Introduction
While developing a hospitality software company using RFPs may seem easy in theory, in practice, many hotels find themselves looking at catchy sales presentations and trying to determine whether they actually deliver. For example, if a vendor claims to provide “easy integration,” “high uptime,” or “support for multiple properties,” those statements are all good advertising slogans; however, what those statements really mean for your hotel will change once a PMS, payment systems, employee work patterns, and rollout impact are added to the equation.
These two responsibilities create more robust RFPs that help vendors clarify where their focus lies and allow your team to create a fair scoring model for all proposals, rather than an emotional one.
At Appricotsoft, we have a straightforward approach to software development. No “black boxes,” no vague promises, and no making dynamic hospitality software projects look the same as producing an average tablet app. We see our work as an extension of who we are as a company, and creating strong software partnerships as being honest, accountable, and focused on what the result will be for our clients.
This guide will help you build an RFP question list and scoring rubric focused on the four areas that usually determine whether a hospitality project succeeds or becomes painful:
- integrations
- uptime and operational reliability
- rollout approach
- ability to support multiple properties
The target audience for the article includes founders of hospitality software companies, hotel managers, innovation leads, or senior management who want to create more effective conversations with vendors and better scoring criteria without many post-contract surprises. The layout, target audience, and tangible product result from the above description will follow your blog standards for articles.
Here are some examples of why generic RFPs fail in the hospitality industry.
Buying teams can easily evaluate vendors using a “good-to-go” checklist; however, once they start integrating the vendor’s products with existing systems, supporting a busy front desk, and rolling out products to multiple properties with varying operational differences, they may have some issues.
Hotels are not single-system environments, but rather a composite of integrated applications; hosted on top of or integrated into a Property Management System (PMS), Online Booking Engine, Payment Gateway (such as Credit Card), Messaging Applications, Housekeeping Systems, Room Access Systems, System for Upselling, Point of Sale (POS) Systems, Guest Loyalty Systems, Reporting Analytics, etc., as well as a multitude of internal processes that function differently from one property to another. The complexity of these layers of connectivity when implementing hospitality vendor solutions raises additional questions over and above those typically asked in generic software procurement decisions (e.g., whether the vendor offers a good interface).
Appricotsoft offers an excellent selection of hospitality-centric content that will demonstrate that in order for hospitality vendor solutions to be successfully integrated, the vendor must understand the specific operational model of the hotel property, the depth of integration required, how far along they are in preparing their product for deployment, and the readiness of the property to support the vendor’s integrated product, not simply the quality of the vendor’s interface.
An example of a question that should be included in a good RFP would be, “Will you provide an integration plan?” rather than just, “Can you build this?”
The types of questions asked in the RFP will show the difference between a vendor who sells confidence and one who delivers customer confidence.
What to Expect from Your RFP
Align your team on what you expect the RFP to deliver before you start posting vendor questions. In hospitality software, for example, the purpose of the RFP isn’t to just evaluate bids – it’s to lower the risk of delivery.
An effective RFP will help you:
- Evaluate vendors based on their delivery capability rather than how appealing their presentation is.
- Identify hidden assumptions more easily regarding integrations or data ownership.
- Determine if a vendor’s uptime promises are substantiated with evidence of operational discipline.
- Assess the maturity of a vendor’s rollout plan – both for one property and across an entire portfolio.
- Verify whether a vendor can support future growth once implemented.
This is consistent with our belief in transparent delivery systems. At Appricotsoft, we utilize the Unison Framework, which is based on visibility of progress, proof of trade-offs, weekly demos, shared decision logs, and quality control built in throughout the phases of development rather than at the end. This same line of thinking is important when selecting a vendor; you want to work with a partner who can clearly communicate their delivery system before the project begins, rather than once they have made a mistake during the project.
The 4 aspects to consider when evaluating an RFP for a lodging company
In the RFP evaluation process, lodging companies should focus nearly all of their evaluation weight on these 4 aspects.
1. Integrated Systems
Many issues related to hidden scope items, delays caused by timelines slipping, and poor operational performance stem from software system integrations. A company stating, “We have PMS integrations,” does not give hiring companies the full picture. Any hiring company must know the types of systems that the software will interface with, the methods of integration, the flow of data, how issues are handled if they occur, and what operational dependencies exist between the hotel and vendor.
2. Uptime and operation reliability
When there is a system-related incident between a hotel’s software vendor and that vendor’s software system, a hotel is still operational; guests are still arriving, staff still need tools to do their jobs, and orders are placed to vendors. Evaluating uptime as a measure of business continuity, as opposed to a hardware and/or software performance measure, is key in ensuring that lodging companies have no lapse in services they provide to their guests.
