We’re exceptionally pleased to share the news that Guestwise has just won the Ad & Marketing Technology Award at the National Technology Awards 2026.
Not just for the trophy, but also for what the category recognises.
Hospitality has never been short of marketing tools. Most operators already have more systems, more dashboards and more guest data than their teams can realistically use. The hard part — especially as tech stacks have become more complicated and more fragmented — is turning all of that into better decisions, better guest experiences and measurable revenue growth.
That is the problem Guestwise was built to solve.
Why this award matters
The Ad & Marketing Technology category is especially meaningful for us because it sits right at the centre of our work.
Guest engagement in hospitality should not mean sending the same campaign to everyone, chasing covers with blanket discounts or relying on disconnected tools that do not reflect how guests actually behave.
The opportunity is much bigger than that.
A guest might abandon a booking, make an enquiry, join a database, visit a venue, respond to a campaign, buy a voucher or interact with paid social. Too often, those moments sit in different systems and are treated as separate events.
When they are connected, marketing becomes far more useful.
It becomes possible to understand which guests are most likely to return, which moments need intervention, which audiences should be re-engaged and which campaigns are genuinely changing behaviour.
That is where hospitality marketing technology should be heading.
What Guestwise is building
Guestwise helps hospitality brands make guest engagement more personal, automated and measurable.
That includes better data capture, smarter segmentation, paid social audience activation, booking recovery, referral, web personalisation, campaign automation and AI-powered guest communication.
The point is not technology for the sake of it.
The point is helping operators turn fragmented guest interactions into useful action. A lapsed high-spend guest should not be treated the same as someone who visited yesterday. A booking enquiry should not be left unanswered because a team is busy. A guest who has shown clear intent should not fall through the cracks because systems are not joined up.
Good technology should help hospitality teams move faster, make sharper decisions and give guests a more relevant experience.
That is what we are focused on.
Recognition across four categories
This year, Guestwise was shortlisted across four National Technology Awards categories:
Start-up Tech Company of the Year
AI Innovation of the Year
Ad & Marketing Technology Award
Best Tech Place to Work
Winning the Ad & Marketing Technology Award means a lot because it recognises the part of the business closest to our customers’ commercial reality.
It also reflects the wider work happening behind the scenes. Product, engineering, customer success, data, AI, marketing and delivery all have to work together to build something genuinely useful for hospitality.
That is not easy. Hospitality is operationally complex, commercially pressured and full of edge cases. Generic technology rarely survives contact with the reality of restaurants, bars, pubs, hotels and experience-led venues.
The product has to understand the pace, pressure and nuance of the sector.
Why hospitality needs better marketing technology
Most hospitality businesses already have more data than they can realistically act on.
A single guest might exist across booking systems, EPOS, email platforms, WiFi, loyalty tools, gift voucher platforms, enquiry forms and social campaigns.
The problem is not the absence of data. The problem is turning that data into action.
That is where we believe the next wave of hospitality marketing will be won. Not through more dashboards or more campaign volume, but through joined-up systems that help operators make better decisions, personalise at scale and prove what is working.
AI will accelerate that shift, but only where the foundations are right.
Without connected data and clear commercial use cases, AI quickly becomes another layer of noise. With the right context, it can help teams respond faster, spot opportunities and deliver more relevant guest experiences.
The businesses that benefit most will not simply be the ones that “use AI”. They will be the ones that understand where AI fits into the guest journey, where automation can remove friction and where human judgement still matters most.
A thank you to our customers and team
Awards are never the goal, but they are a useful moment to recognise the people behind the progress. This win belongs as much to our customers as it does to the Guestwise team.
The hospitality operators we work with do not just use the platform. They help shape it. Their enthusiasm for trying new things, their trust in us to test and iterate, their honest feedback, suggestions and ideas have all played a huge role in making Guestwise evolve to where it is today.
The best product improvements rarely come from building in isolation. They come from real conversations with customers who are dealing with the day-to-day reality of hospitality: busy teams, fragmented systems, changing guest behaviour, commercial pressure and the need to prove what is actually working.
Our customers show us where the friction is. They tell us what needs to be simpler, faster or more useful. They challenge our thinking, pressure-test new features and push us to solve problems that genuinely matter.
The Guestwise team deserves huge recognition for turning those conversations into technology that works in the real world — but this has not been built alone. Our customers have been part of the journey from the beginning, and they deserve as much recognition for this award as we do.
Thank you to every customer who has trusted us, challenged us, shared feedback, tested new ideas and helped us keep raising the standard.
