Wyndham Hotels & Resorts

Josh Dow

Hospitality AI Integrator

Josh Dow is Vice President of Hotel Technology Strategy & Services at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, the world’s largest hotel franchisor. With over two decades of experience, he’s helped drive a number of complex technology transformations at Wyndham, including among others,  the integration of more than 8,000 hotels onto a unified cloud-based security and reservation system, reducing cost and complexity in hotel operations.

Passionate about hospitality, he shared his valuable thoughts for the 2025 edition of Travel and Hospitality Tech Outlook about the industry and the future of hotel technology.

Evolving through Experience

I have been fortunate to spend nearly my entire career with Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, starting back in 2003. At the time, I was brought in as a temporary project resource to help modernize connectivity and perform system upgrades. It was a crash course in both technology and hospitality.

Since then, I have touched nearly every part of our IT organization: technical support, PMS installation, project and product management, quality assurance, development, infrastructure, architecture, and now strategy. Today, I lead an incredible team responsible for property technology strategy, global systems deployment, and AI-powered contact center solutions.

Travel and technology are my two greatest passions, so this role represents the perfect intersection of business impact and personal interest.

Success Driven by Vision

When you operate on a global scale, innovation can only happen if you are working from a common foundation. Years ago, we were running multiple central reservations platforms and dozens of property management systems across the portfolio, much of it reliant on legacy on-prem infrastructure. It was expensive for owners, complex to maintain, and nearly impossible to innovate on.

The vision was simple: to accelerate innovation, we needed to unify. That meant industry-first moves like taking our legacy data center infrastructure to AWS, migrating all central reservations to SynXis CRS, and consolidating property management systems to Oracle's Opera Cloud and SynXis Property Hub. With that common core, we have been able to roll out at speed and scale capabilities such as mobile check-in, guest messaging, upselling, mobile tipping, and more—all of which operate through Wyndham Connect, our industry-leading guest engagement platform.

Alignment was not easy, but by rallying teams and owners around the principle of building a strong foundation first, we kept momentum and delivered transformative outcomes.

Navigating Technological Transition

Integration after acquisitions is always one of the biggest challenges. It is disruptive, it is high stakes, and the longer you delay, the harder it gets. After several complex integrations, we reimagined our playbook and modernized the tools and processes to accelerate future transitions.

That work paid dividends during the La Quinta acquisition in 2018. Our teams executed a cutover of all major systems, including CRS and PMS, across more than 900 hotels in a single night. What could have been a multi-year exercise elsewhere was completed in under 24 hours. The key was investing the time up front to modernize our platform, so when the opportunity came, we could deliver with precision and confidence.

Balancing the Demands the Right Way

Balancing the technical demands of integrating security, reservation, and operational systems projects with the unique needs of individual properties and the guests they serve lies in choosing the right partners and the right platforms. For example, Oracle’s OHIP open API framework allows our franchisees to innovate locally by integrating custom solutions that reflect their unique property needs while still benefiting from the scale and security of enterprise systems.

We also maintain a highly engaged product organization that works hand-in-hand with partners, ensuring that our needs and those of our owners are prioritized in their roadmaps. That collaboration ensures that the enterprise platform delivers real-world value at both the global and property level.

Future of Hotel Technology

It would be impossible to talk about the future of hotel technology without talking about AI. We are at the front edge of a seismic shift.

In distribution, agentic travel planners that can query hotels directly via APIs exposed through MCP, or Model Context Protocol, will reshape how guests discover, evaluate, and book stays. MCP is an emerging open standard that allows AI systems to securely connect to live data and services. APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are the digital connectors that expose capabilities like rates, inventory, and loyalty data. MCP provides the “universal adapter” that makes it possible for AI agents to use those APIs in a consistent way. For example, instead of a guest navigating a brand.com site or OTA form, a personal AI travel agent could ask directly, “Show me a Wyndham property in Miami with an ocean view under $300 next weekend,” receive a live response, and complete the booking instantly. The traditional funnel of SEO, web forms, and static room grids will start to feel outdated much sooner than most leaders expect.

In operations, AI-powered voice and text agents are transforming the guest journey. Routine questions such as pool hours, late checkout requests, or folio retrievals, which eat into staff time, can and should be automated. This is an area where Wyndham is really leading, thanks to the help of partners like Canary, who are already proving how these capabilities can free up staff for high-touch moments that really matter while also unlocking incremental revenue opportunities for franchisees.

The advice I give leaders is simple: do not wait for the perfect roadmap. Start experimenting today. Pick a manageable use case, such as automating folio delivery or triaging guest feedback, and begin learning. The organizations that start now will be the best positioned as these technologies move from novelty to necessity.