How to boost hotel automation with no-code programming

The days of having to spend hundreds of thousands of euros on developers are over — the easiest way to improve hotel automation is to use no-code programming.

But what is it and how can hospitality companies best put it into practice?

No-code automation relies on tools that do all the coding behind the scenes. As far as the user is concerned, they can concentrate on the ultimate outcome, defining what new automation is required and using simple tools to move quickly to a working solution. 

The impact of a no-code approach to product development is immediate, because hospitality operators can improvise and experiment constantly. This means the guest experience evolves more consistently and the brand doesn’t fall behind its competitors. No-code applications are growing all the time — from chatbot and website builders to mobile apps and database tools — using not just drag-and-drop, visual tools but predetermined text instructions and, thanks to AI,  unstructured text prompts too. So how to go about it? 

Four steps to success

Here, we give you our four essential tips for how to get started with no-code automation:

• First of all, don’t automate the things that are working well. Start by identifying where your business is inefficient, prone to errors or too dependent on staff. Once you’ve identified a contender, closely examine the potential impact of automation. How many people are involved in the process currently? How much time does it take? How detrimental to the guest experience is it when things go wrong? How much of the process can truly be automated if some elements require expertise or human input? You’ll also want to consider backlogs, associated revenue, quality of service, response times and staff retention in relation to the most repetitive tasks.

• Not all no-code platforms are born equal. Look for those that are intuitive, have a high level of security, and are easy to navigate and connect to existing systems. Popular apps in the hospitality technology arena, such as Make, Retool, Zapier,, offer a high degree of no-code flexibility for industry-agnostic tools like Hubspot, ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft 365. Their popularity is rooted in how easily hospitality operators are able to begin using them.  

• No-code automation can transform the way you use your Cloud PMS, as well as how it integrates with third-party software. Within the PMS, no-code tools allow you to introduce criteria-based workflows. This means it's easy to customise the guest experience, because you can decide what matters to the guest and what should trigger a specific response, whether that’s an automated message or something more personal delivered by your staff, all tailored to your brand. But no-code also applies to integrations using the open APIs that modern hospitality platforms favour. When building a hotel tech stack, it’s important to ensure that all apps work on open APIs (internally as well as externally), or the potential for no-code customisation and automation will be lost. 

• It’s easy to get started. There are ready-to-use Apaleo and universal templates on platforms like Make and Zapier that will help you build your first workflows, using API calls to pull in your property management data. It’s a great way to learn how no-code automation works before you go into greater depth. Once you’ve created your first no-code automations, it’s time to test if they work before you set them live. Then measure the results to see if you’re getting the impact you set out to achieve. This part of the process will help you better identify what to automate next. 

No-code automation is a relatively recent phenomenon on the hospitality technology landscape. However, many brands are making great strides across operations, guest experience, payments and accounting. No-code is transforming the guest experience with personalised messaging, for example, and improving the level of service provided by chatbots. In operations, no-code is enhancing the guest profile as it becomes a crucial battleground for retention, remarketing and upselling. Other operators are using it to improve the way their scheduled payments are processed while, for others, it is unlocking custom accounting policies, better fraud prevention and OTA invoice consolidation. 

How to ensure success

There are thousands of no-code enthusiasts out there, and you can meet many of them in the Apaleo Community's ‘Automation Club’. There are other resources too — you might want to check out No Code Founders, NoCodeDevs and Indie Hackers. These are great places to get well-informed support and advice. 

Before you get that far, though, remember to sit down with your own team and take them with you on the automation journey. Explain to them what you, as a business, want to get out of it and how it’s going to improve the lives of guests and employees. Their experiences will be essential in identifying many of the best opportunities to automate. And if you need more high-level help, there are specialist consultants out there, such as Wemakefuture, who can provide that extra support. 

Key takeaways

If you’re already using an API-first platform, don’t wait to start experimenting with no-code automation. Your competitors likely already are and it’s one of the key reasons why we’re beginning to see the guest experience evolve more quickly, driven by the short amount of time it takes to devise and build new tools, as well as test and deploy them. 

No-code also lends itself perfectly to challenger brands and smaller businesses, thanks to its low cost and zero barriers to entry. Companies can grow faster without the need for coding expertise. No matter how close you are to exploring no-code automation, don’t become stranded by your PMS. Only true API-first hospitality platforms will allow you to fully exploit the potential of no-code custom tools and workflows, so make sure you have the right foundation at the outset.