The End of the Staffing Struggle: 4 Ways Automation Is Eliminating Labor Shortages in Hospitality
Labor shortage in hospitality isn’t a new story. It’s the one problem that never really leaves the room, or, to be more precise, any hospitality property.
A problem as old as the hospitality industry:
Low pay, unpredictable hours, and physically demanding work are often cited as reasons. But that’s only part of the story.
Over the past few years, wages and benefits have steadily increased across the hospitality industry. Still, labor shortages remain at record highs, and burnout rates continue to rise.
In fact, more than 65% of hotels say they’re still struggling with staff shortages, as reported in a recent AHLA and Hierology survey.
The reason is twofold:
1. Shrinking pool of hospitality workers:
Visa caps for H-2B seasonal workers haven’t increased since the 1990s, while domestic workers and students, once reliable sources of part-time labor, have shifted to other flexible or remote jobs. The H-2B visa program requires a systemic fix that AHLA has been seeking for years.
The result: fewer hands available across hotels, restaurants, and resorts. And this gap continues to widen every year.
2. Burnout & turnover:
Long hours, unpredictable scheduling, and the constant demand to do more with less push even experienced staff to leave faster than hotels can replace them. Hospitality, in fact, consistently records the highest stress and turnover rates among service sectors.
In essence, there aren’t enough new people coming in, and the ones who stay are leaving sooner than ever.
Solving the Labor Shortage with AI: A Transformation Taking Shape
For years, the industry has tried to close this gap through hiring drives, manual scaling, wage hikes, and expanded benefits. None has solved the problem. In many cases, they have only made it more complex.
Labor costs have surged disproportionately, while vacant roles remain unfilled. The result is a cycle of rising expenses without operational stability.
Yet, just as the problem begins to seem permanent & immovable, AI-powered automation is finally turning the tide.
By empowering hotel operators with real-time analytics like never before, AI-powered accounting automation tools are providing them with the visibility and control to address the perennial labor shortage problem intelligently. Here’s how:
1. Smart Scheduling & Payroll Optimization:
Hotel accounting automation tools today leverage copious amounts of live logged data to provide features such as intelligent scheduling & real-time cost and labor analytics.
By combining these features with payroll optimization and expanding them across their entire portfolio, hospitality establishments are addressing decades-old efficiency and burnout issues that contribute to labor shortages. Here’s how:
Smart scheduling is helping hotel operators avoid employee overstaffing or idle hours by ensuring the correct number of people are scheduled at the right time: no more excessive hours or overstretched teams.
Real-time labor cost analysis, combined with smart scheduling, provides managers with instant labor-to-revenue insights that enable them to optimize staffing levels in accordance with revenue goals. This optimized mix of smart scheduling and cost analysis is a win-win for both staff and management.
Overtime control and payroll optimization enable seamless and accurate calculation of wages, including overtime pay, while also monitoring and controlling excessive work hours. This helps maintain compliance and prevents burnout among staff.
Advanced hotel accounting automation tools, such as Docyt, offer all of the above and amplify their impact by providing multi-entity accounting automation. By providing portfolio-level insights, it enables hotel groups to monitor labor performance across all properties at a macro level – think of it as a performance amplifier.
Multi-location properties today use Docyt to perform all these tasks across sites with a single click. They also leverage these features to identify and reward high-performing teams, pinpoint training needs, and address workforce imbalances without requiring the restart or overhaul of labor structures across locations.
2. Dynamic Forecasting for Adequate Staff Coverage:
Traditional accounting tools also offer scheduling features. However, because traditional scheduling is based on historical data, it tends to deviate from actual numbers, which makes scheduling buggy and error-prone.
Dynamic forecasting offered by hotel accounting automation tools utilizes hundreds of data points that reveal forecasting fluctuations and enable adjustments to be made as quickly as possible. In addition to offering better accuracy forecasting demand and scheduling staff, dynamic forecasting also provides more capabilities to make the most of the staff:
1. Not just occupancy, dynamic forecasting models can also provide forecasts based on activity peaks. This activity-based forecasting enhances staff scheduling and further improves accuracy, enabling hotels to strike the optimal balance between productivity and service quality.
- For example, a coastal resort notices that flight arrivals spike by 30% on Fridays during the spring season, which, as we often see, leads to long queues and overtime costs. Using activity-based forecasting, the resort can predict these surges a week in advance and auto-adjust schedules.
- For a mountain lodge where bookings change with weather and weekend events, the dynamic forecasting model can run “what-if” simulations. For instance, it might show that rainy weekends cut dining traffic by 25% but increase in-room service requests by 40%. This helps managers adjust staffing two days in advance and avoid unnecessary overtime
This adaptability keeps teams productive and ensures employees still hit target hours for consistent pay. For management, it means stable profit margins and fewer surprises, even when conditions change fast.
