A 90-day automation plan for independent hotels

Most automation projects in independent hotels fail for the same reason: they start with a product demo instead of a list of the things your team does twice. The demo is always impressive. The list is always boring. The list is what actually saves you money.

Days 1 to 30: write down the handoffs

Spend the first month counting, not buying. Every time information moves from one system to another by hand, write it down: who does it, how often, and how long it takes. A booking re-typed from the PMS into the restaurant system. A dietary requirement copied from an email into a kitchen sheet. An event enquiry that lives in one person's inbox.

You are looking for the tasks that are repeated daily and take under ten minutes each. Those are the expensive ones, because they are invisible. A five-minute job done four times a day is eighty hours a year, and nobody ever put it on a budget line.

Days 31 to 60: fix the worst one properly

Pick the single handoff with the highest count and connect it properly. Not a workaround, not a spreadsheet with a macro. A real integration between the two systems that already hold the data.

At Palé Hall this was the hotel booking system and the restaurant EPOS. Reservations were being re-entered by hand, which meant the restaurant occasionally had a different picture of the night than reception did. Connecting the two removed the typing and, more usefully, removed the disagreement.

Resist the urge to fix all of them at once. One connection that works and is trusted by the team beats four that everyone quietly works around.

Days 61 to 90: protect the human part

Now decide what you will never automate. This matters more than the technology. The welcome, the recommendation, the apology when something has gone wrong, the note that remembers someone's anniversary: these are the reasons guests come back, and an automated version of them is worse than nothing.

Good automation should be invisible to the guest and obvious to the team. If a guest can tell, you have probably automated the wrong thing.

What good looks like at the end

After ninety days you should have one connection doing real work every day, a written list of the next three, and a team that trusts the system enough to stop keeping their own parallel notes. That last one is the real test. If the paper backup is still on the desk, the automation has not landed yet.

If you want to work through your own list of handoffs, that is a useful first conversation to have.

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