A market entry checklist. For hospitality tech firms.

I'm Lauren Pearson, and I wrote our full market entry strategy framework as the "how to think about this" piece. This checklist is the companion to that: a working list you can actually run through with a leadership team in a single sitting, item by item, rather than another explanation of the theory behind it.

What the checklist covers

Five groups, worked in order, because each one depends on decisions made in the group before it.

The region is a genuine pull for this list right now. WTTC data puts Middle East tourism GDP at USD 385.8 billion in 2025, with Saudi Arabia alone contributing USD 178 billion and business travel spend up 23 per cent across the region, and Ken Research values the Middle East hotel hospitality management software market at roughly USD 350 million, growing on the back of that same tourism expansion in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. That demand is real, but it also means more vendors are running the same playbook, which is exactly why a genuine pilot, not a demo tour, is what separates a market entry that sticks from one that quietly stalls after the launch press release.

How to use it

Run this as a single working session with whoever actually owns the decision, not a document that circulates for comments over three weeks. Go group by group. For each item, the room needs one of three answers: confirmed, in progress with a date, or not yet started. An item marked "not yet started" in group one blocks moving to group two, because licensing and data residency decisions shape which partners and which properties are even viable pilot candidates.

Treat group two, commercial validation, as the item the whole checklist exists to protect. A signed pilot agreement with a real property group, with a written definition of what success looks like at the end of it, tells you more about market fit in eight weeks than any amount of market sizing research. I have seen firms spend four months on legal structuring before ever testing the product with a real Gulf-based operator, and the structuring work often turns out to need revisiting anyway once the pilot surfaces requirements nobody anticipated.

Revisit the checklist at the launch decision gate itself, not before it. The point of group five is a genuine go or no-go conversation using the evidence the first four groups produced, not a rubber stamp on a decision that was actually made informally weeks earlier. If the pilot in group two did not hit its agreed success criteria, that is a no, whatever the sunk cost in legal and partner work says otherwise.

A worked example

A hospitality technology firm I advised on this exact process had already built strong reseller relationships in Southeast Asia and were confident the same product would work in the Gulf. Running the checklist surfaced two things the confidence had skipped over: their product's payment integration did not support the settlement structure most Gulf hotel groups use, a group four localisation gap, and their strongest inbound lead, a five-property group in Dubai, wanted a paid pilot with a defined ninety-day success measure rather than the free trial the firm's standard playbook offered everywhere else.

Working the checklist in order meant the payment integration gap got fixed before the pilot started, not discovered mid-pilot when it would have cost the relationship. The pilot itself became the group two evidence: it hit its agreed occupancy-reporting accuracy target in week six, which made the group five decision straightforward rather than a debate based on optimism. That sequencing, fix the localisation gap first, then let a real pilot generate the evidence, is the difference this checklist is built to enforce.

What to do once the checklist says go

A confirmed "go" at the launch decision gate is the start of execution, not the finish line for planning. The three things worth locking down in the same week as that decision: a named local point of contact for the pilot account who is not also running product development, since support requests during a first Gulf deployment need a faster response time than most product roadmaps are built around; a simple weekly reporting cadence back to leadership on the pilot's agreed success metric, so a stalling pilot gets caught in week three rather than discovered at the ninety-day review; and a clear answer to whether the next customer after the pilot needs the same manual hand-holding or whether the onboarding process itself needs building out before a second sale closes.

Firms that treat the checklist as finished work once the pilot is signed tend to under-resource exactly this stretch, the weeks between "we have a pilot" and "we have a repeatable process for the next five customers." That gap is where a promising Gulf entry either turns into a genuine regional business or quietly stays a single reference account for the next two years.