CAMO Hospitality, an infrastructure platform for room service, is expanding into Portland, Ore., its sixth U.S. market, as the company surpasses 60 hotel partners and more than 200 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
Data & Partnerships
CAMO provides hotels with a fully managed room-service operation under their own brand. Guests scan a QR code in their room and order from a hotel-branded menu. Behind the scenes, CAMO handles everything including menus, ordering, kitchen coordination and delivery to the guest’s door. The hotel keeps the branding, the guest data and the revenue upside. The platform offers an alternative to partnering with a third-party delivery platform, which does not provide the hotel with additional data into what guests want in terms of food and beverage at a hotel.
“When a guest orders through DoorDash or Uber Eats, the hotel receives zero margin and zero data,” CAMO founder and CEO Kevin Rohani told Hotel Management. “With CAMO, the hotel receives a share of every transaction and full access to the order data behind it. The economics don't compete with third-party delivery; they replace a zero. And on data, the gap is even wider: Third-party platforms treat the hotel as a delivery address, not a partner. We treat the hotel as the owner of the relationship, which means transaction data, ordering patterns and guest behavior all flow back to the property.”
Through the platform, hotels capture order-level data including timing, frequency, average order value, menu item performance and order-to-room linkage. “That gives operators visibility into when guests are ordering, what they're ordering, and how those patterns vary by guest type, length of stay and property,” Rohani said, noting that the way hotels use this data “is still an evolving area.” Some partners use it to inform menu and pricing decisions; others are starting to layer it into loyalty and personalization strategy. “The honest answer is that this level of granular in-stay data has, historically, been inaccessible to hotels, so the use cases are emerging in real time.”
Hotels, he added, have spent “decades” investing in the lobby, the restaurant, the spa and the front desk. “The guestroom—where guests spend the most time—is now the most contested and most outsourced part of the experience. Whoever owns the commerce layer inside that room owns the future of the guest relationship.”
Gaining Ground
CAMO's expansion into Portland brings the company to six U.S. markets, joining Anaheim, Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York City's Financial District and Midtown. The Portland launch covers select-service and extended-stay properties across the greater downtown area, with additional properties onboarding in the coming weeks. The company now operates under most major hotel brands within the limited-service, select-service, and extended-stay segments, and counts some of the largest owner groups and management companies among its partners. CAMO is also piloting with several major hotel brands, beyond its existing property-level partnerships
“Our market prioritization has been driven by three factors: existing partner relationships, hotel density and segment fit,” Rohani said. “We tend to follow our owner and operator partners as they expand, so when a group we already work with has properties in a new metro, that becomes a natural entry point. From there, we look at hotel density (we need enough partner properties in a market to justify the kitchen and delivery infrastructure) and segment composition, since limited-service, select-service and extended-stay properties are where the [food-and-beverage] vacuum is most acute and our model has the strongest fit.”
That segment, Rohani continued, fit matters because food-and-beverage is structurally secondary in these hotels. “There's rarely a dedicated F&B director or restaurant team, so AGMs typically end up running food and beverage on top of their actual job. Our model is designed to give hotels real F&B revenue without pulling team focus away from what hotels are supposed to do: house guests and deliver impeccable service.”
In terms of pace, Rohani said the CAMO team has been “deliberate” rather than aggressive. “Six markets in three years reflects a methodical approach where every market is operationally sound before we move to the next. We expect to expand the pace, but we're not interested in flag-planting. Our goal is to enter markets where we can serve dozens of hotels at scale, not single properties scattered across the country. We'd rather be the only platform a hotel needs in three markets than a logo on a partner deck in 30.
Driving Revenue
Since launching, CAMO claims that it has facilitated more than $10 million in hotel-branded room-service revenue, with average orders exceeding $45. The platform operates entirely on a revenue share, so the properties pay nothing upfront and properties add a new revenue stream with zero capital expenditure and no added headcount.
Rohani said that the revenue numbers are real, but argued that they are only one dimension of a bigger picture. “For most of our partners in limited-service, select-service, and extended-stay properties, room service through CAMO is fundamentally incremental,” he said. “These properties never had a traditional F&B operation generating in-stay revenue, so what we deliver isn't a lift on an existing line item, it's a new one entirely.”
Most of CAMO’s hotel partners earn “a couple thousand dollars per month in pure profit” through CAMO, Rohani continued, without requiring capital outlay and or additional staff. “Stronger performers are closer to $5,000 per month, or $60,000 a year.” A hotel actually running its own F&B program would need to drive $500,000 to $1 million in F&B revenue at a 5 percent to 7 percent margin to net the same $60,000, he added—“and that's assuming the operation isn't losing money in the first place—which, in these segments, most do.”
The more important point is what comes alongside the revenue. CAMO isn't just generating dollars, we're building a native ecosystem inside the hotel that the property controls. That ecosystem includes the brand at the point of sale, the data behind every transaction, and a direct line into the guest's in-stay behavior. Revenue is the entry point. Ownership of the in-stay commerce and engagement layer is what compounds over time.
CAMO is in the final stages of closing a capital round to support continued national expansion, with additional details to be shared in the coming weeks.