Toggle tax is costing US hotel businesses more than they realize

Toggle tax is a term coined to highlight the hidden productivity that is lost or drained when you’re constantly switching between digital systems. It was initially introduced in a 2022 Harvard Business Review study, describing not just the seconds lost each time you’re switching systems, but the mental cost of the errors that creep in and the slow build-up of wasted time across your entire team. 

For US hospitality businesses, the numbers are significant as according to a survey of 400 US hospitality operators conducted by Access Hospitality and CGA by NIQ, 39% of hospitality managers spend between 1 and 2 hours every day switching between software systems. This is before you look at the additional costs in training, data errors and missed decisions.  

This article will break down what toggle tax is for hoteliers, and where you can measure it to see how much it might be costing your hotel operation. With insights from our own data, we will show you where the gaps are and what you can do about it.  

Toggle tax is the accumulation of time, energy and cognitive cost of switching between different digital tools or interfaces throughout a working day. It's worth looking at it separately from context switching, which is about jumping between different types of tasks. Toggle tax is specifically about tool switching which is the moment you close one browser window and open another, re-enter your login, wait for a page to load or try to remember where you were. Harvard Business Review found that the average worker switches between apps around 1,200 times a day, costing roughly 9% of their working day just from the act of switching.  

If we put this into a hotel setting, that's your front desk jumping from a booking system to a CRM platform before getting guests checked in. Or your team pulls revenue data, labor costs, F&B performance and guest satisfaction data from separate systems before the morning briefing. According to our research with CGA by NIQ, hotels use an average of 9 separate systems to run their operations, with each one being a potential challenge to your team and their time. 

Most hoteliers know the challenges are there, but others have started to measure them, so they can see where to improve their processes.  

Start with time spent switching between systems 

Ask your team to track how long they spend each day moving between systems. Use our survey research with CGA by NIQ to give you a useful starting point. 

• 19% of operators spend less than 30 minutes per day switching between systems. 
• 26% spend 30 minutes to an hour. 
• 39% spend one to two hours. 
• 11.5% spend two to three hours daily. 

If your hotel teams spend even 1 hour a day switching systems, this has a huge effect on your hotel performance and can be costly. The time spent dealing with systems that are disconnected is lost, so focusing on making your hotel services the best they can be is at risk.  

Add in the hidden costs that are hard to see 

The direct time loss is only part of the picture as toggle tax in a hotel can show up in many ways.  

• Rate decisions made on unconfirmed data because your revenue system and PMS aren't speaking to each other in real time. 
• Guest profile information is sitting in your CRM that your front desk never sees at check-in. 
• F&B upselling opportunities are missed because your restaurant team has no visibility into who's arriving and when. 
• Manual re-entry errors between your hotel CRS and PMS that create booking differences your team spends hours fixing. 
• New staff onboarding takes twice as long because every system is a separate training exercise. 

Our research found that 98% of US hospitality operators believe unconnected systems are costing them money. For example, the estimated OPEX waste is 14%, so for a hotel with $3 million in annual operating costs, that's $420,000 potentially lost to data errors, duplication and decisions made without full visibility. 

Count your systems and your login platforms 

Operators running 8 or more systems report significantly higher daily switching times. In fact, training challenges worsen when using 5 or more platforms, with 9% more businesses in that group saying training is their single biggest operational challenge according to our findings.  

A simple audit of what you already have usually tells the full story. Start by listing every software system your team logs into during a typical day and note which ones require a separate username and password. See which ones require data to be manually copied from one into another, and that list will begin to create your toggle tax map.

Your front desk team is one of the most affected groups of toggle tax in a hotel. They're constantly switching between systems when talking with a guest or finding data to help with queries or upselling. Every second spent navigating between a hotel PMS and a separate loyalty or CRM system may result in errors or distractions when trying to deliver the best service. But if this happens at every arrival, query or upselling attempt, it starts to strain guest experiences and the morale of your teams. 

Our report found that 18.75% of US operators cite high staff turnover and constant retraining as their biggest training challenge. In hotels with busy periods or peak demand, every new hire has to learn a different set of logins, workflows and manual workarounds before they can serve a guest confidently. The more systems there are, the longer that takes, and the more likely something gets missed in the process. 

Quick decisions are also a factor as 67.5% of US operators said real-time data would significantly improve their ability to make quick decisions during busy periods. For a manager trying to decide whether to adjust pricing for a local event or understand why F&B revenue is down, pulling that data from three separate systems adds delays. The decisions still get made, but they get made slower, and sometimes without the accurate data to back it up.

You don’t need to tackle everything in one go but think strategically about what you have and what will work for your team. Here are 3 practical starting points to begin reducing your toggle tax.  

1. Run the system audit thoroughly  

List every tool your team logs into each day and make a note of the ones that require manual data entries. Recognize the systems that have no connection to each other and prioritize those that create the most friction. For most hotels, the PMS and CRS switching for the front desk are the highest-cost points to fix.  

2. Ask questions before adding new tech 

Every time a new system or tool is suggested, you need to think beyond if it does the job, but rather will it connect with everything you already have. A tool that does its individual job well but doesn't share data with your hotel PMS or CRM is still adding to the toggle tax. Integration needs to be at the front of your mind when thinking about new systems and if it will either add or reduce your toggle tax dependencies.  

3. Get your whole team on the same page  

Having your teams work effortlessly together is what makes your hotel run smoothly and that comes from systems that are connected to each other. In our research with CGA by NIQ, 44.75% of hoteliers were insistent on having consolidation to help save admin time, with 38% saying it would give them better visibility into how their hotel was performing. Creating an operation that takes away the manual switching and integrates everything into one place enables teams to feel that their workload is manageable and collaborative.  

Toggle tax is more expensive than most hotel operators realize but it’s easily manageable and measurable. By auditing your hotel’s tech and seeing where the problems are costing you or if they are disconnected, this is the perfect place to think about integrating your systems. You might not have known toggle tax was in your operations but recognizing it early and making changes to your process now will save you time and money in the future.  

When your front desk, revenue team and operational managers all work from the same data, the switching stops and so do the errors, the delays and the decisions made without the correct information. Access Hospitality brings your key hotel systems together, from revenue management systems and hotel CRS to hotel CRM and booking engines, they all run together on one platform. Your whole team works from the same data so there are no manual errors or risky decisions that can create more problems than they’re worth.