The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest MSP.

Chapter 01

The headline fee is marketing. The scope definition is the contract.

MSP contracts are bought in a comparison table: monthly fee, response time, done. But the monthly fee only covers what is inside scope, and the scope section is where contracts quietly diverge. One provider includes incidents, changes and advice; another bills every password reset as out of scope work. Twelve months later, the cheap contract has produced the expensive invoice. The fix is not cynicism. It is reading the right pages before signing.

Consider how this plays out in a 120-room property. The signed quote was four hundred euros a month below the runner up. Then the first invoice arrives with hours for a printer swap at reception, a VLAN change for a new keycard system and an onboarding fee for three seasonal staff. None of it was in the comparison table. All of it was in the contract.

We see this pattern every time a hotel asks us to review an existing agreement. The problem is rarely dishonesty. It is asymmetry. The provider wrote the scope section and knows exactly where the meter starts. The buyer read the fee and assumed the rest was included. Page nine settles that argument, and it settles it in writing.

Chapter 02

Four clauses to read before the signature.

Extra costs rarely hide in the fee. They hide in four standard clauses that most buyers skim. Each one looks reasonable in isolation. Together they decide what you actually pay over three years. In a hotel IT contract, volume makes them expensive: seasonal onboarding, staff turnover, device churn at the front desk. Small clauses meet high frequency, and the invoice follows.

Every contract defines what is included. The sharper question is what is not. Password resets, printer issues, changes to user accounts, support around the PMS vendor’s updates: if these sit outside scope, every routine week generates billable hours. Ask for the out of scope list first, and price a normal month of your hotel against it before you compare a single fee.

Many contracts allow the provider to rebadge any task above a modest time limit as a project, quoted separately. A switch replacement, a keycard integration, an office move. If the threshold is low and the definition vague, your support contract quietly becomes a sales channel for project work. Ask how many projects the provider’s average client bought last year. That number tells you whether the threshold protects the contract or feeds it.

Annual indexation is normal. Indexation plus per device surcharges plus per user fees is a compounding machine. A hotel that adds a restaurant POS, a handful of sensors and a seasonal team can watch a fixed fee grow year on year without a single renegotiation. Get the growth formula in writing, and check that you can calculate it yourself. Then run it against a busy year: an extension opening, a doubled summer roster. If you cannot predict the fee, you do not control it.

This is the clause nobody reads until they need it. Who owns your documentation, your configurations, your licences? What does handover cost, and how long does it take? A provider that prices the exit at the end of the relationship holds every card. Agree it at signing, while you still hold some. We have seen handovers priced at a quarter of an annual contract because nothing was agreed upfront. The hotel paid; high season without documentation was worse.

None of these clauses is illegitimate on its own. Unread, together, they are the real price. Read them slowly, with last year’s numbers beside you. An hour with the ticket history turns a sales document into a forecast.

Chapter 03

The standard we hold our own contracts to.

It is easy to criticise other people’s contracts. So here is the standard we apply to our own, and the one we suggest you hold any provider to, including us. A standard you will not apply to yourself is a talking point. These commitments sit in our schedules, in writing, for every hotel we serve.

The fee covers the work. Incidents, changes, advice and the routine requests of a running hotel sit inside scope. When a receptionist forgets a password on a Saturday, that is support, not a billable event. A contract that meters routine work punishes the provider for building a stable environment and rewards them for an unstable one. We want the opposite incentive: the fewer tickets your hotel produces, the better our month looks too.

Projects are named before they start. When something is genuinely a project, a refurbishment, a new property, a full network redesign, we say so upfront and quote it upfront. You approve a number, not an hourly drift. If we misjudge the effort, that is our problem, not your invoice. We plan the work around occupancy too: quiet season for a redesign, never a fully booked week. A fixed number and a fixed window let a general manager plan instead of hope.

Growth is priced in a formula you can check. Adding rooms, staff or devices changes the fee by an agreed amount you can calculate yourself before you commit. Indexation follows a named index, not a percentage we choose in December. A hotel grows in steps: a new floor, a pop-up restaurant, seasonal contracts in May. The fee should move in the same visible steps.

The exit is written on day one. Documentation, configurations and data are yours, handover effort is defined, and the cost of leaving is known before you arrive. We would rather keep clients because staying is attractive than because leaving is expensive. That is not generosity, it is confidence. A hotel that is free to leave stays for the right reasons.

None of this makes us the cheapest line in a comparison table. It makes us the number your finance team can put in a budget and find again, unchanged, at the end of the year. In hospitality, where margins are counted per room per night, that predictability is worth more than a discount that evaporates by March.

Chapter 04

Ten minutes of reading beats twelve months of surprises.

Buying managed services well is a discipline, and it pairs naturally with lifecycle planning: when you know your estate and roadmap, scope discussions become factual instead of hopeful. See how we structure predictable IT budgets in IT without a roadmap surprises your CFO, and what our own model includes at Managed IT Support.

Model the full contract period, including expected extras and exit. Take last year’s ticket history, price it against each provider’s out of scope list, add the indexation and the exit fee, and compare the three year totals. The cheapest quote often finishes second or third once the meter is included. Do the same for growth: add year two’s rooms and staff and see which fee moves furthest.

The out of scope list predicts your future invoices. Study it. If it excludes the things your hotel does every week, onboarding staff, moving devices, resetting passwords, then the monthly fee is a floor, not a price. Hotels are high-churn environments: starters in spring, leavers in autumn, every one a ticket. Priced per hour, peak season becomes your most expensive IT quarter.

Ask what leaving costs and takes. The answer tells you everything. A confident provider describes the handover in a paragraph. An evasive one tells you it depends. Depends is a price too, and it is never a low one. Ask for the handover description in writing before you sign. If it does not exist, you have just learned how documented your environment will be.

Get scope, growth pricing and indexation in writing before signing. Verbal reassurance in the sales meeting does not survive the first invoice dispute. If the account manager says it is included, ask them to write it into the schedule. Watch how quickly the conversation sharpens. Written scope protects the relationship too. Disputes end at the page instead of the phone.

A provider that welcomes these four questions is usually a provider you can sign with. One that gets defensive has just answered them for you. The questions are not aggressive. They are the ordinary due diligence of a hotel that runs around the clock, and an MSP built for hospitality answers them in writing.

Chapter 05

The lowest fee and the lowest cost are rarely the same number.

Look back at the comparison table that started this article. The column that decided the deal was the monthly fee. The columns that decided the three year cost, scope, thresholds, indexation and exit, were not in the table at all. That is the whole problem, and it is fixable in an afternoon of careful reading. Hotels already compare suppliers on total cost per room. A hotel IT contract deserves the same arithmetic.

Hotels don’t need the lowest fee. They need a number that stays the number: predictable, complete and honest about growth and exit. That is how we write our own contracts, and why comparisons on total cost tend to end in our favour. Read why single ownership beats vendor sprawl in five vendors, one outage, zero owners, and what the service behind the fee should deliver in everyone sells 24/7.

There is a quieter argument for transparent pricing too. A hotel that trusts its IT invoice stops auditing it, stops hesitating before calling support and stops deferring small fixes that grow into outages. Predictability is not only a finance benefit. It changes how freely your team uses the service they are paying for, and a service desk that people call early is cheaper for everyone.

So take the ten minutes. Read page nine. Ask the four questions from the previous chapter and write the answers into the schedule. If the cheapest quote survives that exercise, sign it with our blessing. In our experience, it rarely does. A hotel IT contract will outlive two general managers and a refurbishment. Give it the scrutiny of any supplier agreement that touches the guest.