Zonal, the Edinburgh-based EPOS and hospitality management technology provider, and Airship, the CRM and email marketing platform used by more than 800 UK operators, have announced a unified guest data product that combines point-of-sale spend data with guest profile and campaign response data in a single interface.
The platform, called Zonal Guest Intelligence, launches in May and is being positioned at multi-site operators in the 10 to 100-unit range — a segment that has historically struggled to build the data infrastructure that larger groups take for granted, often because the engineering cost of connecting disparate systems falls outside standard IT budgets.
The integration eliminates the need for a third-party data warehouse or ETL pipeline by using a shared data layer built on top of Zonal's existing cloud infrastructure. Operators can segment guest records by spend tier, visit frequency, average cover size, and menu category preference, and trigger automated CRM campaigns directly from those segments via the Airship platform.
Why this matters for operators
The practical value of connecting EPOS and CRM data is well understood in hospitality — knowing that a guest who regularly spends above a certain threshold hasn't visited in six weeks, and being able to send a targeted win-back campaign as a result, is a basic capability in retail that hospitality has been slow to replicate at scale.
"The data has always been there," said Airship CEO Ben Alcock. "The problem has been that it lives in different systems that weren't designed to talk to each other. What we've built with Zonal is the plumbing that makes the insight actually usable without a dedicated data team."
Early access customers who trialled the integrated platform over the past three months reported meaningful improvements in campaign open rates and a measurable reduction in the time required to build audience segments. One national casual dining group with 34 sites said it had reduced the time taken to configure and send a post-visit feedback campaign from four hours to under 25 minutes.
Pricing and rollout
Zonal Guest Intelligence is included for existing customers running both Zonal EPOS and Airship at no additional licence cost during a six-month introductory period, after which it will be priced on a per-site basis. New customers will be able to take the integrated stack as a single contract from June.
The product will be demonstrated at the Restaurant & Bar Tech Live show at ExCeL London in May, where both companies will share stand space for the first time.
The announcement reflects a broader consolidation in hospitality technology, where point-of-sale providers, reservation systems, and marketing platforms are increasingly under pressure from operators to work together rather than as isolated tools. Several senior operators The Mise spoke to this week welcomed the move, with one group operations director describing the proliferation of non-integrated tech stacks as "the single biggest drain on our management time that nobody talks about publicly."