The Internet brings boundary-less business environment and a strong competitive market. The oversupply of tourism suppliers, especially in the hotel industry, forces hoteliers to be innovative and creative and to find ways to differentiate and give prominence to their hotel among the large number of competitors. Smartness through interoperability and interconnectivity of all network partners increasingly enables hospitality organisations to develop their competitiveness through better understanding of customers and market conditions and develop their decision making processes. Smartness can effectively develop networks to create an ecosystem and dynamically interconnect all members. However, how to interlink the ecosystem is a challenging task as there is no standardisation among practitioners, and the stages of ICT development and implementation among members varies. Some hotels are on the technology frontier, as they adopt and upgrade to latest IT infrastructure and application systems, where some still use legacy technologies. More than one decade ago, Buhalis and O’Connor (2005) pointed out that technologies on ambiance and intelligence should be the focal point of technology developments in tourism. These included sensor technology, embedded systems, ubiquitous communications, media management and handling, natural interaction, contextual awareness and emotional computing. Advance technologies bring-in innovative and intelligence ways to control and monitor business. The Internet of things (IoT) and the Internet of everything revolutionize and reengineer business process as effectively disrupting the tourism and hospitality industries (Porter and Heppelmann, 2014). Data is one of the most valuable assets in the hospitality industry. Contemporary hospitality management requires tremendous amount of data, including internal big data (such as hotel reservation history, cost analysis, guest history, revenue statistics and marketing statistics), and external context information collected from the external macro-environment such as economic, political and environmental data as well as nearby event profiles to conduct comprehensive business analysis. Big data collected from both internal and external services enable hospitality practitioners to make use of historical databases to forecast and predict business trends such as occupancy, rates and yield, labour costs and investment decisions (Zhang et al., 2015). However, current big data is still spread around the Internet without a standardized format. Therefore, users have difficulties to retrieve and consolidate them in a meaningful manner. Hospitality industry consists of countless direct and indirect business partners and collaborators. Every member of the network has comprehensive and detailed data to enrich their business analysis. However, no value can be created without these data is accessible, analysed and support decision making. The main objective of this study is to explore smart hospitality and propose a comprehensive ecosystem that takes advantage of interconnectivity and interoperability. With the support of big data, cloud service, sensors and ambient ecosystems can collect data dynamically, and decision support systems to support business functions in order to maximise the value for all stakeholders and intelligence. This will enable all actors to develop the collective competitiveness of the entire hospitality ecosystem and cocreate value for all stakeholders. The paper demonstrates how agile management using technology can be used, to support hospitality, as a highly-interconnected and networked industry. This conceptual study extracted an extensive body of research from two disciplines. Research related to hospitality technology development and adoption was assessed and analysed to form the preliminary smart hospitality foundation. The foundation explored the developments of information technology in the hospitality industry and the implementation of technology in operations, management and customer interaction. This study adopted desk research as the method of data collection. Due to the recency of the topic, Internet reports were used for the developments in hospitality information systems, future trends, and challenges of smart hospitality. Resources searched included journal articles, conference papers, statistics and reports. In searching for resources, the following search words were used with a range of combinations of “ICT in hospitality”, “ICT adoption”, “innovation”, “hospitality operation with ICT”, “impact of ICT” “hotel ecosystem”, “interconnect and interoperate”, “barrier and challenge”, “external macro-environment affect hotel management decisions”, “Internet of things”, “intelligent system”, “smart hospitality system”, “cloud and big data”, and “data exchange”. To ensure that the latest technologies and methodologies were extracted; only papers published after 2010 were included. Content analysis illustrated several key themes that drive smartness in hospitality and several themes were classified to explore development and critical success factors.