Aura Hoteles Builds on Cloudbeds Instead of Building Its Own Stack

Aura Hoteles, a six-property startup out of Galicia, Spain, made a deliberate bet against building its own technology: instead of developing proprietary systems, it built its entire stack on top of Cloudbeds’ property management system and open API. Co-founder José Luis Carro Roca frames the goal plainly — “what we would like to do is not only give you accommodation, but give you an amazing experience” — and the custom applications Aura built on top of Cloudbeds reflect that: an in-house housekeeping app, and a guest-communication system that sends check-in instructions and generates personalized smart-lock codes automatically, no staff intervention required. Roca calls the all-in-one foundation “the selling point” — connective infrastructure Aura can build proprietary innovation on top of, rather than either a closed suite or a fully custom build, as it plans further expansion across Spain and internationally.

It’s a build-on-top-of-open-API path that Cloudbeds has been explicit about wanting hotels to take. In an interview from HITEC 2026, Cloudbeds’ Josh Graham argues AI is reversing decades of scale advantage that favored big chains — because independent operators hold the real-time property knowledge AI needs, while large brands typically don’t — and warns that “scattered data becomes fatal” in the AI era: a spa integration that only posts a charge, instead of capturing that a guest prefers a specific massage style, can’t trigger the right offer later. Graham’s advice — audit the stack, eliminate silos, consolidate vendors — is exactly the instinct Aura acted on.

Not every operator is choosing the small-and-API-first path, though. Al Khoory Hotels shows the enterprise version of the same underlying logic: the seven-property Dubai group picked Shiji’s Daylight PMS specifically for a single guest profile shared across its whole portfolio. Different scale, different vendor, same underlying bet — that unified guest data, not more point solutions, is what AI-driven personalization actually runs on.