Highgate Hotels

Mike Uwe Dickersbach is the Chief Information & Digital Officer at Highgate Hotels. With over two decades of experience across food service, hotel ownership, vendor-side technology and enterprise IT, he brings a holistic view of hospitality operations and digital transformation. His leadership combines practical frontline insight with strategic vision, aligning technology with business growth, guest experience and long-term resilience.

Formative Experiences in Technology Leadership

I was fortunate enough to begin in a different vertical before my career turned to technology, that was Food Service. Specifically, food service within hotels. My time as a restaurant manager built a foundation of learning that allowed me to appreciate the hard work everyone does every day to make a business function and how technology impacts everyone’s working life. If a point of sale wasn’t working, I had firsthand experience of having to talk to the guest that couldn’t make a payment or close out a check or do a room charge. That sets the foundation on how to solve IT problems today and how it impacts people, not just in solving problems but in strategy as well.

When I transitioned fully into IT, I was working on the ownership level of hotels, this allowed me to gain experience with all the hotel brands, their tech stacks, how they operated. That resulted in the ability to take the best of all worlds and apply that thinking to my everyday life. Moving through my career, I was able to work on the vendor side for a few years that gave me the ability to understand the other side of the business, the sales and service side. It was a mind opening experience that gave me great insight into how I negotiate and work with my partners today. Finally, being in the field now for so long and seeing all the iterations of how technology has evolved and morphed gave me plenty of opportunity to apply modern data designs to help our company move to a full cloud first digital strategy.

Aligning Technology with Business Growth and Guest Experience

We must strike a balance on a couple different fronts. Internally we need to have people working efficiently. This means removing manual processes, adding in automation and being able to easily access data that allows everyone to do their jobs with less complications. Essentially focusing on how to work smarter. From a tech perspective, that means ensuring that the systems we have put in place are configured the way we need them to be and adjust when necessary. It also means listening to the business and the departments and what their needs are so that IT can help with a solution for them. We are here to support the growth of the company by utilizing the collective skill set in technology to foster solutions that work for all.

 Hospitality is experiencing a bit of a renaissance in terms of technology 

On the customer side, the guest side, I am looking to bring automation as well that helps both the guest and the team within the hotels accomplish their mutual needs. For example, adding intelligent AI web chat bots that allow guests to interact with us virtually and get their answers to them instantly without having to divert a human resource is a win for both us and the guest. The guest receives instant answers and is then able to follow up live with a human if needed from where they left off. The data that goes into those bots is enormous and obviously needs to be accurate. It may look simple on the front end but takes a lot of nurturing on the backend.

The largest challenge we face as an industry, is understanding where AI fits into the model of everything we do. There are plenty of vendors out there advertising “AI” when their tech stack isn’t much different than some sort of advanced automation. For hospitality, I think the largest area that cannot be overlooked, is how guests find and book our hotels. If we really embrace where things are heading, our customers will look towards their favourite AI chat (Gemini, ChatGPT etc) and go right from having the AI not only provide recommendations on where to go and what to do, but carry that forward into agentic AI and book everything on the spot. In order to prepare for that, we need to be ahead of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how, as an industry we are going to approach that. Getting to a better understanding of how independents and brands alike can take advantage of the latest technology is key for all operators in hospitality, and hits on a potentially new booking channel that we haven’t had previously.

Challenges in Technology and Digital Transformation

Like many things, change is difficult. Human nature is that we do not like change by default, it causes anxiety. Ensuring that we have clear project plans with proper communications and follow up is key to any strategy. Other than the change management, change in scope or scope creep usually shows up in some form or another. Sometimes it can be managed as a separate project and sometimes it must come to fruition due to various reasons, it is usually inevitable but in some instances also preventable. Ensuring IT is aligned with all stakeholders at any given time is the only way to navigate those issues.

Technology Trends Shaping the Future of Hospitality

Hospitality is experiencing a bit of a renaissance in terms of technology. Major brands are finally moving to modern cloud-based systems and the management companies that run those brands must adapt and incorporate modern thinking. As you can imagine, security was and continues to be a strong focus and it keeps evolving. Staying on top of emerging threats and ensuring you have the proper tech stacks to help manage them are just the baseline these days. Using AI systems to help do that heavy lifting is the current trend and will remain in place and only get stronger from here.

Advice for Emerging Technology Leaders

Understand the mission. Understand where your company is and where you are trying to go. Once you know that, you can create a roadmap on how to achieve those goals for the technology stack of the equation. If you have a team under you, remind them technology is to help facilitate revenue for the business as well as protect the business. Make great choices when it comes to partners, they are the ones that will help bail your team out when the times are tough.