What people do, what systems should take over

Saying you are short-staffed is usually not quite accurate. More often it is not that there are too few people, but that the work people must do and the work they need not do have been mixed together.

What people are good at

What only people can do in hospitality is clear enough: reading a guest’s expression and situation to notice a problem before it is raised, judging cleanliness and the condition of a room by eye, solving what goes wrong on site there and then, answering requests that fall outside the manual, and creating a moment nobody expected. What these share is that they require judgement. The answer differs by situation, and arriving at it means reading the context.

What systems are good at

And then there is work that repeats, demands accuracy, and cannot observe office hours.

• Gathering reservations arriving from several channels into one place
• Keeping room inventory and selling rates aligned across every channel
• Holding occupancy and revenue in a form you can check at any moment
• Answering the repeat enquiries that get the same answer every time
• Recording who handled what and when, and passing it to the next shift

There is almost no judgement in that list. What there is instead is a requirement to do it completely, correctly and continuously. The kind of work that tires people out, and where tiredness turns into mistakes.

The paradox of adding channels

Adding sales channels is an obvious move for revenue. But each new channel adds one more place to change a rate, and one more place to decrement inventory when a booking lands. Workload scales with the channel count, and every gap between updates is a window for overbooking. Which is why expanding distribution stalls at some point without a system. You could sell more, but you cannot manage more, so you stop selling more.

And what about the night?

The hardest hours to divide are the night. Keep someone at the desk and the cost runs every day; do not, and there is nothing there when something goes wrong. The way through is to stop treating the night as one state and split it into three tiers.

• Unattended handling: key boxes and contactless check-in complete arrival, guidance is sent in advance, and rules such as age restrictions apply automatically. Most night arrivals end here.
• Remote response: someone answers the night line, talks through first steps, and settles what can be decided without going there: a room change, a refund, directing the guest to alternative accommodation.
• On-site call-out: reserved for what remote cannot fix. Facility and safety issues, a leak, a power cut. The point is having the call-out threshold and the contact chain agreed in advance.

Unmanned operation is not about removing people. It is about writing the response standard and the call-out chain in advance. Unmanned without a standard is not a saving, it is neglect.

A system that carries the operator’s standard

None of this is ours alone. It was worked out together with Mansion Bridge, a partner that buys, renovates and operates two boutique hotels directly. Mansion Bridge uses the PMS, CMS and RMS in Vacatio Solution with their own operating standards built into it, refining it alongside us. It is less a matter of receiving features than of co-developing, with what the site needs finding its way into the product. In practice it looks like this. An alert arrives when occupancy crosses a certain band, and at that moment the operator decides whether to raise the rate or hold it. When a booking comes in, inventory on the other channels updates automatically, so nothing has to be closed by hand. The system is not setting the price; it is supplying the basis and the timing for the operator to decide quickly.

To audit the division of labour, write out a day’s tasks and mark next to each one whether it requires judgement. If the tasks that need none take up more than half the shift, you are not short of people. The division is wrong.

In short

Put people where judgement is needed and systems where the work repeats and must be exact. Expanding channels requires the system to be in place first, and the night should be split into unattended, remote and call-out with the thresholds set in advance. Once that boundary is clear, the same team can run more rooms — and more importantly, people spend their hours on what only people can do.