As you’re reading through the onslaught of 2025 hotel industry predictions and trends pieces, you’re likely noticing “Automation” near the top or at the top of every list. So much so that “Automation” might become a buzzword that you start to skip over.
But there’s a reason it’s at the top of every list. Hotel operators are under more pressure than ever to maintain profitability while navigating labor shortages and rising wages, and automation provides a clear path to increased efficiency, empowering hotel teams to do more with less.
In addition, 2024 was the year ChatGPT became widely adopted at scale, and now everyone at your organization from corporate to property level has experience with a real-world example of how technology can make them more productive.
While the temptation is there to write it off as a buzzword, you’ll be best served by really stepping back and thinking about what specific automations would improve your daily life while at the same time making your company more successful.
Below, we go beyond identifying automation as a trend and delve into the specific areas ripe for automation in hospitality operations. The opportunities are vast, particularly in back-office and property-level processes. This guide highlights six areas where automation can significantly reduce labor costs while enabling teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
6 Steps to Hotel Automation
1. Eliminate “Swivel-Chair” Operations with Automated Data Aggregation
Hotel teams spend an extraordinary amount of time manually pulling data from disparate systems, a process sometimes referred to as “swivel-chair” operations. Department leaders, data analysts, and revenue managers might each spend 10 or more hours a week building dashboards and reports – tasks that could be fully automated with technology like Otelier IntelliSight.
Automating data aggregation not only saves time but also minimizes errors associated with manual data handling. By consolidating information from property management systems, point-of-sale systems, and other sources, automated solutions empower teams to focus on interpreting data and making decisions rather than compiling spreadsheets. For portfolios with multiple properties, the savings scale exponentially, with thousands of labor hours reclaimed each month.
2. Streamline Night Audit Reporting
Night audits are essential for balancing accounts and generating daily reports, but the process is often cumbersome and time-intensive. Many properties still rely on manual workflows to compile data, verify figures, and store reports. By automating these tasks, hotels can achieve significant efficiency gains.
Automated night audit tools like Otelier DigiAudit generate reports, route them for approval, and securely store them for future reference. This eliminates the need for team members to spend valuable time manually organizing data. Additionally, automated systems simplify audits, making it easier to locate and verify historical reports when needed, saving days of work during compliance reviews or external audits.
3. Automate Vendor Payments
Vendor payment processes – including invoice receipt, entry, verification, and approval – can be tedious and error-prone when handled manually. Automation streamlines these workflows, allowing invoices to be automatically verified and routed for approval while enabling secure online payments.
By eliminating manual check-cutting and reducing the time spent managing invoices, hotels can reallocate these labor hours to more strategic tasks. This process also enhances accuracy, reducing payment errors and ensuring vendors are paid on time. For larger portfolios, centralized automation tools provide visibility into all properties’ accounts payable, ensuring consistent processes and substantial time savings.
Read how Five Rivers Hospitality has reduced the time GMs spend on administrative tasks by 50% with Otelier back office automation solutions.
4. Simplify Income Journaling and Bank Reconciliations
Accounting teams often spend hours cross-matching daily income with bank statements and reconciling discrepancies, particularly when dealing with third-party platforms like OTAs. Automating income audits and bank reconciliations reduces these time-intensive processes, creating a standardized and transparent workflow.
With automation, income data is seamlessly pulled from PMS and POS systems, reconciled with bank records, and logged in the accounting system. These tools not only save hours each week but also reduce the risk of human error, ensuring accurate financial records.
5. Automate Housekeeping Operations
Housekeeping is one of the largest labor expenses for hotels, yet automation has only begun to make its mark in this area. Forward-thinking properties are leveraging technology to schedule housekeeping shifts more effectively, often contracting labor during peak times instead of maintaining a full-time staff. Automation tools can dynamically assign shifts based on occupancy forecasts and real-time room turnover needs.
Looking ahead, robotic cleaning solutions are poised to further revolutionize housekeeping. While still emerging, examples of robots handling vacuuming and basic room cleaning tasks demonstrate the potential for significant labor savings.
6. Optimize Commercial Strategy with Automation
Sales, marketing, and revenue management departments all benefit from automation tools designed to streamline day-to-day operations. Dynamic pricing algorithms adjust room rates in real time based on demand and competition, while automated marketing platforms send targeted campaigns to loyalty members or prospective guests.
These tools also help optimize channel management, ensuring third-party booking sites deliver incremental business at manageable acquisition costs. By automating these processes, hotels save hours of manual effort across multiple teams while driving more effective results. Team members can manage more hotels at once and focus on refining strategies rather than executing repetitive tasks, maximizing both efficiency and revenue.
Turn to Hotel Automation for Longevity
Automation is no longer pie-in-the-sky thinking; it’s a necessity for hotel operators seeking to remain competitive in 2025 and beyond. By streamlining repetitive tasks and optimizing workflows, automation reduces labor costs and empowers employees to take on more strategic roles. These advancements translate directly to smaller wage line items in budgets and forecasts, positioning hotels for long-term success.
Ready to explore how automation can transform your operations? Talk to Otelier today.
About Otelier
Otelier is a hospitality performance optimization platform that puts data and efficiency at the heart of hotel operations. The solutions enable hotel owners, operators and brands to run world-class operations by automating back-office tasks, improving budget and forecast accuracy, and gaining real-time insights into property and portfolio performance. Otelier serves more than 10,000 hotels across the globe with DigiAudit, DigiPay and Rec to streamline back-office workflows; TruePlan for more accurate budgets and forecasts; and IntelliSight to turn comprehensive data sets into actionable insights. For more information, visit otelier.io.
Jason Freed
Hospitality Data Evangelist
+1 330 221 6068
Otelier
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