Hotels warned over 'toggle tax' from disconnected systems

Access Hospitality has warned hotel operators about the cost of relying on multiple disconnected software systems, saying staff are losing time to what it calls "toggle tax".

Research cited by the company found that 47% of hotel businesses use between two and four systems, while 25% use more than five. Hoteliers in the UK and Ireland use 5.2 systems on average, with staff losing 322 hours a year switching between them.

The term refers to the time and attention lost when front desk employees move between separate tools for bookings, guest management, workforce tasks and other daily operations. Access Hospitality said this can slow check-ins, increase the risk of human error and affect guest satisfaction.

The findings point to a broader issue in hospitality, where operators have added specialist software over time for reservations, payments, staffing and procurement, often without integrating those systems. The result is a patchwork of tools that can leave staff handling the same guest or operational task in several places.

Technology choices

Nicola Longfield, chief commercial officer, global accommodation & payments, at Access Hospitality, outlined four steps hotel operators should consider when reviewing those arrangements. Her comments focused on long-term technology planning, system consolidation, supplier scrutiny and the cost of staying with fragmented tools.

"The operators who will be best positioned over the next three to five years are the ones making deliberate technology decisions today. Not panic decisions, not rip-and-replace, but strategic ones informed by where the industry is heading.

Audit your tech stack with a different question than you have asked before.

The old question was: does this system do what I need today? The new question is: is this technology for the next decade, or a tool solving yesterday's problem with yesterday's solutions?" Longfield said.

She argued that operators should assess whether each product still fits a longer-term operating model rather than simply meeting an immediate need. In practice, that means asking whether current systems can support future use of automation and data analysis across the business.

On consolidation, Longfield pointed to the value of unified systems across hotel functions.

"Platforms that unify your operations across guest engagement, workforce management, procurement, and distribution, in the case of hotels, give AI a complete picture to work with, and AI only gets better with time and good data.

Fragmented point solutions give it fragments. We see this across our own customer base: operators running multiple modules on our platform report stronger operational outcomes than those on isolated tools, because the data compounds," she said.

Supplier questions

Longfield also addressed how hotel groups assess technology vendors. Rather than asking suppliers whether they have an artificial intelligence strategy, she said buyers should look at what has already been built and deployed.

"Ask your technology partners what they are actually building, not whether they have an AI roadmap.

Ask what is in production today. Ask whether it is powered by hospitality-specific operational data or generic models available to anyone. The quality of those answers will tell you where that vendor will be in three years," she said.

This matters as hotels face tighter labour conditions and pressure on margins, prompting management teams to examine the return on software spending more closely. A system that requires repeated manual work across several platforms can add hidden costs even when licence fees appear manageable.

Longfield also urged operators to rethink how they measure the cost of changing systems. Traditional concerns such as retraining, migration and disruption still matter, but she said they should be weighed against the cost of keeping disconnected software in place.

"The traditional calculus was about migration pain: data transfer, retraining, disruption. That is real. But there is now a cost on the other side of the ledger. Staying on disconnected, isolated, and therefore AI-incapable systems means being locked out of the operational improvements your competitors will have access to. In an industry with razor-thin margins, that cost compounds fast," she said.

Operational impact

Access Hospitality also linked fragmented systems to practical issues on the hotel floor. Front desk staff often need to move between applications during guest check-in, reservation changes, room allocation and payment handling, adding delays at busy times. Back-office teams may face similar duplication when managing rotas, ordering and reporting.

The company, which supplies property management and related hospitality software, said the problem is not simply the number of systems in use but the lack of clear insight when data sits across separate products. In that environment, managers may have access to large volumes of information without a single view of operations.

Longfield said: "Hoteliers are switching between two to five systems every day, and while these systems collect a lot of data, they do not always provide clear, cohesive insights.

At Access Hospitality, we believe that people should shape software, and the key to being successful is being AI-powered and having all systems in one place.

Using a consolidated system like Access Hospitality's Property Management Suite can reduce hotelier headaches, elevate guest experience and avoid toggle tax because everything you need is in one place.

By making the switch, operators can reclaim hours lost using disconnected systems, while also supporting the overall growth of their business."