As hoteliers prepare to celebrate their housekeeping teams next month, recognition should include easier access to the tips employees earn

By Doron Dreyer

International Housekeepers Week, taking place September 13 through 19, 2026, gives the hotel industry an important opportunity to recognize employees whose work is fundamental to virtually every guest stay. With the annual celebration approaching next month, hoteliers are planning appreciation events, employee recognition programs, and other ways to thank the housekeeping professionals who keep guestrooms clean, comfortable, and welcoming.

Those celebrations matter. But in today's economy, recognition should go further.

For an industry that depends so heavily on its frontline workforce, International Housekeepers Week should also prompt hotel owners and operators to ask a bigger question: Are we giving these employees the tools they need to benefit financially from the exceptional service they provide?

For many housekeepers, that starts with making it easier for guests to tip and ensuring employees can access those earned tips when they need them.

Housekeeping is among hospitality's most diverse workforces. While no reliable national study shows precisely what percentage of hotel housekeepers currently send money to relatives in other countries, available research illustrates why remittances matter.

A University of Central Florida-led study of 140 hotel housekeepers recruited through UNITE HERE Local 737 in Orlando found that only 9.5% of participants were born in the continental United States. The remaining participants reported birthplaces including Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Central or South America.

Remittances are an important financial lifeline for many immigrant families. U.S. Treasury data reported that U.S. residents sent approximately $73 billion to family and friends overseas in 2021, with those funds frequently used for necessities including food, education, and medical care. Census research has also found that foreign-born households are far more likely than native-born households to send money abroad.

Why Two Weeks Can Be Too Long

For an employee living close to the financial edge, a tip earned today can matter today. Bankrate research found that 34% of American workers describe themselves as living paycheck to paycheck, rising to 43% among workers earning less than $50,000 annually. According to the UKG Frontline Worker Playbook, most frontline workers live paycheck to paycheck, and low pay is the top reason they consider leaving a job. UKG points to early access to earned wages as one way employers can improve satisfaction, motivation, and retention.

Another UKG study found 65% of frontline workers work long hours to make ends meet, while 60% feel pressured to produce more without receiving more pay. Meanwhile, inflation continues to squeeze household budgets. In a 2025 Bankrate survey, 62% of workers said their income had not kept pace with increases in household expenses caused by inflation.

Against that backdrop, holding an employee's earned tips until the next biweekly paycheck can feel increasingly outdated. If a housekeeper receives a $10 digital tip Monday morning, why should that employee have to wait up to two weeks to benefit from it?

TIPMO by GratifID was designed around a different premise: The worker earned the tip, so the worker should have access to it. Tips appear in the employee's digital wallet as transactions occur, and employees can choose how and when to transfer available funds.

That flexibility can help with groceries, gasoline, childcare, an unexpected expense, or sending money to relatives abroad.

Recognition in a Cashless World

Housekeepers face another challenge that hoteliers cannot ignore: Guests increasingly do not carry cash. A guest may sincerely want to recognize the person who made the room immaculate, replenished amenities, and helped make the stay comfortable. But appreciation does not become a tip when there is no cash in the guest's wallet.

Technology removes that obstacle. With TIPMO by GratifID, for example, guests tap an NFC-enabled smartphone on a TIPMO tag assigned to an employee, choose a tip, and pay using Apple Pay or Google Pay. No app to download, no account to create, and no QR code to scan. The transaction can be completed in seconds.

For housekeeping in particular, that simplicity is important. Housekeepers are mobile employees. They are not standing behind a fixed point-of-sale terminal or waiting beside a restaurant check presenter. NFC technology enables the tipping opportunity to travel with workers.

The Tip Is Also a Data Point

Digital tipping should do more than improve the employee experience. Done correctly, it can give hotel operators information they rarely have.

Cash tips are largely invisible to management. A hotel manager may know that guests are tipping, but they cannot easily see who is being recognized, how often, or whether patterns exist across employees, shifts, and departments. TIPMO changes that through its PULSE analytics dashboard.

