8 ways to cut hotel costs through digitalization

When hotel costs come up, most people think of energy, staff and OTA commissions first. Those are the visible items: they arrive as invoices and have a line in the budget. There is another cost that never appears on any invoice: the same information being typed in more than once, carried by hand from one system to another, and the time spent correcting the mistakes this creates. A large share of the working day at the front desk, in accounting and in housekeeping goes into exactly this.

This article is not advice on hotel investment or how to run a hotel. It looks at a hotel that is already operating and shows where costs come down when technology is used well. The figures in the examples are assumptions for a 25-room hotel; you can run the same calculation with your own numbers.

1. Enter information once and let the system carry it

The biggest saving from going digital comes from one principle: a piece of information is entered only once. Take a booking that arrives from Booking.com. In a hotel without integration, it is first written into a reservation book or a spreadsheet. At check-in the guest's details are typed again into the police registration system. At check-out they are entered once more in the invoicing software. At month end, accounting posts the same amounts yet again.

A simple calculation: say there are 15 arrivals and departures a day, each entered by hand in three different places, and each entry takes 2 minutes. That is 90 minutes a day, or about 45 hours a month: a large part of a part-time employee's month. And this does not include the time spent fixing mistyped ID numbers, guests who were never registered, and cash drawers that don't balance.

In an integrated system the same booking arrives from the channel on its own. At check-in an ID scanner fills in the guest record. The registration, the folio, the invoice and the accounting entry are all produced from that single entry.

2. Choose a system that is open to integration

No hotel works on its own; every day it exchanges data with dozens of outside systems:

• Sales channels: Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and channel managers
• Government bodies: guest registration with the police, accommodation tax and tourism contribution returns
• Financial systems: e-invoice and e-archive providers, your accountant's software
• Payments and banks: virtual POS, pre-authorizations and collections, bank transactions
• Communication: WhatsApp, email, guest review platforms

With a closed system, each of these connections means either a separate add-on with its own monthly fee, or someone moving the data by hand. When a new need comes up, such as opening a new sales channel or a change in a legal reporting requirement, you have to wait.

A system that is open to integration talks to this outside world directly. When choosing software, "which integrations exist today?" is only half the question. The other half is "how is an integration I need tomorrow added?" You should not have to replace your hotel software because you changed your e-invoice provider, your bank or your channel manager.

3. Stop paying for double bookings and manual stop sales

A hotel selling on several channels has to close a room on every channel the moment it is sold on one. When this is done by hand, sooner or later the same room is sold twice (overbooking). The cost of moving the guest to another hotel, the transfer, and the long-term effect of a bad review add up to far more than one night's revenue.

Going through each channel one by one to close sales on full dates (stop sale) carries the same risk and wastes the same time. A channel manager sells every channel from a single inventory: once a room is sold, availability drops on all the other channels automatically.

4. Cut commission with direct bookings

OTAs are an essential shop window for a hotel, but they take a commission on every booking. A direct booking from your own website carries no commission. Raising the share of direct bookings by even a few points adds up to a significant amount over a year.

This needs a working booking engine on your site, a price consistent with the OTAs, and direct contact with the guest after booking (for example a WhatsApp confirmation). To see what this would mean with your own numbers, use our OTA commission calculator.

5. Automate your legal reporting

Guest registration, accommodation tax, the tourism contribution and e-invoicing are things every hotel in Turkey must do and none of them bring in revenue. Done by hand, they create two costs: the staff time they take, and the risk of fines for late or incorrect reporting.

When the hotel software is integrated with these systems, guest registration (KBS) is sent automatically at check-in. Accommodation tax is posted to the folio together with each night's room charge, and the invoice is issued as an e-invoice or e-archive document.

6. Put housekeeping on the phone

If the news that a room has been cleaned reaches the front desk by radio, by phone or on the head housekeeper's list, it creates two costs: rooms that are ready but not sold or not offered for early check-in, and the time spent passing the information along.

When a housekeeper marks a room "clean" on their phone and it shows on the front desk screen instantly, both costs disappear. When minibar consumption and maintenance requests are entered on the same screen, forgotten minibar charges and delayed repairs go down as well.

7. Get rid of server and IT running costs

The cost of a server sitting in the hotel basement is not just its purchase price. Licenses, backups, a UPS for power cuts, the technician called out when it breaks, and the risk of one day losing your data are all part of it. With a cloud-based system the whole burden moves to the software provider, and the software works anywhere there is internet, including on the owner's phone.

The cloud is not the only right answer for every property. For properties with weak internet, or organizations that must keep their data on their own servers, an on-premises option matters. What counts is that the choice is made by your needs, not by the software.

8. Shorten the night audit and month end

Checking every folio balance, posting room revenue and updating exchange rates takes hours when done by hand at night audit. Preparing the reports for your accountant at month end takes just as long.

Once these steps are automated, the night audit takes minutes. Exchange rates come from the Central Bank automatically and entries are transferred to your accountant's software. Closing the month takes hours, not days.

Where to start

To save money you first need to see where it is being lost. We suggest noting the following in your hotel for one week:

• How many different places is the same information typed into by hand?
• Which tasks are tracked on paper, in spreadsheets or by phone?
• How many mistakes were corrected in the week: wrong invoices, missing registrations, double bookings, cash that didn't balance?
• With which outside systems (channels, banks, e-invoicing, government bodies) is data moved by hand?

Every line on this list is a cost that digitalization can bring down. You don't have to solve them all at once; starting with the two or three items that take the most time is enough to see the difference quickly.

Zeus PMS offers the integrations described in this article in a single system, and it is built to be open to new integrations. If you'd like to see how it would work with your own hotel's processes, we can set up a 30-minute demo.