65% of North American hotels reported staffing shortages in 2025 as AI moves into ops

A new analysis from BCG and NYU School of Professional Studies (NYU SPS) confronts hotel operators with a stark statistic: 65% of North American hotels said they faced staffing shortages in 2025, and labor costs rose 11.2% year over year, according to a PR Newswire release on the report.

That context matters because the report’s core claim is not theoretical. It frames AI as a near-term operations tool in a labor-constrained business where labor costs make up about half of gross operating margins, also per PR Newswire.

From “search and scroll” to “ask and book” changes what distribution teams optimize for

BCG’s report, “AI-First Hotels: Faster to Build, Leaner to Operate, and Richer in Customer Experience,” says hotel discovery is moving to AI-powered digital assistants that filter choices down to a short list of recommended properties (Boston Consulting Group). PR Newswire’s writeup of the same analysis calls this the “ask and book” era and says hotels will compete to appear on that shortlist by improving digital presence and connecting data more effectively.

For revenue and distribution teams, the operational implication is that visibility work expands beyond OTA content hygiene and brand.com SEO. The report’s stated priorities include machine-readable, high-trust content that answers traveler questions consistently across platforms, plus “distribution readiness” for AI-driven environments where prominence is increasingly linked to new fee and placement models (PR Newswire).

The shift to AI-mediated booking does not automatically change today’s distribution costs. According to PR Newswire, OTA commissions remain 15% to 30%, and the analysis also points to new fee and placement models tied to prominence and relevance. For operators, that raises procurement questions: what costs vary per booking, what is fixed platform spend, and how attribution will be determined.

Early ops wins are being reported in housekeeping and kitchens, but data plumbing is the gate

PR Newswire and Hotel Management cite examples of room cleaning and preparation times reduced by 20% through AI-synchronized housekeeping schedules aligned with checkouts and staff availability. Both also cite AI-enabled waste-tracking tools that provide real-time kitchen analytics and produced roughly 50% reductions in food waste within eight months.

These are the kinds of claims that can be tested quickly. Housekeeping cycle time, room readiness at peak check-in windows, and kitchen waste as a percent of covers are already instrumented at many brands. The harder part is integration across systems that were procured one workflow at a time.

Hotel Management reports that many hotel companies still run on fragmented technology systems with limited integration, and that nearly half of hoteliers report trouble getting access to critical business information.

Booking engines are adding “refundability at checkout,” a test case for AI-era retailing

One near-term example of hospitality software moving toward retail-style offers is the go-live of “Refund Protect” inside the Aven Hospitality Booking Engine, announced by Hospitality Technology. Aven Hospitality (formerly Sabre Hospitality Solutions) partnered with Protect Group so hotels can sell an upgrade to a refundable stay during checkout, while activating and managing the feature through Protect Group’s Onboarding Platform, according to Hospitality Technology.

Why it connects to the BCG-NYU thesis: once AI assistants steer travelers to fewer options, conversion depends more on how cleanly a property can present and transact the offer set. Refundability is a high-friction decision for guests and a high-stakes one for revenue management, so any “add-on” product that can be activated without rewriting policies becomes a practical lever for commercial teams to test.

Where this lands in 2026 planning for hotel ops, IT, and commercial leaders

• Write AI readiness into 2026 integration backlogs: inventory where guest profile, PMS, CRS, housekeeping, and F&B data is duplicated or manually reconciled, since Hotel Management reports nearly half of hoteliers struggle to access critical information.
• Treat “algorithmic relevance” as a cost line: ask distribution and marketing vendors how new fee and placement models would be measured and governed alongside existing 15% to 30% OTA commissions, using the framing reported by PR Newswire.
• Pilot AI with two metrics that move P&L fast: room cleaning and preparation time, which the analysis says can be reduced by 20%, and food waste, which it says can drop by roughly 50% within eight months. Set baselines and reporting cadence in the statement of work before deploying.
• If selling refundability, confirm operational ownership: for Refund Protect in the Aven Hospitality Booking Engine, clarify who owns configuration, accounting treatment, guest communications, and exception handling, even if activation is positioned as tech-led (Hospitality Technology).