Hotel managers can see tip volumes, service ratings, and performance information by employee, department, and location. Each interaction can generate time-stamped data that helps management understand where exceptional service is occurring. That creates a powerful management opportunity.

If one housekeeper consistently receives strong ratings and frequent tips, management has an objective reason to recognize that employee. The hotel can celebrate the performance, learn what that person is doing particularly well, and potentially use those behaviors to coach others.

Conversely, if an employee consistently receives little or no guest recognition while comparable team members perform much better, the data may signal that a conversation is warranted. Low tipping alone should never be treated as definitive proof of poor performance because room assignments, guest mix and other factors can affect gratuity. But combined with guest ratings and other operating data, it can identify opportunities for coaching, training and support.

The objective should not be punishment. It should be improvement. Help employees deliver service guests want to recognize and give employees the opportunity to earn more. That turns digital tipping from a payment tool into a workforce-development and recognition platform.

Put Appreciation Into the 2027 Budget

International Housekeepers Week lasts seven days. The people it celebrates work all year. As hotel owners and operators finalize their 2027 capital and technology budgets, digital tipping deserves serious consideration as part of the employee experience strategy.

The timing is particularly relevant. According to the 2026 Lodging Technology Study, 35% of hoteliers said they planned to add digital tipping in 2026, making it one of the industry's most common planned technology deployments.

TIPMO also does not require hotels to undertake traditional large-scale technology implementation. The platform requires no POS integration or major IT projects — branded NFC tags, employee onboarding, and dashboard access are all designed for rapid deployment.

The benefits reach both sides of the employment relationship. Employees gain an easier way to receive the gratuities guests want to give them, visibility into their earnings, and greater control over when they access their money. Operators gain workforce intelligence, guest service feedback, performance data and new ways to recognize and develop their strongest people.

This International Housekeepers Week, hoteliers should absolutely celebrate their housekeeping teams. Bring in lunch. Hand out awards. Put up banners. Recognize milestones. Thank people personally for the work they do. But then, what happens on September 20?

The most meaningful form of employee appreciation may be creating a system that lets guests say thank you every day of the year and allows the people who earned that recognition to benefit when they need it most. That is recognition with real value.

A hotel’s property-management system is the operational backbone of the business; When it goes down, preparation determines how quickly the hotel can recover, with platforms like Maestro illustrating the importance of being prepared

By Doug Wagner

Most hotels have a disaster recovery plan for a fire, a flood, or another emergency that could temporarily disrupt operations. But when was the last time the hotel tested its plan for a property-management system outage?

The answer can be uncomfortable. Although many hotels have data backups in place, they may not know how recent those backups are, whether they can be restored, or how much of the hotel’s business data could be lost if the PMS failed.

That matters because the PMS contains far more than guest information. It is tied to deposits, gift cards, reservations, rates, posting codes, room information, availability, and the financial picture of the hotel. If that information disappears or becomes inaccessible, the impact can extend well beyond the IT department and into day-to-day operations.

From my experience working with hotels and their PMS environments, I’ve seen how quickly a system failure can turn into an operational crisis. I’ve also seen that the difference between a manageable disruption and a prolonged recovery often comes down to preparation.

Here are five things every hotel IT team should understand about protecting PMS data.

1. A PMS failure is an operational problem, not just an IT problem

When a PMS goes down, the immediate temptation may be to think of it as a server or software issue. But the PMS is connected to virtually every aspect of running the property.

Without access to the system, a hotel can lose visibility into its financial status, future availability, reservations, and arriving guests. Even credit card processing can be affected because processing runs through the system.

That means PMS recovery should not be treated as an issue that IT handles in isolation. Hotel leadership and operations need to understand what the PMS contains, what happens when it is unavailable, and how the property will continue operating while recovery is underway.

The goal is not simply to get a server running again. The goal is to get the hotel back in business.

2. Having a backup is not the same as having a recovery plan

One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating “we have a backup” as the end of the conversation. The more important questions are: How recent is the backup? Where is it stored? Can it actually be restored? And how much data would the hotel lose if the PMS failed right now?

