New Hotels Are the Test Labs for F&B Tech Integration

The Ava Hotel Paso Robles, a Curio Collection by Hilton property that opened in August 2025, is deploying IRIS mobile ordering and digital directory integrated with Toast POS to streamline F&B operations and unlock ancillary revenue. It's a textbook example of how new builds have an edge: they skip the retrofit complexity and embed technology into operations from day one.

This matters because F&B remains the untapped goldmine in most hotels. Mobile ordering solves two real problems at once. Guests get frictionless in-room or poolside ordering without the phone call dance. Your staff gets order accuracy and kitchen visibility instead of scrambled notes. When IRIS plugs into Toast, the data flows clean: no double entry, no reconciliation headaches. That's where you see margin improve and labor get deployed smarter.

Here's my take. New properties like Ava aren't just adopting tech, they're becoming testing grounds for the revenue playbooks that established hotels will copy in three years. When you open green, you choose your tech stack with revenue intent from the start, not as an afterthought. That's a structural advantage. The hotels that see this trend early and start planning F&B tech integration now, whether they're greenfield or renovation, will be the ones running leaner F&B ops and capturing upsell moments their competitors still miss.