A 188-key resort that was budgeted at 25 billion pesos — roughly US$441 million — and estimated to take two and a half years to build instead took six. That gap is the first thing Terence Ronson, founder and managing director of Hong Kong-based hospitality technology advisory Pertlink Limited, tells every owner before a shovel hits the ground.

Ronson delivered that message this week to 20 students at EHL – École hôtelière de Lausanne, at the invitation of Senior Lecturer Ian Millar. His session, titled "From a White Sheet of Paper to a Full House," walked students through a single real project from blank page to opening day rather than through theory. The pandemic cost time, he said, restarting cost more, and the owner changing her mind added the rest. None of it was anyone's failure. Large multi-year projects simply don't finish on time and on budget, and owners need to know that at the start.

The project began with an owner holding a master plan for a beachfront resort: 188 keys of rooms and villas on a parcel where the resort itself covered only a sixth to an eighth of the land. Branded properties under Accor, Marriott or IHG never start this way, Ronson noted, because brand standards have already made most of the decisions.

The briefing book, not the spec sheet

Most owners aren't technical, so Ronson doesn't hand them a specification. He builds a briefing book — a storyboard of up to 120 pages of pictures and a few words — organized around the guest journey, from choosing a hotel, increasingly through an AI assistant rather than a booking site, to leaving a review. His measure of success is blunt: read the TripAdvisor reviews. If guests mention the technology, it has probably failed. Good technology is seamless and almost invisible; guests should write about the beach, the breakfast and the staff.

What guests will actually pay for, he said, is a short list: a clean room, a comfortable bed, a great shower, security, excellent Wi-Fi and a place to charge devices without crawling behind furniture.

Who holds the pen

A hotel project has a crowded cast — owner, master planner, architect, interior designer, project managers, consultants, general contractor, subcontractors and eventually the brand. The owner holds the pen and therefore the power. Hotel groups often arrive with a list of 42 systems and "we want it all," Ronson said, but the owner may not need everything on day one; some items can wait three or six months. The management agreement must state clearly who is responsible for what, because the owner pays for the flag.

He prefers to contract directly with the owner rather than through a general contractor, who may not understand how the owner or operator wants the hotel to look. Subcontractors, he added, are where many pain points begin: product substitutions, scheduling clashes, payment disputes and work quietly re-subcontracted.

Build the stack from the bottom

Ronson teaches technology as four layers. Cabling is the most important — never cut cost there, he said, because if it fails, nothing works, cloud or not. The network sits on top with standard equipment, where the switch brand matters far less than people think. Then systems — accounting, HR, food and beverage, marketing — all with open interfaces. Applications and the user interface come last. Every system needs a business owner: the front office manager owns the PMS, not the IT manager. If a system doesn't help operations or return value, don't install it.

Show the five-year number

Owners want costs, so Ronson gives them five-year total cost of ownership. A system with a $165,000 upfront price becomes $285,000 with five years of support — the same system, a very different conversation. Worked back against a $220 room rate, that system costs about 35 cents per room per night; multiply by 25 systems for the full technology cost. He is also developing a new metric, Token Cost Per Guest: if AI systems run on tokens and the token cost per guest is $1, has the value gained justified it?

When the red pen comes out

Every owner eventually asks, "Can we VE this?" Value engineering is legitimate as long as the cheaper option still delivers the functionality and compliance the business needs. Ronson's list of traps: the quiet product swap (part number 456 becomes 454 mid-negotiation), components that disappear to save 50 cents per device, warranties shrinking from a year to six months, a 25-page proposal returning as one page, end-of-life products without written support commitments — buy 300 access points if you need 274 — and scope creep disguised as favors.

Never agree to anything on a handshake, he said. Put it in writing. Six months later, people leave and memories fade.

The human keys

The most useful tool on a project is not software, Ronson argued. It is getting everyone into a room, agreeing what is required, documenting it and getting signatures. He records and transcribes meetings; on one project he fed roughly six months of meeting notes to an AI to verify that what was discussed had actually been agreed and delivered.

The step most often cut is the simulation period — a dress rehearsal with the real team before guests arrive. It is usually squeezed into the last week or two because everything upstream ran late. Protect it, he said, and follow it with a 30-to-60-day troubleshooting period written into the contract, because something will break at the worst possible moment, like a full house on a long weekend.

And go to the site. Sit in the ballroom chairs, lie on the bed, check that cabling is labeled and color-coded. Ronson spent a month working out where the power, USB and cable points went in a single guest room on this project.

The resort in the final slide of his deck is open, full and profitable — and nobody is mentioning the Wi-Fi. That, Ronson said, is what a dream come true looks like: not a system that works, but a guest who never has to think about it.