Self-Service Kiosks Didn't Cut Hospitality at This Hotel. They Freed Up Time For It.

72% of food-and-beverage marketplace orders at Hyatt Regency Savannah are now placed via self-service kiosk instead of staff — and total marketplace sales rose 24% comparing May-June 2026 to the same period a year earlier, before the kiosks existed. Those are the numbers behind Shiji and Rivalry Tech’s new integrated kiosk partnership, which launched its first Americas deployment at the Savannah property in May 2026 and reports a 22% increase in total marketplace orders alongside the sales gain. The framing from both companies runs counter to the usual automation-replaces-staff narrative: Shiji SVP Ryan King says “when technology removes routine transactions, hotel teams have more time for the moments that define great hospitality,” and the property’s Area IT Manager, Rachel Moore-Hunt, credits the kiosks with freeing front-desk and marketplace staff from line management for higher-value guest interactions.

That reframing has a direct precedent from three days earlier in the same channel. HotelKey reported that NSR Hotel Group’s rollout of self-check-in kiosks across 20+ G6-branded properties is saving an estimated 2,000+ labor hours annually per property, with NSR’s president describing the value as “seamless flexibility” from PMS integration rather than headcount reduction. Different transaction (check-in versus F&B ordering), different vendor, same underlying claim: kiosks are being positioned industry-wide as a labor-reallocation tool rather than a labor-cutting one, with hard usage numbers now backing that pitch in two separate deployments within the same week.

The harder question neither case study answers yet is what “freed-up time” actually converts into on a property’s P&L — whether reallocated staff hours show up as measurable service-quality gains, incremental upsell revenue, or simply absorbed slack. Until an operator publishes that follow-on number, the kiosk pitch remains proven on throughput and unproven on the hospitality payoff it’s built around.