dormakaba closes its Alliants deal, putting the door lock and the guest app under one owner

dormakaba has completed its acquisition of Alliants, the guest experience software company it agreed to buy in September. The close was confirmed on 2 November, at the start of The Hospitality Show in Miami.

It is a deal worth understanding even if neither company's name is on your PMS contract, because it puts two layers of the guest journey that used to be bought separately into the same hands.

Who bought whom

dormakaba is a Swiss access control manufacturer, headquartered at Rümlang near Zurich and listed on the SIX exchange. It reported turnover of CHF 2.8 billion for its 2025/26 financial year, employs more than 15,000 people and sells into more than 130 countries. In hotels, it is the lock on the door.

Alliants is much smaller and much newer. Founded in Southampton in 2009, it has more than 100 employees and its software runs in more than 100,000 hotel rooms. What it does covers concierge, contactless check-in, mobile key, payments, guest messaging and, more recently, agentic AI. It was among the first to put hotel room keys into both Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, and TIME named that digital key work one of its best inventions of 2025.

Neither company has disclosed what dormakaba paid. The September agreement was binding and subject to regulatory approval, which dormakaba said at the time it expected to clear within 2026. It did.

Till Reuter, dormakaba's chief executive, said when the deal was signed that owners and operators increasingly treat access and guest experience as one strategy rather than two, and called hospitality a key growth vertical for the group. Tristan Gadsby, Alliants' founder and chief executive, put it more bluntly: "Access and guest experience stopped being separate problems some time ago; the industry's tooling just hasn't caught up."

What is on show this week

At the Miami event dormakaba is demonstrating two things built on the combination. The dormakaba Digital Wallet lets a guest add their room key to a phone wallet and tap to open the room plus amenity doors such as the gym, spa and business centre. The Staff Key Validator is a keycard management tool using multi-layer PIN authentication, aimed at cutting front desk work and at the familiar problem of keycards that get lost, shared or walk off site.

Darien Long, senior vice president for specialty access control solutions at dormakaba Americas, said "hotels have more technology than ever, but guests should never have to think about the complexity behind it", and that "choice is at the heart of our approach".

The part to watch

That word choice is doing real work, and it is the thing operators should hold the companies to.

Both sides have said they will remain interoperable with other manufacturers and software partners, so a hotel can keep the suppliers it already has. That promise matters in two directions. If you run Alliants for mobile key on top of a competing lock brand, you now depend on a lock manufacturer continuing to support its new software against a rival's hardware. If you run dormakaba locks behind a competing guest app, the same logic applies in reverse.

Nothing in the announcements names which property management systems Alliants will keep certified against, or commits to a support window for either set of third-party integrations. Interoperability is currently a stated intention rather than a contractual term, and the commercial incentive now points the other way.

The wider pattern is the one to note. The guest experience layer that sits between the PMS and the door has been a crowded field of independent vendors, and it is getting less crowded. Each time one is bought by a hardware manufacturer, operators have one fewer neutral option for the piece of the stack that decides how a guest gets into their room.

If Alliants or dormakaba appears anywhere in your stack, the question for your next renewal is specific: ask for the integration roadmap in writing, and ask what happens to it if you change lock vendors.