A hotel might have a backup that is several days old. That is certainly better than having nothing but recovering from it can still create a significant operational challenge. Transactions, reservations, and other information from the missing period may have to be reconstructed.

In more serious cases, hotels have had to rebuild their PMS database from scratch. That can mean recreating rates, posting codes, room numbers, and other foundational information, then working through reports and paper records to reconstruct what happened.

It is possible to do, but it can consume enormous amounts of time and labor. The better approach is to establish a recovery plan before the failure occurs, with a clear understanding of how frequently PMS data is backed up and how much information could potentially be lost.

3. Backups need to be monitored and validated

A backup that exists in theory is not necessarily a backup that will save the hotel.

One of the most important things an IT team can do is regularly verify that backups are actually occurring and that the resulting data is readable and usable. In my experience, one of the most common gaps is simply that nobody is monitoring the backups closely enough.

There have been situations where a backup process had stopped recording for days—or even weeks—without anyone realizing it. Hoteliers should ask their IT teams a straightforward question: Who is validating that our PMS backups are working?

Validation should be more than checking a box that says a backup completed. The hotel needs confidence that the backup contains the data it expects and can be used to restore the PMS if necessary.

For organizations using a PMS provider that can assist with this process, it is worth taking advantage of that expertise. A backup can potentially be loaded into a separate system to verify that it is functional before an emergency makes that validation critical.

A backup should not be considered reliable simply because the system says it is completed. It should be considered reliable when the hotel knows it can be used.

4. Redundancy and offsite protection matter

A single backup is not enough protection for a critical PMS. Consider what happens if the backup is stored alongside the PMS server and the property experiences a fire or another event that affects the physical infrastructure. The hotel could lose both the production system and its backup.

That is why redundancy matters. At least one copy of the backup should be maintained somewhere separate from the primary system and protected against the same event that could take the production environment offline.

This is also where the distinction between an on-premise PMS and a hosted PMS becomes important.

With an on-premise environment, the hotel is responsible for the infrastructure and the data. That includes the servers, the environment in which they operate, and the processes used to protect and recover the PMS.

In a hosted environment, those responsibilities shift to the hosting provider. The provider manages the PMS server environment and takes responsibility for the data, database, hardware, security, and patches. The hotel still needs to manage its local network and other technology, but the PMS infrastructure itself is removed from the hotel’s direct responsibility.

The shift toward hosted environments is significant because it can free hotel IT teams from maintaining the PMS infrastructure and allow them to focus their time elsewhere.

5. The best recovery plan is one the hotel has practiced

Technology is only part of preparedness. People and processes matter just as much.

Hotels should have a practical checklist for what happens when the PMS is unavailable and revisit that checklist regularly. That could mean reviewing procedures every few weeks or once a month and making sure the right reports and information are available to support recovery.

It is also valuable to practice operating without the system. Hotels have historically conducted emergency drills for events such as fires. The same thinking can apply to a PMS outage: Know what happens when the system is not available, know which records the team needs, and know who is responsible for each step.

The objective is to make the response familiar before the emergency happens.

A valid, recent backup combined with the right end-of-day reports and a practiced process can make it possible to rebuild a PMS environment in hours rather than facing days of disruption. And that preparation should not live only with the IT manager. PMS recovery is a hotel-wide responsibility because the PMS itself is a hotel-wide system.

Preparation is the real recovery strategy

No hotelier can predict exactly when its PMS will fail. Hardware can fail through normal wear and tear, and malware or ransomware attacks can bring systems down unexpectedly. In recent customer experiences, even hotels with dedicated IT teams and dedicated backups have experienced significant downtime.

The lesson is not that every failure can be prevented. It is that hotels can determine how prepared they are when one happens.
For hoteliers managing their PMS on premises, that preparation includes understanding their infrastructure, backup schedule, offsite redundancy, and recovery responsibilities. For hotels using a hosted PMS, many of those infrastructure responsibilities move to the hosting provider, but the hotel still needs to understand how its PMS data is protected and how recovery works.

