News Briefs

In a deal that is valued around $1 billion, Roark Capital has acquired controlling interest in Dave's Hot Chicken.  

Financial terms were not disclosed, but Dave’s CEO Bill Phelps said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the reported $1 billion valuation for the deal is “pretty close.” The Wall Street Journal is also valuing the deal at $1 billion.

The fast-casual brand, which began in a Los Angeles parking lot in 2017, is on track to surpass 400 restaurants worldwide by the end of the year.

At MURTEC 2025 Experience Matters, Dave’s Hot Chicken CTO Leon Davoyan took the stage to share insights on Effective Automation, sharing how the brand leverages technology to enhance the guest experience and streamline operations across its global footprint. The brand was also recently featured in HT Talks Tech, showcasing its forward-thinking approach to tech-enabled expansion.

Dave’s has earned industry-wide recognition not only for its unit economics and guest satisfaction but also for its sophisticated digital strategy. With nearly six million social media followers and hundreds of millions of user-generated views, the company’s digital-first marketing model continues to be a key growth engine.

“This is one of the great entrepreneurial journeys of our time, and now we begin the next chapter in the story,” said Bill Phelps, Dave’s Hot Chicken’s CEO. “Our entire organization is excited about the fit between Dave’s Hot Chicken and Roark, and we’re looking forward to continuing to blow our guests’ minds and unlocking growth and value for our franchise partners.”

The leadership team—including the brand’s founders—remains in place and focused on the core pillars that fuel Dave’s growth: menu innovation, food quality, brand storytelling, guest-facing tech, automation, and data-informed decision-making.

Roark has other investments in the restaurant space including Inspire Brands and Subway.

North Point Mergers & Acquisitions served as Dave’s exclusive financial advisor.

The new DoorDash Preferred Integrations Program has ranked Qu "Excellent," its highest possible rating.

As delivery continues to play a larger role in the restaurant landscape, this program evaluates technology partners based on real-world system performance, error rates and integration depth. Qu emerged as the only POS to achieve exceptional scores across the board, delivering a 99.8% order success rate — more than 3x better than the industry average — with no need for middleware or manual workarounds. For restaurants, that means fewer headaches and more fulfilled orders, ultimately improving profitability through more sales and revenue growth. 

Qu injects orders directly from third-party marketplaces into the POS and KDS, enabling a seamless, automated order flow with significantly lower failure rates, real-time updates, centralized control and dynamic pricing across all delivery platforms. More importantly, merchants can update menus and pricing for all order channels from Qu's unified menu management platform and gain full visibility into performance, without the integration chaos.

"For too long, restaurant operators have had to sacrifice either speed or stability. We built Qu on the belief that they shouldn't have to choose," said Amir Hudda, CEO of Qu. "This recognition from DoorDash validates our mission to simplify the complex and bring harmony to restaurant operations. The results speak for themselves."

Restaurants using Qu's direct DSP integrations have already seen the difference. One national fast-casual brand, Hot Head Burritos, increased its third-party delivery volume and cut its order failure rate to just 0.15%, saving thousands in lost transactions each month.

"Qu's DoorDash integration has helped us reduce failed orders to well below industry standards, eliminating operational headaches we once faced," said Peter Wiley, Hot Head Burritos' Director of Marketing and IT. "Being the only partner ranked with an excellent performance level is a well-deserved recognition of their commitment to reliability and efficiency. Qu has been a game-changer for our team and a big win for our guests."

To see the full list of DoorDash Preferred Integration Partners, visit: merchants.doordash.com/en-us/preferred-integrations. 

Radisson Hotel Group is extending its hospitality tech stack to include one of the most underleveraged experiences in hotel ecommerce: restaurant booking. This week, Radisson announced the launch of a new online platform that allows guests and local diners to browse and reserve tables across its global portfolio of 1,900 restaurants—directly on RadissonHotels.com.

The tool supports searches by city, cuisine, and concept, and integrates rich content like menus and photography, offering a seamless, end-to-end digital dining journey. It also uses geolocation and personalized recommendations based on stay details—bringing Radisson’s digital transformation closer to full-service guest engagement, from room to table.

While the functionality is framed as a convenience for food lovers and local explorers, it’s also a strategic move: Radisson is positioning its F&B venues as standalone destinations in the eyes of consumers—and discoverable entities in the online travel and dining ecosystem.

Why It Matters:
 

1. It bridges the “last digital mile” in hotel dining.

Historically, hotel restaurants have lagged behind in online visibility, often buried within hotel websites or dependent on third-party platforms. This move brings restaurant booking into Radisson’s owned digital ecosystem—giving the brand more control over conversion, data, and customer experience.

2. It aligns with industrywide digital transformation trends.

From Marriott’s revamped Bonvoy dining experience to Accor’s push into F&B as a standalone vertical, major hotel groups are investing in better tech to elevate their culinary brands. Radisson’s approach—fully integrated, mobile-responsive, with geo-personalization—puts it in line with this growing trend of hotels treating restaurants as both guest amenities and local businesses.

3. It’s a content-forward ecommerce model.

By combining functionality with storytelling—like the “Taste of Heritage” culinary series—Radisson is merging marketing and booking tools. This model mimics the success of platforms like Resy or TheFork, but within the hotel’s own digital walls. It shows that content-rich UX can drive transactions, especially when built around emotion (local food culture) and convenience (real-time booking).

4. It prepares Radisson for AI and intent-based discovery.

A searchable, structured database of global restaurants with menus, photos, and bookability positions Radisson well for future integrations with GenAI platforms and voice search, where context-rich, hyper-local content will increasingly shape travel decision-making.

