Smart tech offers much promise for tourism recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and the broader issue of decarbonising tourism. This paper investigates how accommodation managers engaged with smart tech during the crisis, and the journey of learning how to use numerical data output to drive sustainability actions. Interviews with nine accommodation managers/owners at six sites uncovers a ‘tech journey’ that extends prior to, and beyond, the acquisition and installation of the smart technology itself. The journey is explained by a new framework that recognises the need for users (here, the accommodation managers) of smart tech to ‘make it their own’, integrating it into their decisions, workflows and finally, identity. This can only happen through a capacity to understand what the data (i.e. numerical outputs) mean, and a process of transforming data into actions. Understanding these processes of ‘data domestication’ and ‘data clotting’ addresses key gaps in how to achieve potentially radical changes in resource use. Only one case study site had reached this final stage of the journey. The theoretical framework uses the findings from each case to propose early diagnostic questions/tools that can help identify where smart system may need assistance to move from data to action.