Ultimately, you can never be overprepared for a PMS failure.

The investment required to maintain current, validated backups, and a practical recovery process is insignificant compared with the labor and cost of rebuilding a hotel’s PMS after the fact. The most important step is simply to start asking questions before something goes wrong. Because when the PMS disappears, the question is no longer whether the hotel has a backup. It is whether that backup can actually get the hotel back in business.

A resilient PMS strategy starts with understanding where your data lives, how it is protected, and how quickly your hotel can recover when disruption occurs. Maestro PMS helps hotels strengthen operational control by providing the technology and deep hospitality expertise needed to protect critical PMS data and support recovery when it matters most.

To learn how Maestro PMS helps hotels protect critical operational data and build a more resilient PMS environment, visit www.maestropms.com.

Real-time room status and operational visibility within the hotel PMS are becoming essential to delivering faster arrivals, happier guests, and more efficient hotel operations

By Lisa Jane Wheaton

Peak travel seasons represent some of the greatest opportunities for hotels to grow revenue and to strengthen guest loyalty. They also expose operational weaknesses that often remain hidden during slower periods.

As occupancy approaches full capacity, hotels have very little room for operational uncertainty. Every delayed room missed housekeeping update, and every unanswered question at the front desk compounds into larger operational challenges throughout the day. What may seem like a minor communication issue at 10 a.m. can quickly become a lobby full of frustrated guests by 3 p.m.

During peak periods, most hoteliers naturally focus on maximizing occupancy and revenue. Equally important, however, is ensuring operational decisions keep pace with arriving guests. The speed of those decisions often determines whether the guest experience begins with confidence or frustration.
The reality is that hotel room readiness is no longer simply a housekeeping responsibility. It has become a hotel-wide operational priority that directly influences guest satisfaction, employee productivity, and revenue performance.

Guests don't see departments. They see one hotel. Travelers arrive expecting a seamless hotel check-in process. Many have already completed mobile check-in, selected upgrades, or received arrival notifications before stepping into the lobby. Their expectation is simple: the room should be ready.
Unfortunately, the operational reality behind the scenes is often far more complicated.

Housekeeping may still be finishing a room. Maintenance may have temporarily taken another room out of service. A room inspection may not yet be complete. Meanwhile, the front desk is working from information that may already be outdated.

Without accurate, up-to-date room status information shared through the hotel property-management system, front desk associates are forced to make decisions based on incomplete data. They call housekeeping for updates. Housekeeping supervisors stop what they're doing to answer questions. Maintenance receives unexpected requests to prioritize repairs. Managers begin reassigning rooms to keep lines moving.
Every interruption creates another interruption.

What begins as one unavailable room quickly evolves into longer wait times, increased guest frustration, and unnecessary stress across multiple departments. These are the hidden costs of slow operational decisions.

Impact Beyond the Front Desk

Peak hotel occupancy places extraordinary pressure on every operational team. Housekeeping management is balancing departures, stayovers, inspections, staffing shortages, and special requests simultaneously. Maintenance teams are responding to preventive work and unexpected guest issues while front desk operations are managing arrivals, upgrades, loyalty recognition, billing questions, and guest requests.

Each department may be performing well individually, yet without effective communication and real-time operational visibility; the hotel still struggles as a whole. The challenge isn't that employees lack dedication. It's that they often don't have access to the same operational information at the same time.

When departments operate from different versions of room status, decision-making slows dramatically. Staff members spend valuable time confirming information rather than acting on it. During peak periods, even small delays can quickly escalate.

One unavailable room may delay another arrival. That arrival creates a longer queue. Longer queues generate more guest complaints. Employees become increasingly reactive instead of proactive.

The operational impact is significant, but so is the human one. Employees who spend their shifts chasing information instead of serving guests experience higher stress and lower job satisfaction. That pressure can contribute to burnout during the very periods when hotels depend on their teams the most.

The solution isn't asking staff to work harder. It's giving every department a shared, current view of room status so teams can make informed decisions with confidence.

