What to know before you fly to San Antonio
HITEC 2026 runs Monday June 15 through Thursday June 18 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio. The education program opens Monday with full-day sessions; the exhibit hall opens Tuesday June 16 and runs through Thursday June 18. If you're exhibiting, your team needs to be on-site for hall setup Sunday June 14.
The show is produced by HFTP (Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals), the nonprofit association that's been running HITEC since 1972. Registration is open to all hospitality industry professionals; exhibitor passes and guest passes are handled through the HITEC exhibitor portal.
Show hours for the exhibit hall: 9:30–17:30 CDT Tuesday and Wednesday; 9:30–14:30 CDT Thursday. Tuesday runs the longest and has the highest traffic volume — plan your Tier 1 booth time accordingly.
San Antonio in mid-June is hot. The convention center is air-conditioned but the walk between hotels and the venue is not. If your booth team is in suits, pack extra shirts. The River Walk hotels are walking distance from the convention center; everything else requires a rideshare.
The HITEC mobile app launches 3–4 weeks before the show and is essential — it's how attendees navigate the floor plan, schedule meetings, and mark the booths they plan to visit. If your team isn't visible in the app with a complete booth profile before June 1, you're invisible to the pre-show planners. Get that sorted.
Field Marketing Tip
Pull your target account list 6 weeks out, not 2 weeks out.
The HITEC pre-registration list is available to exhibitors. Cross-reference it against your CRM's open opportunities and renewal-cycle accounts six weeks before the show — by mid-April for 2026. Six weeks gives your SDR team time to send pre-show LinkedIn outreach to Tier 1 accounts. At 6-week lead time, hospitality buyers have enough runway to put a booth visit on their schedule. At 2 weeks, the agenda is already full.
Hospitality brand buyers typically pre-plan their HITEC visit more than most show audiences. They know which vendors they're evaluating. If you're not in their pre-show plan, you're fighting for aisle time against vendors who are. Get into their schedule before they board the plane.
Who's actually on the HITEC floor
HITEC's audience is more CIO-heavy than most industry shows. The buying committee for a cloud PMS, a revenue management system, or a guest engagement platform is not in Atlanta or Chicago — it's here. The ICP breakdown based on HITEC historical attendee profiles:
- CIO / CTO / VP of Information Technology — ~22% of attendees.
Economic buyer for enterprise-wide technology decisions. Arrives with an evaluation list; leaves with 2–3 vendors on a shortlist. These are the people your AE needs to be in front of.
- Director / Manager of IT — ~16%.
The champion and validator. They don't sign the check but they control the technical evaluation. If they can't explain your product to the CIO, you don't make the shortlist.
- VP / Director of Operations — ~18%.
Property and brand-level operations leaders who own the guest experience and operational technology layer — POS, PMS, guest messaging, housekeeping systems, digital keys. Budget authority for mid-range decisions.
- General Manager / Hotel Owner / Operator — ~12%.
Property-level decision-makers, particularly from independent and boutique brands. Faster decision cycles, smaller deal sizes, but high close rates if the conversation is right.
- VP of Revenue Management / Revenue Technology — ~8%.
Owns revenue management systems, channel managers, OTA strategy, and pricing tools. A small but high-value segment if you're selling into the revenue stack.
- Finance / Procurement / CFO — ~6%.
Typically shows up for enterprise decisions — multi-property PMS rollouts, payments platforms, security infrastructure. Their involvement signals a deal is past early evaluation.
- Consultants, analysts, and academia — ~10%.
Not buyers in this cycle, but useful for competitive intel and positioning. The HFTP advisory council is heavily represented; the conversations with academics and analysts often surface where the industry is heading 18 months out.
- International attendees — 20%+ of total.
Attendees from 60+ countries. If you have international hospitality exposure, HITEC is the most efficient conference for building non-US pipeline without leaving North America.
The companies sending the biggest delegations are large hotel management companies (Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Wyndham), mid-market hotel groups, casino resort operators, restaurant and foodservice technology teams, and independent hoteliers evaluating technology for the first time.
The 3-day Exhibit Strategy
HITEC's exhibit hall is three days. That's not enough time to do everything — it is enough time to execute a disciplined capture strategy on your Tier 1 accounts if you walk in with a plan.
Day 1 (Tuesday, June 16) — Tier 1 and pre-booked meetings only
This is your highest-energy day. Attendees have been in sessions since Monday; the exhibit hall opening is an event. Traffic is strong all day. Use this day exclusively for pre-booked Tier 1 meetings and structured captures of accounts you identified pre-show. Do not cold-walk the aisles on Day 1 — your Tier 1 accounts are at the show and they're making their first rounds. Be at the booth, not on the floor.
Run the hardest capture on Tuesday. This is the day to hit 50–70 meaningful conversations per rep, not 150 badge scans. Quality of context captured on Day 1 drives meeting conversion for the rest of the show.
Day 2 (Wednesday, June 17) — Floor intelligence and secondary targets
Traffic is still strong Wednesday morning; it tapers after lunch. Use the morning to execute on any Tier 1s you missed Tuesday. Use the afternoon to walk the floor yourself — know what competitors are saying, what themes are dominating the conversations, and which adjacent vendors are drawing traffic.
Wednesday afternoon dinners are important in hospitality tech. The HFTP evening events and sponsor dinners are where relationship-level conversations happen. If your team is not in the evening networking circuit, you're missing the layer where the longer-cycle deals get started.