3. Rollout methodology
The successful implementation of good software systems can fail due to poor training and/or change management procedures, weak pilot approaches, and nonexistent fallback methodologies for businesses. For lodging companies, the rollout is a critical part of the product being offered by any vendor; it must not be treated as an afterthought.
4. Multi-property Support
A single successful implementation at one hotel does not ensure that it will work when deployed across multiple hotels that are all utilizing different brand rules, local configurations, patron access/roles, content governance processes, etc. All hotels in the chain must be able to replicate that deployment and subsequent servicing before proceeding with the installation of the product.
RFP questions: integrations
Below are the most useful RFP questions to ask vendors about integrations.
Core questions
- Which PMS, booking engine, payment, POS, CRM, messaging, and channel systems have you integrated with before?
- For each relevant integration, was it API-based, middleware-based, file-based, or custom?
- Which data objects move between systems, and in what direction?
- What dependencies require action or approval from the hotel, PMS vendor, or third party?
- How do you handle partial failures, retries, duplicate events, or delayed sync?
- How do you log and monitor integration health?
- How do you test integrations before rollout?
- How do you manage sandbox limitations or missing vendor documentation?
- What happens if one external system changes its API or rate limits?
- Which integrations are part of the base scope, and which are estimated separately?
Follow-up questions that reveal maturity
- Can you show a sample integration architecture diagram?
- Can you explain how data mapping is documented and approved?
- How do you handle guest identity across multiple systems?
- What is your escalation path when the issue sits with a third-party vendor?
- What is the expected lead time for a new property if the PMS is already known?
- Which parts of the integration layer are reusable across properties?
These questions matter because hospitality integrations are a major selection factor in hotel software projects. Industry guidance around HTNG and hospitality interoperability also reinforces how critical common standards and integration clarity are to reducing implementation friction.
What a strong answer sounds like
A strong vendor answer is specific. It names systems, explains integration patterns, identifies risks, and distinguishes proven capability from planned capability.
What a weak answer sounds like
A weak answer says things like:
- “We can integrate with any PMS.”
- “This should not be a problem.”
- “We usually figure this out during implementation.”
That is not reassurance. That is deferred risk.
Questions regarding reliability and uptime in the delivery of your operations:
Teams in hospitality are accustomed to asking for contract-based guarantees for uptime. But too often, they use the same phrase ‘guaranteed uptime’ without asking manufacturers how they will fulfill that commitment.
Essential Questions
- What uptime guarantee do you provide for production?
- What methods do you use to measure uptime & which events are excluded?
- What monitoring and alerting tools are you using?
- What is your priority/severity system for incidents & how quickly do you respond?
- Describe your redundancy, backup, and recovery methods.
- Based on your redundancy, backup, and recovery processes, what is the anticipated recovery time and recovery point for critical services?
- How will you communicate with your clients when you are doing planned electronic maintenance on systems?
- If an external service becomes inoperative, what processes do you have in place to avoid the impact on other systems?
- What operational reports and dashboards are available to clients?
- Have you experienced a production incident? What would you have done differently?
Questions that allowed you to connect uptime subjects back to the hotel support
- If the payment provider is temporarily down, what functions would be disabled for guest-facing functionality?
- If there were an outage of an integration, would the staff be able to complete critical tasks?
- Record the current company manual fallback solution(s) directly supporting a production outage.
- If the system has a cosmetic bug, how do you differentiate that from an operational blocker?
What you hope to know
- You are not just purchasing an infrastructure product. You are purchasing disciplines surrounding how those products operate.
At Appricotsoft, we believe software quality should be built into day-to-day delivery through review, testing, QA, release readiness, and visible risk management rather than treated as a final-stage cleanup. That principle appears in our internal delivery framework because reliability is created through process, not slogans.
RFP questions: rollout approach
When considering a hotel rollout, there are many factors involved, such as the timing, people involved, how to train staff, and what the rollout plan looks like from the pilot property to completing the rollout at an entire collection of properties. Therefore, there is no need for justification in giving the rollout section its own space in the RFP with its own weight in scoring.
Core questions:
- What does your rollout plan look like from pilot to full rollout?
- How do you choose a pilot property?
- What implementation roles do you expect the hotel to contribute?
- How do you handle staff training and adoption of the new system?
- What documentation is provided to your operations and support teams?
- What is your cutover plan for switching?
- What rollback or fallback scenarios do you have in place (if things do not go well during go-live)?
- How do you collect feedback after go-live and determine what to prioritize for fixing?
- How does the rollout differ depending on different property sizes or different operating models?
- What metrics will define if the rollout was successful?