PMS Integration is the Solution

With an integrated property-management system such as Maestro PMS, housekeeping updates, maintenance notifications, inspections, and room status changes become immediately visible across departments. Instead of relying on phone calls, radio conversations, or manual spreadsheets, everyone works from the same accurate operational data. That level of visibility transforms the hotel check-in process.

Integrated communication tools such as GuestXMS further strengthen operational visibility by connecting guest communications and service coordination within a single platform. Teams can communicate in real time through team chat, create and assign service tickets, upload photos to document the maintenance or housekeeping issues.

Front desk associates can confidently assign rooms that are genuinely ready. Housekeeping supervisors can prioritize cleaning based on arrivals rather than guesswork. Managers gain immediate insight into operational bottlenecks before they affect guests.

Mobile housekeeping capabilities extend the operational visibility to room attendants, allowing them to manage room assignments and to update the room status in real time using a mobile device. With access to guest information, VIPs, special requests, housekeeping team can prepare the room on time and share the updates instantly in Maestro PMS. This gives the front desk and the other teams accurate, real time and updated information about room availability without the need for manual updates, unnecessary back and forth communications, and separate interfaces.

Most importantly, decisions happen faster. Real-time room status allows teams to respond to changing conditions immediately instead of discovering problems after guests have already reached the front desk. This becomes especially valuable during periods of high occupancy, when hotels have very little margin for operational inefficiency.

Hotels often talk about reducing hotel check-in delays, but the conversation shouldn't begin in the lobby. It should begin with improving hotel room readiness through better coordination.

When housekeeping management, maintenance, and front desk operations all share accurate information, hotels reduce unnecessary communication, minimize room reassignments, and improve overall operational efficiency.

The benefits extend beyond faster arrivals. Managers gain better visibility into productivity. Teams collaborate more effectively. Employees spend less time searching for answers and more time assisting guests. Guests spend less time waiting and more time enjoying their stay. These operational improvements create measurable business outcomes while strengthening the guest experience.

Technology alone isn't the solution, but it provides the foundation people need to perform at their best. As travel demand continues to grow and guest expectations continue to rise, operational agility will increasingly separate high-performing hotels from the competition.

Peak seasons will always be demanding. While hotels cannot eliminate every unexpected maintenance issue or last-minute housekeeping delay, they can eliminate the communication gaps that turn manageable situations into operational bottlenecks.

Improving housekeeping and front desk communication through real-time room status updates gives hotel teams the confidence to make faster, better-informed decisions throughout the day. Ultimately, successful hotel operations during peak travel seasons aren't defined by how busy a property becomes. They're defined by how effectively every department responds together.

When operational visibility replaces uncertainty, hotel room readiness improves, guest wait times shrink, employees become more productive, and the entire arrival experience feels effortless.

In hospitality, guests may only spend a few minutes at the front desk, but those first few minutes often shape their perception of the entire stay. Investing in real-time operational visibility supported by integrated platforms such as Maestro PMS ensures those moments begin with confidence instead of confusion, setting the tone for an exceptional stay from the very first interaction.

Why the future of lodging will belong to organizations that connect technology, commercial strategy, and human experience

By Kirsten Mosco

Last week in San Antonio, I had the opportunity to attend both HSMAI (Hospitality Sales and Marketing International) and HITEC (Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition & Conference), two events that approach hospitality from different angles but ultimately pointed to the same conclusion: the lines separating sales, marketing, revenue strategy, operations, communications, and technology are disappearing.

HSMAI focused on commercial strategy. HITEC showcased the technology shaping the future of hotel operations and guest engagement. Together, they offered a valuable view of where our industry is headed and what hotel leaders should be paying attention to now.

My goal at both events was simple: separate what is real from what is noise.

Artificial intelligence dominated conversations throughout the week, but what interested me most was not the technology itself. It was how differently organizations are approaching it. Some companies have established governance frameworks, clear use cases, and disciplined adoption strategies. Others are still experimenting and learning where AI creates value or possibly risk. Most are somewhere in between.

