The Gap We Can’t Ignore: Closing the Disconnect Between Facilities and Hotel Operations

Tim Thilleman works at the intersection of hospitality operations and technology, advising hotel ownership groups and management companies on how systems actually perform in real-world environments. His perspective is shaped by time spent both inside hotels and in advisory roles across multi‑property portfolios.

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There are moments in this industry where everything comes into focus. Not just when something new appears, but when what’s been hard to see finally becomes clear.

At MSARC in Charlotte, NC, finance, operations, and technology leaders kept circling the same unresolved problem: Facilities management is still not integrated with the systems that run the rest of the hotel business.

Why the facilities gap is no longer sustainable

Hospitality operators have spent years optimizing guest experience, revenue management, and property systems. But facilities management — the backbone of physical operations — has largely evolved alongside it, rather than in sync.

Now those worlds are colliding, and gaps are showing up in cost, speed, and accountability.

That imbalance shows up in the numbers, too.

That’s a clear sign that many operators are still far from fully connected, preventive operations.

Where the gap comes into focus

That message came through clearly in conversations throughout the conference, including from ServiceChannel’s Casey Swan, who attended MSARC and spent time with finance and operations leaders across the region.

Swan works closely with hospitality operators on facilities, vendor management, and spend visibility, giving her a front-line view of how these gaps play out every day. “What stood out to me most was how interconnected finance, operations, and technology really are in hospitality, and also how disconnected the execution layer still is.”

Across conversations — particularly on the club and hospitality side — there was a consistent pattern:

• Facilities, vendor management, and maintenance workflows are still highly fragmented
• Operators are relying on a patchwork of systems alongside manual processes
• Spend visibility and execution tracking are not operating from a single source of truth

This isn’t a fringe case. It’s the day-to-day reality for many teams. And the people in the room knew it.

What disconnection looks like in practice

If you talk to operators long enough, you start to hear the same operational story repeated in different ways:

• Work orders live in one system
• Vendor communication happens somewhere else (email, text, phone)
• Financial tracking sits inside accounting or ERP tools
• Reporting requires manually stitching all of it together

It works until volume increases, turnover hits, or a critical repair stalls. At scale, the patchwork becomes a constraint.

Why core hotel systems stop short of facilities

One of the more telling moments in Charlotte came during a conversation with Infor about its Hospitality Management Solution (HMS) platform.

While systems like Infor HMS are essential for managing the guest experience and front-of-house operations, they are not designed to truly support facilities or vendor workflows. Maintenance, trades, asset upkeep, and vendor coordination typically sit outside these core hotel systems.

This limitation is widely understood. What’s still unresolved is how the industry is addressing it. Because embedding facilities into core systems isn’t just a technical challenge, it’s an operational one. It requires alignment between how work actually gets done on property and how systems are designed to support it.

The real source of the facilities gap

It would be easy to say this is a technology problem, but it’s really a coordination problem between:

• What actually happens on property — how maintenance work gets identified, assigned, completed, and followed up
• How money is tracked and controlled — where costs are approved, recorded, and reviewed
• How systems are set up — which platforms hold the data and whether they’re built to work together

Facilities management sits right in the middle of that intersection. And today, it’s the least integrated layer.

What conversations from MSARC made clear

Across conversations at MSARC, it became clear that hospitality has reached a tipping point. Finance, operations and technology are more connected than ever at the strategic level, yet facilities management remains the execution gap holding them apart. The result is reactive spend, fragmented workflows and limited visibility at a time when scale, speed and accountability matter more than ever.

Facilities is no longer a back-of-house function that can operate in parallel. It sits at the center of cost control, asset performance, and operational consistency across portfolios. Until it is fully integrated into the systems and processes that run the rest of the business, the industry will continue to feel friction where alignment should exist.

The opportunity now is not just to modernize tools, but to rethink how facilities work fits into the broader operational ecosystem — on property and across portfolios.

If you’re evaluating how facilities, vendor management and spend visibility fit into your broader operational strategy, now is the time to take a closer look.

*ServiceChannel 2024 Facilities Management Survival Guide.