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Jordan Hollander
CEO @ HotelTechReport
Jordan is the co-founder of Hotel Tech Report, the hotel industry's app store where millions of professionals discover tech tools to transform their businesses. He was previously on the Global Partnerships team at Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Prior to his work with SPG, Jordan was Director of Business Development at MWT Hospitality and an equity analyst at Wells Capital Management. Jordan received his MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management where he was a Zell Global Entrepreneurship Scholar and a Pritzker Group Venture Fellow.
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Hotels face constant labor management challenges, from aligning staffing levels with fluctuating occupancy to controlling labor costs without sacrificing service quality. Hospitality scheduling software transforms these challenges into opportunities, empowering hoteliers with tools to optimize staffing, track performance, and meet operational goals. By leveraging features like automated scheduling, real-time labor tracking, and labor cost insights, hotels can ensure they have the right team in place at the right time while staying within budget.
We’ve surveyed 911 hoteliers across more than 23 countries to understand which are the best Scheduling & Workforce Management vendors, along with everything you need to know in order to buy the right Scheduling & Workforce Management for your hotel (including our 2025 Scheduling & Workforce Management Guide). We also aggregate key decision criteria data including integration availability, partner ecosystem, expert recommendations and more (learn more about HTR’s ranking methodology).
Hospitality staff scheduling and rostering software helps hotels and restaurants streamline staff planning, track work hours, and optimize labor costs. It automates shift assignments, ensures compliance with labor laws, and provides real-time updates for better communication. Popular hospitality staff scheduling solutions include Unifocus, hotelkit, and 7shifts.
This guide is designed to help you identify the best Scheduling & workforce management vendors, questions to ask on demos, read unbiased reviews from similar hoteliers and so much more. (including our 2025 Scheduling & Labor Management Guide)
Choosing the right Scheduling & Workforce Management for your hotel depends on several variables some of which come down to personal preference but most of which come down to the characteristics of your property. Is your hotel a small property with limited budget? Or is your property a luxury resort with lots of outlets and high ADR? Below are HTR’s defined key personas based on common property characteristics that typically indicate similar product choices.
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Hospitality workforce management software provides essential tools to optimize labor costs while maintaining exceptional guest service standards. Instead of simply reducing staffing, these systems guide the effective utilization of a hotel property’s workforce.
Advanced features such as labor standards management, integrated forecasting based on real business drivers, and seamless integration with payroll and timekeeping systems work together to create actionable service and labor plans.
These capabilities help hotels eliminate unnecessary over-scheduling, reduce overtime, optimize the use of outsourced contractors, and ensure precise service delivery. On average, hotels leveraging robust labor management practices powered by technology can save 3-5% on total labor costs annually, with significant reductions in overtime expenses.
By using hotel scheduling and workforce management software, properties can achieve cost savings of 3-5% in total labor expenses, directly boosting net operating income and operational cash flow. These savings are particularly impactful in today’s challenging environment of rising wages and limited talent availability.
When used effectively, this technology enables hotels to meet financial goals while maintaining service excellence.
Hospitality staff scheduling software significantly reduces the time managers spend creating schedules, ensuring they align with labor cost and service expectations. Accurate business volume forecasts, combined with labor standards, allow for precise scheduling that meets both financial and operational needs.
This efficiency builds stakeholder confidence across all levels of the organization, from department managers to executive leadership.
Hospitality scheduling software provides comprehensive visibility into labor costs at the department, property, and portfolio levels, fostering greater accountability. Potential risks, such as overstaffing or inefficiencies, can be identified and resolved proactively.
Internal and external benchmarks, like reduced Minutes Per Room (MPR) for housekeeping, allow for continuous improvement in operational quality and cost management.
With advanced hospitality workforce management tools, hotels can navigate labor challenges, improve profitability, and deliver exceptional guest experiences.
The most important features of hospitality scheduling and rostering software focus on improving operational efficiency, controlling labor costs, and enhancing staff and guest satisfaction. Here are the key features to look for:
Labor Standards: Simple, wizard-like tools will make creation and management of sophisticated staffing rules very easy for all levels of management. Updating standards to reflect changing operational goals or market conditions should be effortless and reflected immediately in labor plans and schedules.
Operational drivers integration: Direct connection of Business Intelligence, accounting, and revenue forecasting tools, while maintaining the ability to be overridden by authorized managers. This data is paired with labor standards to produce staffing models and scheduling target hours optimizing performance and eliminating inefficiencies, excessive overtime, and providing better control of contract labor use.
Daily check-in: Every manager should be able to review, update, and modify his/her labor schedules and performance objectives on a daily basis in five minutes or less through thoughtfully designed, easily understood dashboards and guided action plan creation. Senior managers, GMs and above-property leadership monitor performance trends and action plans of every hotel. Department managers have the ability to address opportunities, mitigate risks, and seek guidance.
Mobile-friendly employee tools: Line-level employees need a simple, reliable tool to identify preferred shifts, request time off, and see their daily and weekly schedules via mobile device or desktop browser.
Time & Attendance/Payroll integration: Linking the time clock data to scheduling systems, with multiple daily real time updates, enables hotels to monitor overtime risk, unpaired punches, incorrect position coding, absences and tardiness. Corrective action can be taken prior to such things becoming an issue.
Easy to use UX: Features that are designed specifically for the hotel industry will enable complex actions to be completed with a few simple steps. Most users should require minimal training to realize maximum value. Daily labor management tasks should be managed in 5 minutes or less by most users.
Benchmarking: Internal tools to compare hotels across the portfolio including department and function-level benchmarks are critical to establishing and expanding operational standards and rules that can be an owner or management company’s key point of differentiation. Adding external benchmarks - data from comparable hotels within the local market or from other regions - enables senior leaders to identify improvement opportunities.
The typical pricing for hospitality scheduling software ranges from $100 to $2,000 per month per hotel, depending on the hotel’s size, specific requirements, and included features. Some providers offer tiered pricing based on advanced capabilities such as analytics or system integrations. Enterprise-level solutions may involve customization and flat fees, with installation costs potentially reaching up to $20,000, along with $5,000 for on-site training, ensuring the software meets the unique needs of your property.
Get a custom price quote on Hotel Tech Report to see what it will cost your hotel.
Implementing new scheduling and rostering software in a hotel typically takes 4 to 10 weeks, depending on the system's complexity and staff training requirements. Simple systems may be operational in a few days, while customized solutions with integrations and extensive training may require more time.
There are three main parts to implementation of a hotel scheduling system:
Data integration: Linking payroll and business intelligence systems to the workforce scheduling system to provide the data needed for the system to function. Depending upon the provider’s ability to integrate, this can take from a few days to several months.
Configuration: Building property organizational structure and labor standards, along with mapping active position coding, appropriate to each hotel and setting. During this stage users are defined. Time for this can vary but it should not take more than a few days.
Training: Most training can be done online. Owners, general managers, financial management, and Account Administrator should expect to invest about 3 hours to learn a system . Department managers should be able to learn how to use the scheduler and management tools in less than an hour.
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