How Vacatia is using Cloudbeds and its API to reduce tech fragmentation, scale faster, and build the foundation for AI-powered hospitality

Hospitality technology has never been more powerful, or more fragmented.

As operators expand across portfolios, brands, and business models, every new system promises to solve another problem. But for many hospitality companies, that promise comes at the cost of disconnected platforms, duplicate data, manual processes, and growing operational complexity.

For Vacatia, complexity wasn’t just a technology challenge, it was the business itself. Operating nearly 60 independent resorts across the United States and the Caribbean, Vacatia brings together vacation ownership, nightly rentals, owner services, OTA distribution, and corporate operations into a single business. 

Every day, the company balances the needs of nearly 500,000 owners while optimizing more than 11,000 units for both owner usage and transient demand. Traditional hospitality technology wasn’t designed for that reality.

But instead of forcing their business into rigid software, Vacatia chose to build on an open platform flexible enough to support the way they already operate.

That platform was Cloudbeds.

Vacation ownership is unlike traditional hotel operations. Inventory changes constantly as owners decide whether they’ll use their week, rent it, exchange it, or release it back into inventory. Every decision affects availability, pricing, forecasting, and distribution.

At the same time, owners aren’t simply customers. As Kris Wallsmith, VP of Engineering at Vacatia puts it, “They’ve been coming to the same resort for decades. Their children grew up there, families know each other, they’ve become part of the community.”

Protecting that owner experience while maximizing rental performance requires an entirely different operational model. “The owners really love the resorts, and we cherish that. That translates to everyone who operates them.”

Like many growing hospitality businesses, Vacatia initially relied on legacy vacation ownership software, but it quickly became clear that these couldn’t support the company’s vision.

“We’re not your typical timeshare company,” explains Kris. “We’re trying to do something different, and those off-the-shelf systems don’t do what we need.”

Rather than searching for one monolithic solution, Vacatia built a best-of-breed technology strategy with Cloudbeds as the operational foundation.

Our strategy has been selecting the best-of-breed technologies. We're working with Cloudbeds for distribution, for the platform, and for the user experience.

Instead of replacing Vacatia’s proprietary owner management systems, Cloudbeds’ Open API allows the company to connect them into a unified hospitality platform.

“We’re building on top of Cloudbeds because of the platform and the APIs.”

The result is a connected ecosystem where specialized vacation ownership technology and modern hotel operations work together seamlessly.

Vacatia’s proprietary owner portal, known internally as Clubhouse, serves as the central hub for hundreds of thousands of owners. There, owners can pay maintenance fees, manage ownership preferences, deposit weeks into exchange networks, or release inventory into Vacatia’s rental program.

Through Cloudbeds’ Open API, those decisions automatically flow into Vacatia’s inventory management systems before synchronizing with Cloudbeds in real time, giving Vacatia accurate, up-to-date inventory without manual intervention.

For a business where available inventory can change nightly, or even hourly, that flexibility has become critical. “The denominator is constantly changing,” Kris explains. “Our ability to accurately forecast inventory can be a real challenge.”

With Cloudbeds serving as the operational platform, those constantly shifting inventory signals remain synchronized across distribution channels, internal systems, and forecasting models.

As Vacatia expanded its portfolio, onboarding speed became another strategic advantage.

Before Cloudbeds, migrating even relatively small properties required significant manual effort.

Wallsmith recalls one of the company’s earliest implementations.”It was a 53-room resort. They were offline for about two and a half weeks while we loaded everything into the new system.”

Today, the process looks dramatically different. “Last year we migrated a resort with more than 4,000 rooms in four hours.”

But migrating large properties was only part of the challenge. The real measure of success wasn’t how quickly a resort could go live, it was how confidently it could perform under real operating conditions.

During one of the busiest holiday weekends of the year, Vacatia’s Grandview resort, one of the largest hospitality properties in the world, operated at more than 90% occupancy on Cloudbeds’ new calendar experience with minimal issues reported, marking a dramatic improvement from the property’s original migration.

“When we first migrated Grandview last year, the property was at only 50% capacity on migration day, and front desk operations came to a grinding halt,” Wallsmith shared following the successful holiday weekend. “It was a night-and-day difference from where we started.”

The improvement reflected more than a software upgrade. It represented over a year of platform re-architecture by Cloudbeds, combined with months of close collaboration, testing, and refinement between the two teams.

“The new calendar is a genuinely better product, and this weekend proved it at scale.”

For Vacatia, it demonstrated that Cloudbeds could support some of the largest and most operationally demanding resorts in the hospitality industry without compromising front desk performance or the guest experience.

Modern hospitality depends on good data. And for Vacatia, Cloudbeds Data Insights has transformed how information moves throughout the organization.

Rather than relying on custom-built reporting, operational teams now receive the right information at the right time through automated dashboards and reports.

“It’s really revolutionized our night process,” Kris says. Today, a centralized overnight team of just four people supports operations across 30 resorts.

Automated reporting has also strengthened security by delivering relevant operational information without exposing unnecessary guest or owner data to broader teams.

Instead of creating more dashboards or more complexity, Vacatia has created greater visibility with fewer moving parts.

Artificial intelligence may be changing hospitality, but its success depends on clean, connected data. With Cloudbeds, reservations, rates, distribution, guest behavior, and payments all feed the same data model for AI — so forecasting gets sharper, pricing gets smarter, and personalization actually works.

For Vacatia, that means clean, connected operational data which they combine with proprietary forecasting models and machine learning algorithms to continually optimize inventory allocation.

Forecasting models evaluate changing owner behavior, predict available inventory, and automatically feed those recommendations back into Cloudbeds to optimize OTA distribution.

That closed feedback loop allows Vacatia to make increasingly intelligent inventory decisions while reducing manual intervention.

Rather than simply adding AI to existing workflows, Vacatia is building AI on top of a unified operational platform.

Despite its engineering focus, Vacatia never loses sight of the people behind the technology.

As the company prepares to launch a new vacation club offering, preserving the emotional connection guests and owners have with their resorts remains a top priority.

“We’re still a hospitality company,” Kris says. “Technology cannot come at the expense of the guest experience.”

That philosophy mirrors Cloudbeds’ own vision of modern hospitality: technology working quietly in the background, allowing operators to spend less time managing systems and more time creating exceptional experiences.

Hospitality businesses don’t all operate the same way. Some manage boutique hotels. Others oversee hostels, vacation rentals, or large resort portfolios. Companies like Vacatia manage something even more complex, a business model that blends hospitality, ownership, distribution, engineering, and community.

By reducing technology fragmentation, accelerating growth, connecting specialized systems through open APIs, and creating the data foundation required for AI, Cloudbeds is helping hospitality companies like Vacatia modernize without compromise.