loosely enumerated:
- F&B POS (Oracle Simphony, Toast, Lightspeed)
- Spa / wellness booking (Book4Time by Agilysys is, per their own materials, used by more Forbes 5-Star resorts than any other vendor)
- Golf tee-time management (Lightspeed Golf, formerly Chronogolf, serves 1,200+ courses)
- Dining reservations (SevenRooms, OpenTable, Tock)
- Recreation / activities scheduling (often custom or spreadsheet-based)
- Marina management (vendor-specific, frequently offline)
- In-room dining (usually on the F&B POS with custom routing)
- Retail POS (separate instance of the F&B POS, usually)
The scale of the integration problem is now, finally, quantified. Skift Research’s 2025 Hotel Technology Priorities report finds:
93% of hotel leaders rank system integration as their top strategic technology challenge.
Skift Research, Hotel Technology Priorities 2025
And Starfleet Research, as cited in Hotel Technology News, February 2026:
Fewer than one in four hotels have fully integrated core systems.
Three out of four hotels, in other words, are running the guest’s last-mile experience across a set of systems that do not share identity, availability, or context. The guest does not see the fragmentation, except as the forty-three-minute wait at the front desk, the second call to the spa, the binder for the marina.
What guests are doing about it, and what they are not
The guest side of the data is, for the first time, unambiguous. J.D. Power’s 2025 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index, based on 39,219 branded-hotel guest responses collected between May 2024 and May 2025:
Guests who downloaded and used the property app rated overall satisfaction 699/1000 vs. 631 for non-users, a 68-point gap.
J.D. Power, 2025 NAGSI Study
Sixty-eight points on a 1,000-point scale is not a marginal lift. It is the largest single behavioral driver of satisfaction the NAGSI has surfaced in years. The mechanism is not mysterious: the app is the only surface at most branded properties where a guest can interact with the last mile, book the spa, reorder a towel, ask about dinner, without the front desk.
That same capability is almost entirely absent at independents. The app infrastructure that served the J.D. Power sample belongs to the branded chains, Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, IHG One, whose properties participated in the study. Independents, by and large, do not ship apps. The 68-point gap, at independents, is an unclaimed lift.
The wedge is clearer still in the March 2026 BCG + NYU SPS “AI-First Hotels” report:
37% of travelers already use AI to plan and book trips. The hotel discovery pattern is shifting from “search and scroll” to “ask and book.”
BCG + NYU SPS, AI-First Hotels, March 2026
The guest is moving to a conversational surface. The hotel’s stack, at independents, still lives across nine binders.
The agent has to be able to do all of it, or none of it matters
This is the part that distinguishes a real last-mile product from a labeling exercise. Many vendors now market “AI concierge” or “digital concierge,” but the substrate is narrow, a chatbot that answers questions from a knowledge base.
A real last-mile agent, sitting between the guest and the hotel, has to be able to transact, not just respond. It has to:
- Book the spa treatment against live availability in Book4Time, honor the guest’s preferred therapist, and confirm in the same turn.
- Reserve the tee time in Lightspeed Golf with the right pairing, the right cart, and the member-rate flag if the guest qualifies.
- Open a reservation in SevenRooms for dinner at the hotel’s flagship restaurant, with the high-chair, the dietary note, and the anniversary marker.
- Cue recreation for the tennis clinic and confirm the sneaker rental before the 3pm start.
- Check with the marina on paddleboard availability and hold the 4pm rental pending the guest’s walk-down.
Five transactions, five different systems, one conversation, one guest. The moment any one of those five falls back to “please call the spa directly,” the product fails. Not because the guest is lost, they are captive, they are already at the property, but because the property has handed forty-three minutes back to the front desk, and has lost some fraction of the $900 wallet-intent to friction.
This is the structural case for a breadth-of-agents architecture. Not a single chatbot. A family of specialized, coordinated agents, each with live access to one back-office system, brokered by a guest-memory layer that knows it is the same guest asking for all five.
Why independents should care more than branded properties
Counter-intuitively, the last-mile opportunity is larger at independents than at branded chains, for three reasons:
- Branded properties already have a partial app. The 68-point J.D. Power lift is being collected, unevenly, by Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and Hyatt. Independents capture almost none of it.
- Independents have more unique ancillary. A Four Seasons and a Marriott Autograph both have a spa, but an independent resort often has something the brand does not: a private beach, a specific marina, a vineyard, a signature restaurant with a two-week waitlist. That differentiation is exactly the inventory the last mile needs to expose.
- Independents cannot out-spend the brands on rooms-side marketing. They can, however, out-deliver the brands on the last mile, if the software lets them.
BCG’s report, read carefully, makes this point too. The AI-first opportunity is framed not as “compete with Marriott on scale,” but as “build a guest experience that Marriott’s legacy stack cannot match.” The last mile is where that comparison plays out.
The FlowStay frame
We wrote last month that FlowStay’s operating principle is automate the repetitive, elevate the human. The last-mile problem is the specific place where that principle meets the P&L.
The repetitive work at the ancillary layer, taking the spa booking, confirming the tee time, holding the dinner reservation, routing the in-room dining request, is exactly the set of tasks that evaporates forty-three minutes of the receptionist’s shift and sixty percent of the guest’s wallet intent. Automating that work is not about replacing the concierge. There is no concierge at most independents; there is the receptionist, a binder, and a WhatsApp group.
Elevating the human at the last mile means: when the guest walks to the front desk at 2:14pm, it is because he wants to ask about the private wine tasting that does not have a booking interface, or because he wants the GM to know his mother-in-law is arriving early, or because something has genuinely gone wrong. Not because he needs to book three things that live in three systems and has no other channel to reach them.
The room gets the guest through the door. The last mile is what closes the wallet, drives the review, and earns the return booking. It is most of the revenue opportunity at the property segment that matters most for independents. And it is, still, the part of the operation that runs on the thinnest software.
That is the gap. The guest is already standing in it. The spa called back forty-one minutes too late.