With hotels, Goodwin said, the one area where IT spending is worthwhile is in first-class reservations and property management systems, because they are the operations' bread and butter, he said. "Other [upgrades] like this could save money, but there's no real critical need for inventory control," so it is often left undone. "It's always been a kind of second-tier effort".

Andrew Bartels, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said he's not surprised that Loews is just getting to this point in its IT operations. According to Forrester, 33 percent of the global 2000 companies with more than 20,000 employees weren't using browser-based tools for purchasing last year, and 49 percent weren't using online sourcing to find suppliers. Forty-seven percent of the companies surveyed by Forrester weren't using Web-based integration with their suppliers' systems to make purchasing easier and more efficient, he said.

"There are still significant numbers of large enterprises that aren't using online buying," Bartels said. "It's particularly difficult when you have many different locations" and want to centralize it, as in a hotel chain. Because individual hotels in a chain might have different investors, they may not want to share information and data, he said.

"So there's a high degree of decentralization to let each entity run its operations," he said. "These factors have tended to drive very decent activities on the purchasing side but on the same token, many hotel chains are learning that there are efficiencies to be gained together, even allowing for local differences. I think Adaco has done a really good job of understanding the unique requirements of the business."