A hotel owner or GM evaluating technology integrators usually sees the same three or four logos on every proposal: Crestron, Lutron, UniFi, and a PMS name. Those logos tell you very little on their own. What should actually drive a selection is what sits behind them — how a vendor builds guest-room automation, how it actually connects to your PMS, and how it segments a network that has to survive full occupancy. This is a guide to the questions worth resolving before a contract is signed, not a product explainer.
What a Crestron or Lutron credential actually verifies
A logo on a proposal does not tell you who in the company holds the credential, how recently it was earned, or whether the firm has built a guest-room system at the scale of your property. Ask the integrator directly which individuals hold the certification, and ask to see a guest-room mockup or reference installation rather than a slide deck.
Crestron frames its hospitality case around an end-to-end build: the same company supplying guest-room keypads and touch panels also supplies the ballroom AV, the lobby signage, and the back-of-house management tools, all visible from what Crestron calls a single pane of glass. According to The Importance of Crestron Technology in Hotel Design, a guest-room build typically centers on a "grand welcome scene" triggered at door unlock — shades, lighting, and climate preset together, often paired with a Crestron Horizon thermostat and keypads combined with touch panels for guests who want more feedback than a button provides. That same source notes that door locks from systems like VingCard, ASSA ABLOY, dormakaba, or SALTO Systems are what typically trigger the welcome scene, and that occupancy sensors report room status back to hotel management.
An integrator who can speak fluently about how door-unlock events actually propagate to lighting, shading, and the welcome scene — not just that it is "possible" — has probably done the work. An integrator who cannot describe this sequence in specific terms is worth probing further. Cave Group builds custom guest-room automation on Crestron, or on Lutron myRoom where a packaged system fits the property, and the firm is a Crestron Elite Gold Partner and Lutron HTI (Hospitality Technology Integrator) certified.
Judging real PMS integration experience
"We integrate with Opera" means very different things depending on how that integration was actually built. Two details separate a real integration track record from a logo claim.
First, ask which PMS integration path the vendor actually uses. Oracle's current model for OPERA Cloud is self-service: according to Oracle's Hospitality Integration Platform page, partners can register applications, obtain API credentials, and test against a shared, non-exclusive sandbox without a long custom project, paying only for the API calls they make. The same page states that new integrations are not available to legacy on-premises or hosted OPERA 5 deployments, Suite 8 PMS, or selected food-and-beverage solutions — a detail worth raising if your property is still on an older on-premises PMS generation, since that earlier platform generation is not where new integration work is being built. Ask whether the integrator has a published listing or documented application against the current OPERA Cloud APIs, not just general familiarity with "Opera."
Second, ask how the vendor handles a Mews-based property. Mews publishes four distinct open APIs — Connector, Channel Manager, Booking Engine, and Point-of-Sale — according to Mews's Hospitality API page, each aimed at a different integration job (accounting and housekeeping connections, OTA distribution, direct booking widgets, and F&B data). An integrator who references the specific API your project needs, rather than "Mews integration" in general, is speaking from direct build experience rather than a sales sheet.
Cave Group's own hospitality work covers PMS integration across Opera Cloud, Mews, Protel, and StayNTouch, tying check-in, check-out, and occupancy status to guest-room lighting, shading, and climate through myRoom XC's PMS interface module or custom Crestron logic.
Evaluating the guest-room build and mockup process
Before a full rollout, ask to see or participate in a mockup room. A credible process should let you test the keypad layout, confirm engraving and finish choices with your interior designer, and verify that scenes like "Good Morning" or "Do Not Disturb" behave the way staff and guests expect — before that design is replicated across every room on the floor. Ask how phased rollouts are sequenced across floors or wings, and what happens to a room mid-swap if a guest needs it back.
Guest and staff Wi-Fi: what to ask about segmentation
Network architecture is where many hotel technology proposals go vague. Press for specifics on how guest, staff, IoT, and AV traffic are separated — VLANs are the standard mechanism, but ask how the vendor sizes access-point density for peak occupancy rather than an empty-building site survey. A useful outside reference point: in UniFi's case study on The Doyle Collection, the integrator needed a networking approach that could blend into a historic property's aesthetic, handle dense device loads, and support future IoT growth across multiple buildings — the same three constraints worth raising with any integrator proposing a network for your property, historic or new-build.
Cave Group builds hotel networks on UniFi, segmented for guest, staff, PMS/POS, and AV traffic, and designs around high-density occupancy rather than a resting-state survey; the firm's hospitality page covers this alongside guest-room automation and PMS integration in more detail.
Structuring the bid comparison
Once you have multiple proposals, compare them on the same axes rather than a single number. At minimum: which specific PMS APIs or integration paths each vendor references by name, who on their team holds the Crestron or Lutron certification being claimed, how they propose to test the guest-room mockup, and how they document network segmentation before handoff. A vendor that answers these specifically, with named platforms and named APIs, has usually done the integration work before. A vendor that answers only in brand names has not necessarily.