Cloudbeds has taken an executive step to coax hoteliers to opt for its management software platform: It’s hired one of the franchise community’s own. Cloudbeds, an industry leader in property management system services, has appointed, Adnan Malik, the former CEO of Magnuson Hotels, as managing director of franchise development.
Malik, who joins Cloudbeds after more than six years with Magnuson, where prior to being named CEO led revenue and distribution efforts, will be based in London and tasked with forging franchise partnerships, unlocking new growth opportunities and supporting the overall mission of Cloudbeds: “Simplify hospitality through modern technology.”
The move to join a technology supplier may appear like a wild stretch for someone with a hotel company background, but to hear it from Malik, it was seemingly inevitable. “I’ve always seen technology as the most powerful lever to drive meaningful change in hospitality,” he told HOTELS. “My entire career has been rooted in hospitality; it’s in my DNA. I Â saw an opportunity here to make an even greater impact through technology.”
Cloudbeds’ ethos has been to make the tech stack simpler and more efficient, but strong enough to drive incremental revenue and improve a hotel owner’s bottom line. Malik has seen firsthand the pain points and hurdles facing hotel owners and wanted to make it right. “The fragmented technology is out there in the market; I realized the most scalable and sustainable way to solve these challenges was through transformative technology.”
He said he ended up joining Cloudbeds because he sees a company that matches his passion. “We’re working together to reshape the future of this industry,” he said.
Though Cloudbeds may be best known for its PMS, co-founder and CEO Adam Harris as recently as last week at the Skift Data + AI Summit said he eschews describing his company as merely a PMS provider, but one that encompasses a whole suite of intelligence, a unified platform, to increase revenue, reduce costs and improve the overall guest experience.
Harris views the PMS as the hotel’s central hub of operations, a system that should facilitate the seamless flow of information, while supporting and enhancing other technologies through open APIs. And it needs to be easy to navigate: “Users shouldn’t spend excessive time searching for functions; instead, the system should allow them to instinctively locate reservations or guest information,” he said. Good UX is paramount and Cloudbeds has put time into understanding how customers actually use the system. It informs its design. “The goal is to minimize the steps required to move from point A to point B,” he said.
It’ll now be up to Malik to impress this upon the hotel franchise community. His mission, as he put it, is to build authentic and value-driven partnerships with franchisees and multi-property groups. The PMS landscape is a crowded one and while standing out in the bunch is a goal, according to Malik, Cloudbeds is “not chasing a feature.”
Malik said from day one with Cloudbeds it would be his duty to show hoteliers tangible ROI. “Scaling with strategic intent,” he called it.
Not unlike how Cloudbeds’ CEO Harris might frame it, Malik calls the traditional PMS—checking in, checking out—dead, where functionality is shallow and modest. “These are static systems built only to document what happened,” he said. “Hoteliers now need an intelligence growth engine, one that serves as the source of truth and gives the power to grow on their own terms.”
Most PMS platforms are already anachronistic, according to Malik. “It needs to be more than a system of record. It should be a part of a system that actively helps drive business growth.” Malik says that’s what Cloudbeds is building now—and artificial intelligence is playing a role. He said the company is building “hospitality’s first AI foundation model by training a causal model of billions of data points. “It can actually forecast 180 days into the future with 95% accuracy,” he said. And that’s not all: “We’ve also trained the LLM behind it to think and act like a hotelier by learning from thousands of conversations. It can reason like a hotelier.”
“AI not only forecasts demand with a high level of accuracy, but helps act with confidence,” Malik said. “Hoteliers want fast flexibility, intuitive workflows and reliable partnerships, not complexity.”
In sum, a the PMS of tomorrow will interpret forecasts, make smarter revenue and marketing decisions, personalized guest communications and perform functions like upselling. “That’s ancillary revenue coming in and driving better operational efficiency,” Malik said, referring to Cloudbeds as an “intelligence growth engine,” which acts as a source of truth that unifies every operation.
Property management systems traditionally use APIs to facilitate communication and data exchange with other software systems and devices. In the future, APIs could become obsolete. It’s something Cloudbeds is building out with its enterprise solution, Malik said. “As a hotelier, why would you want to go and log into a platform here, then go into a platform there? It can be an all in one.”