Here are the indicators of a strong rollout
Looking for a strong vendor:
- Ability to describe successful pilot metrics and criteria
- The use of property-readiness checklists
- Staff training based on role
- The existence of “hyper-care” for the site after going live (to ensure a successful implementation)
- Use of clearly defined escalation paths to resolve issues
- Phased rollout of features, if appropriate
- The ability to gather lessons learned after a rollout to apply them to future rollouts
This is the correct way to think about a rollout for hospitality – having a structured approach that is ultimately operationally focused with an emphasis on identifying/mitigating risks earlier in the process than later on when executing on a master plan.
Weak rollout signals
Be cautious if a vendor treats rollout as:
- simple project management
- “the client’s internal responsibility”
- a single generic deployment plan for all properties
That usually means they are strong at building software but weaker at making it succeed in real hotel environments.
RFP questions: support for multiple properties
Most RFPs state the word “scalability,” yet few ask how to determine what multi-property support means.
Key Questions
- What does the structure of your product look like to support multiple properties as one group?
- What types of settings are there (global, regional, brand level, property specific)?
- How are user roles managed across multiple groups and individual properties?
- How will governance of property content (or the menu), services, upselling, or operational rules be managed across multiple properties?
- Can properties have different workflows but use the same platform?
- How is reporting handled at the portfolio level as well as by individual property?
- What types of changes are required to onboard a new property when there is an existing property already set up?
- How do you manage property differences in property management systems (PMS), payment methods, or local integrations with each property?
- How do you prevent the customization of one property from putting the rest of the properties at risk for upgrades?
- Can you provide an example of how your architecture supports reusable configuration but does not force every hotel into a single mold?
What will be disclosed in this section is:
You want to understand if the Vendor thinks in terms of platforms versus one-off projects. Vendors that cannot explain the configuration layers, shared services, and governing structures will struggle when trying to move beyond their first property.
Here is a straightforward scoring rubric that is practical and functional:
Each criterion uses a numeric scale from 1 (poor) through 5 (excellent).
1 = Poor. This criterion includes a vague, unproven, or very high-risk (e.g., new technology) response.
2 = Weak. There is intent, but it is an incomplete response; this response generally lacks clarity.
3 = Acceptable. The answer is a reasonable response, but lacks sufficient supporting detail and/or evidence.
4 = Strong. The answer is clear, credible, and well-structured; it has supporting detail/ evidence as well as some benefits.
5 = Excellent. The answer is detailed and contains a proven response with low risk, contains sufficient supporting information, and demonstrates operational capability in the area discussed.
Integration Total (Weight 35% of Overall Score)
- Integration Type (Access Type)
- Integration Architecture Clarity
- Integration Error Handling and Monitoring
- Integration Reusability Across Properties
- Integration Dependencies and Risk Transparency
Uptime and Reliability Total (Weight 25% of Overall Score)
- Realistic Uptime Committed to
- Monitoring and Incident Management
- Uptime Recovery and Fallback Planning
- Production Support Ready to
- Communication During Incident Management
Rollout Approach Total (Weight 20% of Overall Score)
- Pilot Design
- Training and Enablement
- Cutover and Fallback Plan
- Post-Launch Support
- Operational Fit For Hotel Team
Multi-Property Support Total (Weight 20% of Overall Score)
- Configuration Model
- Governance and Permissions
- Reuse vs. Customize
- Portfolio-Level Reporting
- Efficiency of New Property Onboarding
Vendor Scoring Sheet
An excellent example of using a scoring system with your vendors is to rank and score them based on how they measure against the scoring criteria. Below are three vendor score examples:
Vendor A
- Integration: 4.2
- Uptime: 3.8
- Rollout: 4.5
- Multi-Property: 3.7
- Weighted Score: 4.08
Vendor B
- Integration: 3.6
- Uptime: 4.4
- Rollout: 3.2
- Multi-Property: 4.1
- Weighted Score: 3.85
Vendor C
- Integration: 4.7
- Uptime: 4.1
- Rollout: 4.3
- Multi-Property: 4.6
- Weighted Score: 4.45
The point is not that scoring will ever be completely objective; in reality, no scoring system is truly objective. Instead, the point of using a scoring system is to provide a way to make subjectivity visible, so that it can be clearly understood and evaluated, and to ensure all the factors can be considered together.
The RFP should include both narrative answers and supporting documentation from vendors whenever possible.
When requesting from your vendor, you should ask for the following:
- sample architecture diagrams
- sample rollout plan/property onboarding checklist
- sample status report/governance template
- sample support SLAAn
- example of integration monitoring
- Anonymised case study for multi-property deployments
- named assumptions and dependencies on the vendor’s side
Transparency of delivery is one of the clearest indicators of a partner’s ability to deliver projects successfully and in accordance with your organisation’s expectations. At Appricotsoft, we value that every project should be transparent and therefore require all partners to provide shared artifacts, visible risks, decision logs, and regulardemoss throughout the execution of their projects. This principle should be in place from the beginning through to completion at the Vendor Selection stage.