Day 3 (Thursday, June 18) — Close the loop and capture final context
Show closes at 14:30 on Thursday. Half the floor is mentally on a flight by noon. Use the morning to revisit any Tier 1 accounts you haven't booked and any warm conversations from Tuesday or Wednesday that need a follow-up prompt. Every booth visit before 12:00 Thursday that ends without a booked meeting needs a voice note with the next-step context captured before you pack up the booth.
Book your team's travel for Thursday afternoon or evening, not Thursday morning. The last two hours of the show are less crowded and the conversations are often the most direct — buyers who haven't found what they're looking for are willing to engage more openly.
Vendors and Sessions Worth Knowing at #HITEC2026?
HITEC's education program runs June 15–18 and covers the technology themes that are driving hospitality budgets in 2026. Knowing which sessions your ICP is attending is half the floor strategy.
AI and automation in hotel operations
The AI theme is everywhere at HITEC 2026 — AI-powered guest communication, automated revenue management, chatbot-driven service recovery, predictive maintenance for property infrastructure. Sessions on AI adoption will draw the largest CIO and VP of Operations audiences. If your product has an AI component, your booth messaging needs to be specific about the use case (eg check out HippoRev)— "AI-powered" without a specific workflow claim will not differentiate you from 40 other exhibitors saying the same thing.
Property Management Systems (PMS) and cloud migration
PMS modernization is the single largest hospitality technology category by spend. The transition from legacy on-premise systems to cloud PMS (Mews, Cloudbeds, Oracle OPERA Cloud, Agilysys) is accelerating. Any exhibitor whose product touches the PMS layer — integrations, connectors, adjacent modules — should have a clear interoperability story. Buyers will ask "does this work with OPERA Cloud?" in the first 30 seconds.
Payments and POS modernization
The restaurant, F&B, and retail-facing hotel operators are actively replacing legacy POS hardware and evaluating modern payment stacks. Sessions on contactless payments, unified commerce, and mobile POS draw operations-heavy audiences. Agilysys, Lightspeed, Toast, and Revel are in this category. If you're in the payments or POS adjacency, the HITEC floor is one of the best places to find operators who are mid-evaluation.
Cybersecurity and data privacy
With PCI DSS 4.0 now in force and a wave of hotel brand data breaches in the last 18 months, cybersecurity is no longer a back-of-room session topic. CISO-level discussions and network security sessions draw large, senior audiences. This is the highest-growth investment category in hospitality IT and the conversations are driven by urgency, not curiosity.
The Entrepreneur 20X startup pitch competition
HITEC's annual startup competition draws 20+ early-stage hospitality tech companies competing in front of a live audience and panel of investors. The pitches surface the themes venture capital is tracking in hospitality tech. Even if you're not competing, walk the E20X zone — it's the highest-density signal for where the category is going in the next 24 months.
The Cost Math for your HITEC Booth
HITEC is not the most expensive trade show in B2B, but it's not cheap. Booth space is competitive (2026 sold out), and San Antonio in mid-June means hotels and logistics add up. Here's the real cost breakdown:
10×10 booth (typical for early-stage or single-product companies):
- Booth space: $3,200–$4,500
- Booth build and graphics: $1,200–$2,500
- Drayage and electrical: $600–$900
- Travel (2–3 reps, 4 nights): $4,000–$7,000
- All-in: $9,000–$15,000
20×20 booth (typical for established vendors, Series B+):
- Booth space: $8,500–$14,000
- Booth build and graphics: $4,000–$8,000
- Drayage and electrical: $2,000–$3,500
- AV and tech: $1,500–$3,000
- Travel (4–6 reps, 4 nights): $8,000–$14,000
- All-in: $24,000–$42,500
The LTM math:
At a 9% LTM rate (badge-scanner-only baseline), a booth that generates 300 qualified conversations converts to approximately 27 booked meetings. At a $30,000 all-in spend, that's $1,111 per booked meeting.
At B2Brain's customer median (44% LTM for hospitality and technology shows), the same 300-conversation booth converts to approximately 132 booked meetings. Same spend. Same team. Same three days. Cost per booked meeting: $227.
The 5× difference in per-meeting cost is not explained by the market — it's explained by whether the booth team is capturing context and booking meetings on the floor, or handing out badges and emailing a CSV to SDRs the following week.
"The difference between our HITEC performance in 2023 and 2025 wasn't the booth size or the team — it was walking in with a ranked target list and walking out with 40 meetings already booked. The SDR sequence for the rest doesn't compare."
— Director of Field Marketing, hotel technology platform · HITEC 2025 cohort
After the exhibit hall closes Thursday
The week after HITEC is where HITEC ROI is won or lost.
Every hospitality technology buyer at the show will receive 50–100 follow-up emails in the 72 hours after the show closes. The generic "Great to meet you at HITEC!" email with a product overview deck will be deleted. The follow-up that references the specific technology challenge they described at the booth — their PMS migration timeline, their front desk staffing problem, their cybersecurity audit coming in September — that follow-up gets a meeting booked.
Context captured at the booth is the only thing that separates those two types of follow-up. If your team is working from a badge scan CSV and memory by Friday morning, the conversion window is already closing.
Teams running B2Brain at HITEC have the Friday-morning report in the CMO's inbox by 8 AM CDT June 19 — pipeline sourced, LTM by rep, meetings booked with full conversation context, CRM sync complete. By end-of-business Friday, the AEs are working a clean list of meetings, not sifting through 300 ambiguous CSV rows trying to reconstruct what actually happened on the floor.
The HITEC follow-up window is short. Hospitality buyers return to busy properties, guest crises, and quarterly reviews. If you haven't booked the meeting before they land at their home airport, the odds collapse significantly by Day 5 post-show. B2Brain books the meeting at the booth, on the floor, before they walk to the next exhibitor.
