Chapter 01 · The situation
Growth exposes IT gaps before it fills them.
Odyssey Hotel Group positions itself as one of Europe’s most ambitious hotel operators, and the numbers back it. A decade of positive disruption. A multi brand portfolio grown through partnerships with the largest hospitality names. New openings coming every year across the continent. When the business is scaling this fast, the IT function is doing something specific: it is being asked to do more, faster, and better, all at the same time.
Every new opening is a new set of users, a new set of systems, a new set of integrations, and a new set of coverage hours. Growth is exciting on the P&L. It is relentless on IT.
The traditional answer to that pressure is to hire. More engineers, more support staff, more specialists. That answer works if the growth is linear and predictable. Neither is true for a hospitality group opening across brand families and markets at the pace Odyssey is running. Hiring lags growth by six to nine months. Specialist depth cannot be built by one or two people. And 24/7 coverage requires a shift model most in house teams cannot economically sustain.
So Odyssey did something different. Their IT function stays in control of strategy, direction and decisions. Sbit provides the operational depth and coverage the growth pace demands. That model has a name in our service catalogue. It is called Co-Managed IT.
Chapter 02 · What Co-Managed IT means for Odyssey
Not a replacement. A reinforcement, engineered.
Co-Managed IT is not “we do everything, you watch”. It is a shared workspace model where the client’s IT team and Sbit’s four operational teams work in the same tools, with the same insights, on the same timeline. One source of truth for every ticket, every change, every escalation. Odyssey’s team keeps the decisions and the direction. Sbit brings the scale, the specialist depth and the 24/7 coverage.
Four Sbit teams, plugged in alongside Odyssey's own IT function
Support
24/7 servicedesk covering every property and every user, in Odyssey’s language, on Odyssey’s tooling. Takes the front line load so the internal team is not permanently on the ticket queue. When the queue quiets, they are still there.
Operations
Monitoring, changes, patch management and lifecycle across every property. The unglamorous work that keeps the environment healthy, done at a consistency and rhythm a single in house team would struggle to sustain across a growing portfolio.
Projects
New hotel openings, migrations, network upgrades, integrations. Scoped in time, delivered against the operational calendar, without disrupting what already runs. When Odyssey opens a hotel, IT is ready on day one because a project team already prepared for it.
Security & Compliance
Secure360 as an integrated layer under everything. ISO 27001 certified. NIS2 as a guiding standard. Audit ready dossier maintained continuously, not assembled at the last moment. Every new property inherits the security posture automatically.
Every one of those teams sits behind one Service Manager who knows Odyssey’s environment. Odyssey does not need to know which team picks up which ticket. Sbit does.
Chapter 03 · How we operate together
Shared workspace, shared tools, shared truth.
In a Co-Managed model, the working environment is shared by design. Sbit runs the processes, tools and dashboards. Odyssey’s IT people work inside the same environment, with the same visibility. Not two systems to reconcile. Not two versions of the truth. One shared operational surface.
Every ticket in one place
Whether a request stays inside Odyssey’s team or comes across to Sbit, it lives in the same system with the same timeline, the same priority and the same history. No handovers that lose context. No email trails where progress hides. Both teams see the same picture at the same moment.
Onboarding new hotels at pace
Every new Odyssey opening moves through a defined flow. Identity and access provisioning. Workspace configuration. Network integration. Security baseline. Compliance documentation. The internal team knows what is coming. The Sbit teams know what is coming. Neither is discovering the checklist during the opening week.
Onboarding new colleagues on day one
In hospitality, staff onboarding is a constant, not a spike. Every new hire, at every property, gets a workspace ready on their first day. Account created. Applications provisioned. Access rights configured. When someone leaves, the offboarding runs the same day. Licences return to the pool. Access is revoked. No accounts left running for months after someone has moved on.
Coverage that matches how hospitality actually runs
Weekend evenings. Bank holidays. A Friday at 3pm as check in load builds. Hotels do not run on office hours, and neither does Co-Managed. Someone is on it, not “the next working day”. The Service Manager knows Odyssey’s calendar and staffs accordingly.
Chapter 04 · What Co-Managed delivers for a scaling operator
Outcomes that would take another year of hiring to build.
A Co-Managed engagement produces different outcomes for different people looking at it. For a group in Odyssey’s growth position, the outcomes stack in ways that are hard to replicate through headcount alone.
Four outcomes that pay back the Co-Managed model
Odyssey's IT team stays strategic
Their people spend time on architecture, roadmap and business alignment, not on triaging the ticket queue. That is where the internal team creates disproportionate value, and it is exactly what a growth phase demands from them.
Every new opening lands with IT ready
The opening is not the moment IT is discovered. Sbit’s project team has already prepared the environment. Reception can check guests in from day one. Back office is functional from day one. No opening week firefighting.
Coverage scales without proportional hiring
Sbit’s model was built to scale. New properties add cost linearly, not headcount step wise. The internal team does not need to grow at the pace of the portfolio to keep coverage in place.
Compliance travels with every new property
NIS2 exposure, ISO controls, GDPR handling — these are inherited by every new opening automatically. No separate compliance project per property. No last minute audit preparation. The dossier is always current.
The quiet outcome that finance measures
Predictable per property costs, tiered by service scope. Growth means more properties, not more variables. The IT line on the group P&L behaves like the operations line behaves: scaling proportionally, without step function surprises when a new hotel opens or a new market is entered.
Chapter 05 · The partnership
Together we grow, in practice.
Odyssey’s own guiding thought is “Together we grow”. Applied to IT, that principle only works when the partner on the other side of the sentence also has a model that grows with them. A model built for one client at one size does not survive a decade of positive disruption.
The Co-Managed engagement was designed for exactly this shape of client. An IT function that is capable, ambitious and in control, but operating inside a business that is opening faster than any in house team can hire against. The Sbit teams are structured to plug in without displacing, to scale without demanding a proportional headcount investment from the client, and to lean into the parts of the operation the internal team wants to hand off.
Every new property Odyssey adds to the portfolio is a new opening for the partnership too. Same tools. Same source of truth. Same rhythm. Same Service Manager who knows the environment. When Odyssey grows, the Co-Managed model grows with them, quietly, without a headcount conversation. That is what partnership looks like when it is engineered for scale.