The combination of strong travel demand and short booking windows, among other factors, can make figuring out hotel staffing levels a challenge.
To navigate its hotel labor needs, Aimbridge Hospitality, the world's largest third-party hotel operator, created a new internal staffing platform. It's now rolling out the platform — called Labor Insight & Forecasting Tool, or LIFT — across its portfolio following a pilot program.
Labor is typically any business’ largest expense, said Chris O’Donnell, president of select service at Aimbridge, in an interview. Plano,
“Your people are the most important part of your business, but you also need to make sure that you manage efficiently the amount of folks that you deploy toward your business,” he said.
Aimbridge had two options, he said. One was to buy a product off the shelf, and the other was to use its own team and data to build something custom.
Custom won, because building its own tool meant the company would have something it could build on as ideas came up.
The company describes LIFT as applying "advanced data science and AI-assisted forecasting to labor planning, giving leaders a more precise, real-time view of staffing needs," according to a news release. It helps general managers and department heads decide staffing models based on historical data and forecasts, pulling information from multiple systems.
Texas-based Aimbridge has a portfolio of approximately 1,000 hotels across the U.S., Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe.
The platform is designed for individual hotels, O’Donnell said. The tool helps general managers put together historical trends and forward-looking information to determine the staffing levels they need. It will evaluate the schedules they’ve created, telling them when they may need more help in some areas and can be more efficient in others.
The information included isn’t just the forecast itself, he said. It’s also about the type of business the hotel has and the length of stay among other components. It considers the nuances when building a schedule.
O'Donnell called the typically straight analysis of "this is how many rooms we’re cleaning, this is how much time it takes per room" an "analog way of looking at it versus the more dynamic model" that incorporates length of stay and other components.
The pilot program launched earlier this year and allowed Aimbridge to take a new look at its labor standards and consider how it should approach all hotel departments, not just housekeeping, O’Donnell said.
Everyone has access to LIFT now, and at this point, it’s a matter of fully implementing it, he said.
The hotel teams are noting efficiencies, he said.
“When you take any metric and you apply methodology to it and standards to it, rather than just simply building upon what you’ve previously done, it’s amazing how you can align, how you can execute,” he said.
It's more than just compliance, he added.
“If you create the tool to help guide decision-making, but then also provide the training and the guidance to the teams on how to execute against that scheduling, that’s really where the win is,” he said.