In short, dynamic forecasting operates like an advanced engine that elevates productivity and accuracy to new levels by providing previously unseen prediction capabilities. For a hyper-competitive, margin-sensitive, and fluctuating industry like hospitality, that’s precisely the kind of edge they need.
3. Building Flexible & Cross-Function Roles for Efficiency:
Smart scheduling and dynamic forecasting ensure the correct number of people are in the right place at the right time for better productivity.
But building cross-functional roles takes that a step further by pushing productivity and profitability even higher without risking employee burnout.
This approach is used by hotels that operate with smaller teams but still want to maintain smooth operations. So instead of assigning narrow, rigid roles, they combine or cross-train positions so fewer people can perform a broader range of tasks efficiently.
For example, a hotel might merge housekeeping management and front-desk management into a single integrated role, or introduce a player-coach model, where a supervisor manages a team and performs operational tasks, such as a housekeeping lead who also assists with cleaning rooms during peak turnover hours. For night-shift roles, a staff member might handle light housekeeping duties alongside front-desk coverage during quieter hours.
Now, by integrating cross-functional roles with smart scheduling and dynamic forecasting, we are likely to see a 10X increase in efficiency, without employee burnout or profitability leaks, making it a cheat code for hotels to weather economic downturns.
4. Building Cross-Property Job Networks to Maximize Talent:
A cross-property job network is another innovative strategy that adds a new dimension to improved adaptability and delivers exceptional rewards for management, without impacting service quality or employee work-life balance.
For example:
- Frontline flexibility: A concierge or front-desk associate can rotate between two nearby hotels, such as a resort that needs extra staff for late check-outs and a business hotel that requires support during morning rush hours.
- Shared management: Two smaller properties can share a single manager who oversees both teams, maintaining consistency and cutting operational costs.
This model can also extend to roles such as maintenance, security, events, or activity staff, making this a more agile, cost-efficient, and balanced workforce across properties.
TL DR;
- Efficiency: Smart Scheduling keeps the correct number of people on duty at the right time. Cuts overwork and idle hours, optimizes pay to ensure high productivity and the right ROI without strain.
- Accuracy: Dynamic Forecasting predicts real demand, so staffing adjusts before rushes or slowdowns hit. Prevents last-minute scrambles and keeps teams efficient, focused, and running at peak performance.
- Flexibility: Cross-Functional Roles train staff to handle multiple tasks confidently. Boosts flexibility and output per person to ensure smooth and consistent operations even with smaller teams.
- Scalability: Cross-Property Job Networks let nearby hotels share skilled staff when needed. Balances workload across locations, maintains service quality, and lowers overall labor costs for the group.
Efficiency × Accuracy × Flexibility × Scalability = An Adaptive & Highly Productive Workforce
Because the end of the staffing struggle in hospitality isn’t about hiring endlessly, raising wages, or searching for more staff.
The end goal lies in building an adaptive workforce model that creates flexible, highly productive teams that adjust quickly while maintaining both work-life balance and fair pay — a win-win for employees and management alike.
However, two significant barriers still hold hotels back from building truly adaptive workforces.
Most hotels still operate on traditional accounting systems that fail to provide accurate data, which is essential for fueling analytics and automation. Even hospitality properties that use automation often lack the integrated tools needed to connect to offer smart scheduling, forecasting, and cost control across every location.
And this is where Docyt AI can help.
Docyt AI: End-to-End Accounting Automation for Hospitality
An AI-powered hotel accounting automation platform, Docyt automates every financial workflow and brings structure to the moving parts of daily operations. It merges accounting automation, live reporting, and real-time analytics into a single, seamless system that keeps every number aligned and every process connected.
Purpose-built for the hospitality industry, it includes pre-configured tools for labor analytics, real-time cost tracking, department insights, overtime control, and portfolio-wide visibility, among other features.
All of this comes ready to use – no more setups, integrations, or delays. Docyt is a plug-and-play accounting automation platform that provides instant access to everything that matters, connecting your entire operation to deliver visibility, real-time analytics, and live insights that help your team make informed decisions on the go.
Whether you’re looking to end the staffing struggle for good or boost labor efficiency and control, you’ll want to upgrade your existing accounting automation to give your hotel teams real-time visibility and smarter decision-making power – if you haven’t already.
If you’re now considering that next step, please explore Docyt in action with a free demo today.
That said, this piece looked at how automation is helping hotels ease domestic labor shortages. Accounting automation, meanwhile, continues to transform how finance teams work and plan and optimize for better accuracy and control when seasonal labor gaps appear.
We’ll explore this next in How Hotel Finance Teams Can Thrive Amid Seasonal Labor Shortages: 5 Ways Automation Bridges the Gap.
References:
https://www.ahla.com/news/65-surveyed-hotels-report-staffing-shortages
https://www.bcg.com/publications/2022/overcoming-the-talent-shortage-in-the-us-hotel-industry
