Guests now book, pay, navigate and check in on their phones. After check-in, most hotels still hand them a bedside phone and a laminated menu. The fix isn't an app. It's better operations behind the request.

Think about what a guest has done on their phone by the time they reach the room. They booked the stay, paid for the cab and maybe checked in online. Then they open the door and the hotel's service model goes back two decades: a bedside phone, a paper menu that may be out of date, and an extension number nobody remembers.

In an Oracle Hospitality and Skift study, 73% of travellers said they wanted to use their mobile device to manage their hotel experience, including ordering food, and 39% specifically wanted to order room service from their phone or a chatbot. Hotel Tech Report's State of Hotel Guest Technology Report 2025 found that 45% of guests prefer to order room service digitally rather than over the phone.

That is a big share. It is also not everyone, and that matters later.

Where the friction actually sits

The bedside phone is not broken. The problem is everything around it. The guest calls, waits, and reads out an order to someone who is often also handling the front desk. Then they hope "no onions" reached the kitchen. Paper menus go out of date. Housekeeping requests such as an extra pillow or a late towel run end up in someone's memory or on a notepad.

The usual fix has been a hotel app. For a two-night stay, most guests won't download one. In J.D. Power's 2017 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index, only 19% of guests had downloaded a hotel app, and 38% of those who had it didn't use it during their stay.

A browser asks for almost nothing. The guest scans a QR code in the room and gets a live menu and service list with no install, login or password. That is where phone-first room service should start.

The real work is behind the scenes

Getting the request onto the guest's phone is the easy bit. What decides the guest's experience is what happens next. Who receives the request? Who owns it? What happens at shift change? How does anyone know it was delivered, and how long it took?

In our work with hotels at Digital Room Service, the biggest gains rarely come from the guest-facing screen. They come from putting every request into one shared queue, routing it to the right person who is actually free, and making the handoff between kitchen, runner and housekeeping visible. When a request belongs to everyone, it usually belongs to no one.

This matters more when teams are thin. In AHLA's 2025 survey, 65% of surveyed US hotels reported staffing shortages. Few properties anywhere can afford staff re-keying orders or chasing lost requests.

Phone-first is not contactless-cold

Digital ordering should free staff for hospitality, not replace it. The same Hotel Tech Report research found that while 70% of guests find chatbots helpful for simple questions, they still prefer a human for complex requests. The phone captures the order cleanly. A person still delivers the tray, remembers the guest's name and notices the anniversary couple.

Practical steps for operators

Rebuild the menu for a screen. Use photos, clear modifiers, live availability and accurate prices.
Write a service catalogue. List the twenty things guests actually ask for, from towels and an iron to a cab or a doctor, so requests arrive structured and not as free text.
Assign ownership per request type. Every category needs a named team and a fallback when that team is busy.
Set response-time targets. For example, an acknowledgement within a few minutes, plus a delivery window for each category, and make them visible to staff.
Use the devices staff already carry. Alerts on team members' own phones beat a terminal nobody is standing next to.
Measure before and after. Record current response times and order volumes for two weeks before launch, or you won't know what changed.

The pitfalls to avoid

A QR code that opens a PDF. That is the paper menu on a smaller screen, with no ordering, tracking or accountability.

No owner. Digital requests that land in an unmonitored inbox are worse than a ringing phone, because the guest thinks the request went through.

Forgetting the guests who'd rather call. If 45% prefer digital, many still prefer to talk to someone. Keep the phone line working, and log those calls into the same queue so they get the same tracking. Make sure the web interface works with screen readers and large text.

The guest's phone is already the interface. The opportunity for operators is to make what happens after the tap as reliable as the tap itself.

Sources

Oracle Hospitality & Skift, "Hospitality in 2025" consumer research (June 2022)
Hotel Tech Report, The State of Hotel Guest Technology Report 2025 (survey of ~400 recent hotel guests); chatbot finding also reported by Hotel Dive
J.D. Power, 2017 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study
American Hotel & Lodging Association, "65% of surveyed hotels report staffing shortages" (February 2025)

About the author

Kirti Dixit Ojha is Co-Founder of Digital Room Service, a Bengaluru-based company building browser-based guest-service software for hotels. Kirti works with hotel teams on how in-room dining and service requests are captured, routed and fulfilled after check-in, and writes about hospitality operations, guest experience and practical technology adoption.

Images: courtesy of Kirti Dixit Ojha