As generative AI platforms become mainstream tools for travel discovery, hotels are under pressure to adapt their digital strategies for new types of search behavior. Lodging Interactive, a long-standing digital marketing firm in hospitality, is meeting this shift with a new solution: Commingle AI Signals, an enhancement to its existing Commingle Guest Review Response Service.

The new service turns guest review responses into a discovery tool by incorporating strategically written “AI signals”—phrases and context that align with how travelers ask questions in generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience). Unlike traditional SEO that targets static website content, Commingle AI Signals takes a more dynamic and conversational approach, injecting fresh, brand-aligned content into publicly visible review platforms.

Key features include:

• Daily human-written, hotel-approved responses posted across major review platforms.
• Language optimized to improve a hotel’s relevance in intent-based, generative AI searches.
• Enhanced discoverability in platforms like ChatGPT, Google SGE AI Overviews, and Perplexity.
• A proactive alternative for branded hotels that may be limited by rigid corporate web templates.

What makes it unique:
Commingle AI Signals tackles a blind spot in many hotels’ digital marketing strategies: the impact of guest review content on emerging AI-driven search behaviors. While most SEO tools focus on websites and meta content, this solution uses review responses—a frequently updated, guest-visible content stream—as a search engine optimization vector. It’s a novel use of "earned content" to influence discoverability.

Why tech leaders should care:
This service offers a low-lift way for properties—especially branded or independently managed hotels with limited control over website infrastructure—to influence how they appear in GenAI search results. For tech leaders concerned with future-proofing digital visibility and maximizing ROI on reputation management, Commingle AI Signals turns routine operations (responding to reviews) into a strategic marketing asset.

Trend tie-in:
With Google and other platforms emphasizing conversational search and AI-generated summaries, the nature of content that gets surfaced is changing. Hotels need to adapt to a world where discovery starts not with “Hotels in Chicago” but “What’s a romantic hotel with great customer service near the riverwalk?” Commingle AI Signals helps properties become part of the answers to those kinds of prompts.

With guest expectations at an all-time high and staff resources often stretched thin, Unifocus is tackling a critical gap in hotel operations: turning guest feedback into fast, effective action. The company’s new platform, XiQ (ExperienceIQ), empowers hoteliers to collect post-stay feedback and immediately use it to inform decisions, benchmark performance, and elevate the guest experience—all without complicated setup or technical dependencies.

• XiQ is a real-time experience intelligence platform that launches with customizable guest surveys and plans to expand into broader feedback and operational integration.
• Hotels can build branded surveys and distribute them via email or QR code, optimized for multilingual, mobile-first experiences.
• Feedback data is displayed in real time through an intuitive dashboard, with the ability to track satisfaction across departments and properties.
• Features include department-level benchmarking, real-time alerts, and post-stay folio insights—all geared toward operational teams, not just analysts.
• The platform is available immediately as an add-on to Unifocus Workforce Management or Operations, with enhancements like guest messaging and staff engagement tools on the horizon.

Why This Matters:

1. Closing the Feedback-Action Gap
XiQ addresses a persistent pain point in hospitality: collecting guest feedback is easy, but turning it into timely, actionable change is hard. With real-time alerts and department-level benchmarking, XiQ helps operational leaders not only hear the guest but respond—before negative trends impact loyalty or revenue.

2. Designed for Hotel Teams, Not Data Scientists
Many survey tools generate data, but require analysts or consultants to interpret it. XiQ simplifies this with hospitality-specific templates, built-in scoring models, and mobile-first delivery—making it usable by front-line managers, not just corporate offices.

3. Future-Proofing Feedback Loops
Unifocus is positioning XiQ not just as a survey tool but as the foundation for a unified feedback layer across labor, operations, and experience. That means hotels will eventually be able to trigger staff scheduling adjustments or service recovery workflows directly from feedback—turning sentiment into action automatically.

4. Lightweight Deployment = Fast ROI
For IT leaders, XiQ’s no-heavy-lift implementation is a key advantage. It’s available as an add-on to existing Unifocus platforms, making it a low-friction upgrade that extends value from tools many hotels already use.

5. A Sign of Broader Trends
This launch underscores a growing hospitality tech trend toward unifying operational data and experience data. Tools like XiQ reflect a shift from siloed systems (PMS, labor, CRM, surveys) toward platforms that centralize insight and empower quicker decision-making.

SIHOT has enhanced its integration with Dingus, a channel manager focused on tour operator distribution in Spain and the Caribbean. This upgrade brings real-time synchronization of inventory, rates, and reservations directly into the SIHOT PMS. For hotels working with contracted tour operators, this means faster, automated processing of bookings and deposits, fewer overbookings, and less manual oversight.

Now, reservations from Dingus are automatically linked to specific contracts within SIHOT, allowing the system to distinguish between allotment-based and general availability. Hotels also benefit from automated prepayment capture and invoicing that supports Spanish legal requirements.

For IT and operations leaders, this is a strong example of targeted tech integration that reduces friction in legacy processes. Resort hotels still rely heavily on tour operator contracts, which have long required manual tracking and offline coordination. Automating this through PMS integration not only improves efficiency but also provides more transparent, data-driven distribution management—an important asset as hotels diversify distribution strategies to improve yield.

This move is also in step with the wider “connected PMS ecosystem” trend, where hotel tech stacks are increasingly expected to support deep, bidirectional integrations that reduce error-prone data entry and compliance risks. For any resort group still manually reconciling tour operator contracts, this kind of integration signals what modern, future-proof PMS performance should look like.