Dive Brief:

• Toast has added Toast for Hotel Restaurants, a product aimed at helping hotel restaurant operators streamline their operations, increase revenue and process room charges directly from the point-of-sale.
• The suite's other features include check splitting, automated course firing and dish modification, and provides insights on prep time from the kitchen to dine-in or takeout.
• This product launch comes as demand for hotel rooms inches toward pre-pandemic levels. Occupancy rates are expected to reach an average of 63.4% for the year, down slightly from pre-pandemic levels of 66%, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association.

Dive Insight:

Over the last several years, companies that typically work within the restaurant industry have expanded into hospitality. With more than 65,000 hotels in the U.S. and a naturally captive clientele, there is major revenue potential for Toast and other businesses to streamline operations and implement systems that improve the ability to upsell food and beverages onsite.

In February, C3 inked a deal with Las Vegas Westin Hotel & Spa to handle its in-room dining and delivery, building on partnerships with Graduate Hotels and Mandalay Bay Casino. The virtual brand operator is now in more than 75,000 hotel rooms around the world. Grubhub also signed on with Resorts World Las Vegas in 2021, allowing guests to use Grubhub's app or QR codes to order food throughout the property.

By integrating with existing hotel property management systems, including with Stayntouch, which serves over 500 hotels, and Barefoot Technologies, Toast's technology could solve for a major pain point for hotels as they look to modernize their POS: syncing bills between systems automatically.

The integration could speed up service as staff can search for a guest name or room number on Toast's terminal or handheld POS to apply a tab to a room bill. It also allows guests to order and pay for room service or at QSRs in the hotel via QR code.

The product could also present a more consistent experience for guests, which could help gain back some of the guest satisfaction scores lost by the hotel food and beverage industry in 2021, according to a J.D. Power study.

The timing of the launch is beneficial as demand for hotel stays increases. Driven by pent-up demand, new hotel restaurants are opening at an above-average rate, according to FSR Magazine. They’re opening to a changed consumer, however, who now expects easy, fast, frictionless, on-demand service and are willing to pay more for that experience.