That spectrum revealed something important. You can learn a great deal about an organization by how it approaches change. Is it curious or cautious? Strategic or reactive? Focused on solving real problems or chasing the latest trend? The strongest organizations seem to share one characteristic: they are approaching AI with both curiosity and discipline.

If I had to summarize my biggest takeaway from the week in a single sentence, it would be this: AI is not changing what makes hotels successful; it is accelerating how quickly travelers, teams, and owners can see who is doing the fundamentals well.

Trust still matters. Reputation still matters. Communication still matters. Guest experience still matters. What is changing is visibility.

Bringing AI to HSMAI

At HSMAI, many conversations focused on how AI is reshaping discovery. For years, hotels optimized for search engines. Today, travelers increasingly use AI-powered tools to compare options, summarize reviews, research destinations, and narrow choices before they ever visit a hotel website. As a result, website content, reviews, public relations, local storytelling, structured information, and digital reputation are becoming part of the same ecosystem. Hotels that communicate clearly and consistently will have an advantage because AI systems rely on those signals when evaluating and recommending properties.

Clarity is becoming a competitive advantage.

One of the most important themes at HSMAI was the shift away from siloed thinking. Revenue management, sales, marketing, public relations, and communications can no longer operate as separate functions. Guests do not experience a hotel in departmental categories, and increasingly, neither do the technologies influencing their decisions.

A traveler may begin with an AI prompt, compare reviews, visit a website, browse social media, evaluate rates, and book through a channel the hotel does not directly control. No single department owns that journey. The strongest commercial organizations will be those that treat these disciplines as part of one connected ecosystem, sharing intelligence and aligning around common goals.

AI can support that process by helping teams analyze information faster, prepare more effectively, and identify opportunities more quickly. But technology does not replace judgment. It enhances it. The future is not automation for its own sake. It is better preparation, better timing, better storytelling, and better decision-making.

HITEC & High Intelligence

While HSMAI explored strategy, HITEC demonstrated how technology providers are translating those ideas into practical solutions. Walking the expo floor, I was struck by the sheer volume of innovation. Nearly every category, from guest communications and operations to revenue management and reporting, now includes some form of AI-enhanced capability.

The most significant trend was not a single technology. It was the emergence of intelligence as a layer across nearly every platform hotels already use. AI is becoming less of a standalone product and more of an expected feature embedded within existing systems. That creates enormous opportunity, but it also creates complexity.

The number of tools entering the market continues to grow rapidly, which makes discernment more important than ever. Hotel operators need to understand not only what a solution does, but what problem it solves, how it integrates with existing workflows, and what governance and security measures support it. The companies that impressed me most were not necessarily the loudest. They were the ones demonstrating practical applications, measurable outcomes, and a clear understanding of the challenges they were addressing.

Another theme that emerged repeatedly was the growing role of AI agents and workflow automation. The most promising use cases are not broad, generalized applications. They are purpose-built solutions designed around specific business needs. Whether it is summarizing RFPs, preparing revenue meeting materials, conducting sales research, analyzing guest feedback, or monitoring competitive activity, the greatest value comes from reducing repetitive work and giving people more time to focus on what humans do best.

Hospitality remains a people business. Technology should help teams spend more time building relationships, solving problems, coaching employees, and caring for guests. The guest experience should feel more personal, not more automated.

The combined lessons from HSMAI and HITEC point toward a hospitality industry that is becoming faster, more integrated, and more transparent. Hotels will need stronger digital foundations, cleaner information, better reputation management, and tighter alignment between commercial and operational teams. As AI-powered discovery grows, even basic elements such as content accuracy, review quality, and local relevance become increasingly important because they influence how properties are represented to potential guests.

For hotel owners and operators, the path forward is not to adopt every new technology that appears. It is to start with real business problems, establish clear goals, create thoughtful guardrails, test carefully, measure results, and most importantly, remain curious.

The technology will continue to evolve. The tools will change. But the organizations that thrive will be the ones that combine innovation with stewardship, technology with humanity, and curiosity with discipline. Those fundamentals are not changing anytime soon.