You have done this. You went to a hotel tech company’s website to find out what they do. You read the homepage. You clicked through to the product page. And you left knowing less than when you arrived.
The words are all there. AI-powered. Next-generation. Industry-leading. Revolutionary. End-to-end. Seamless. Every one of them is doing the same job: standing in the place where a plain sentence should be.
Then someone in the meeting asks the only question that matters — so what do they actually do? — and the room goes quiet. Not because nobody was paying attention. Because the answer was never actually given.
This is not the vendors being cynical
It is worth saying plainly: almost nobody sets out to be unclear. The homepage is written for six audiences at once — buyers, investors, analysts, partners, competitors, and the person inside the company who insisted on the word “platform.” What survives that is a sentence that offends nobody and informs nobody.
The other reason is closeness. When you have worked on something for four years, the thing it does feels obvious, and the interesting part is the part that is new. So the messaging drifts toward the differentiator and skips the foundation — and a buyer who does not have the foundation cannot hear the differentiator.
The test
There is a line at the end of every episode, and it is the whole reason the series exists:
If you can explain it to a 10-year-old, you probably understand it yourself.
It works in both directions. If you cannot explain what a company does in language a child would follow, one of two things is true — either you do not understand it yet, or there is less there than the website suggests. Both are useful to know before you sign anything.
What it looks like when it works
Take a company that puts hotel video onto booking pages. You could call it an immersive conversion-optimisation layer. Or you could say: you tell your parents the hotel has a pool and they shrug, then you show them a video of people roasting marshmallows by the fire pit and suddenly they want to go.
Take a company that consolidates sales and catering data. You could call it a unified intelligence layer. Or you could say: imagine coaching a soccer team where the score is written across ten different pieces of paper.
Neither of those is dumbed down. They are the same information, minus the words that were doing no work. That is the only edit we make.
If you work at a hotel
Give yourself permission. If you sit through a demo and could not repeat back what the product does, that is not a gap in your understanding — it is a gap in the explanation. Ask for the ten-year-old version out loud. The good vendors will have one ready and will be relieved you asked.
If you sell to hotels
Here is the part worth taking seriously. In this industry almost nobody buys alone. The person in your demo has to go and explain your product to a GM, an owner, a regional director, or a finance committee — without you in the room.
Whatever they cannot repeat, you did not really say. The clearest company in a category tends to win, not because clarity is charming, but because clarity survives the retelling. Your buzzwords do not make it out of the meeting. An analogy does.
A cheap way to test your own messaging: hand your homepage to someone outside the industry and ask them what you sell. Whatever they say back is what the market hears.
So that is the series
Two minutes, two companies, no buzzwords. 2 episodes so far, 4 companies explained, each with its own page you can read without watching.
We are not reviewers. We do not score anybody or tell you what to buy. We just answer the question the website should have answered.