Having recently completed two major acquisitions in as many years, hotel-technology provider Tambourine continued its transformation into a more comprehensive hospitality solution provider for hotel operators.
Long known as a software-as-a-service-based digital marketing company specializing in website design, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company—which was established in 1994—has broadened its lineup of services. With the two deals, the privately-owned company has added a CRS & booking platform and guest management platform, among other things, while expanding its global footprint, according to founder and CEO Rafael Cardozo.
The company unveiled its most recent acquisition of MyHotel to Hotel Management during an exclusive interview with Cardozo.
Earlier this year, Tambourine acquired MyHotel, the largest reputation management and guest experience platform in Latin America, which specializes in hotel management software designed to enhance the guest experience leveraging artificial intelligence.
Tambourine—which opened a secondary office in Bogota, Colombia in 2014—recently expanded its Latin American headquarters to new 13,000-square-foot offices housing over 120 employees.
The Next Phase
The acquisition of MyHotel is the next phase of Tambourine’s Latin American expansion. Cardozo explained some of the motivation behind the transaction.
“We see great growth potential in Latin America. It’s a complicated market and many firms in our industry who attempt to enter the market either fail or don’t fully commit. With MyHotel, we had the opportunity to acquire a great piece of technology and 1,600 really impressive hotel relationships along with it. That’s a world of opportunity.”
Cardozo further described MyHotel as having a “really beautiful user interface” and noted little needed to be done to the AI-enabled infrastructure. “Not only was it a great customer add-on, but we got incredible technology behind it,” he said.
The CEO also noted that MyHotel represented a good fit in another essential way. “It's already a company that shares Tambourine’s philosophy, which is that even though we are a technology company, we're a people-first services company. We think that's where we're going to continue to win,” he maintained.
ReservHotel
MyHotel is the second company Tambourine has acquired in as many years. In 2024, the company acquired ReservHotel, a CRS and booking engine serving the Caribbean and Latin America.
Tambourine was quick to put its imprint on the platform, according to Cardozo. “We used our tech UI [user interface] experience and our web design experience to redesign that booking engine to make it best in class,” he noted.
Cardozo also maintained that the conversion rate on the ReservHotel platform is coming in 2 percent to 3 percent higher than its competitive set in the space as he further pointed out its advantages.
“It's really streamlined, it’s without errors and it's fast. The fact that it packages with air really gives us a unique competitive advantage when hotels truly want to go head-to-head with the OTA's,” he added.
ReservHotel’s booking engine is now fully integrated into Tambourine’s website product line. The company recently launched TambourineOne, an integrated website and booking engine platform.
Cardozo described the new platform, which debuted at this year’s HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference.
“It's essentially a website with a booking engine built in. We’re finally eliminating the fragmentation between website and booking engine. That translates to one platform, one accountable partner for direct bookings and zero booking engine transaction fees or commissions on hotel-only bookings.”
Cardozo went on to add, “we think it is going to be very well received in the North American market.”
Standing Out
Acknowledging the proliferation of competition in the technology space globally, Cardozo noted that there are many “isolated point solutions” with disparate systems that have led to frustration for hoteliers.
“The problem is there's fatigue in the marketplace in terms of piloting different systems and not having any continuity for points of contact or support,” he said.
He touted this as a key point of differentiation for Tambourine, which now counts some 5,000 hotels globally as clients.
“Our approach is to provide best-in-class technology solutions for hospitality where it's easy to use, well supported and where systems actually talk to each other. We've been doing this for a long time,” he noted.
While Cardozo acknowledged the company is still often thought of strictly as a digital marketing company despite its expanded offering, such labels don’t concern him.
“We’ve evolved rapidly over the last 15 years, people aren’t entirely sure how to think about us. Are we a technology provider or a marketing firm? The industry struggles to understand us because they can’t neatly put us in a box. We’ve never been overly concerned with those labels, we just want to make sure we’re solving problems and delivering great technology and service that we’re proud of,” he concluded.