There are some common mistakes when developing a Request for Proposal (RFP) for hospitality software:
1. Overemphasizing price
Price is important; however, submitting a low proposal may, due to rework that has to be done on-site or integration gaps, become higher in total to implement after the fact than submitting a higher than average proposal (using actual costs from previously implemented systems will provide accuracy during comparison).
2. Asking general questions.
Asking questions like “What is your quality?” will result in generic answers. Instead, you should request specific methods, deliverables, and examples.
3. Not recognizing the risk of third parties
A hotel vendor can have a successful proposal; however, for the project to be implemented successfully, you are dependent on other companies, such as a property management system (PMS), payment processors, and approval timelines. A good vendor will identify the risk of dependencies up front.
4. Considering pilot projects as proof of success or readiness for rollout.
A pilot project can show the feasibility of the integration; however, it will not demonstrate that it will be successful across multiple sites and multiple types of guests equally.
5. Failing to understand how changes in scope are handled
A mature partner will clearly explain the relationship between scope, time, and budget in discussing changes to scope. That level of honesty is an important indicator of long-term success in addition to any polish on the proposal itself. Additionally, this value aligns with the Appricotsoft culture of keeping it real, owning the work, and emphasizing quality rather than vague assurances.
How Appricotsoft would address this
Clarity is an intrinsic characteristic of how Appricotsoft has built our experience in hospitality. We believe this is a great psychological bias.
When responding to this type of RFP, we believe there will be 4 major things we will want to make clear from the very beginning:
- Evidence versus new ideas.
- Separate experience from new opportunities for discovery.
- How the project remains visible.
- How the hotel business impacts the implementation.
We will provide documentation and samples through each of the four phases, showing how each phase of the project has been documented and reviewed throughout the planning, building, verification, and implementation processes, as well as through weekly demos as a mechanism to build trust both in our services and in each other.
We will ensure that the hotel guest operating procedures will be completely considered when planning for implementation. Implementation is not just a ”technical” effort. The readiness of hotel staff (including but not limited to facility limitations, as well as existing flow management (default, fallback) processes) is also to be included going into the installation process.
We will develop this product in a way that it can grow from multiple hotels to multiple properties by ensuring it is designed to be repeatable, governable, and reasonably balanced between the common logic of the shared application and the unique needs at each hotel.
The approach above is a direct reflection of what we strive to be as a company – practical, inquisitive, focused on quality, and committed to delivering only high-quality software we are proud to support.
Beyond this explanation, for further discussion, the RFP should be read with Appricotsoft’s hospitality vendor selection guide, and hospitality discovery articles (describing what will occur in a hotel workshop before software implementation) should be taken into account. More detailed information on interoperability and hospitality technology can be found through the HTNG resource guides.
Common Questions (CQs)
How many questions should you ask on an RFP?
Question quantity should reflect delivery maturity; however, too many questions will cause the vendors to reply with blanket, non-specific responses. A good rule of thumb for hotel software-related projects would be to use 20-35 well-developed questions, instead of 80 questions that are too general.
Should we include fixed pricing in the RFP?
You can, but only if you are able to clearly define the project scope. Integration uncertainty and rollout issues typically make it much easier to present a phased estimated budget instead of a fixed one.
What category is the most significant when determining scores?
Generally speaking, the category that carries the most weight is integrations. This category encompasses many of the aspects, such as timeframes, risk, and operational complexity, that are focused on in the hospitality field.
How do we ensure a fair comparison of vendors if one has better sales collateral than another?
One way to ensure a fair comparison would be to use a weighted rubric to score each vendor, request evidence to support the vendor-provided answers, and place a higher value on specifics versus polished responses.
Does one successful hotel implementation prove that a vendor has the capabilities to provide services across multiple properties?
No, while it is a good sign, the vendor must still be evaluated on multiple factors, such as governance, how the configuration is structured, how repeatable the onboarding process is, and how they will report on total portfolio activity.
Closing Thoughts
A hotel request for proposal (RFP) should help find a partner who can “survive” contact with reality, as opposed to just winning a presentation round.
If your evaluation of vendors is based on integrations, uptime, ready to roll, and multi-property support, you will make a more informed decision and limit the risk of downstream delivery. The best vendor is rarely the one who speaks the best; it’s the vendor that answers all difficult questions, exposes trade-offs early, and demonstrates the reliability of the end product in real life.
This is what we believe great clients should expect from the software development proces,s and, in fact, it is also what the industry should be demanding more of.