The Hidden Profit Center Hotels Have Been Ignoring

For decades, hotel finance teams have looked at payments through two very different lenses. Guest payments represent the most obvious stream of revenue to the business, so they receive executive attention, continuous technology investment and constant optimization. Supplier payments are typically viewed simply as operating expenses; an administrative obligation comprised of money leaving the business and deducted from the bottom line.

That distinction is increasingly inaccurate and outdated, and the timing of the shift matters. U.S. hotel margins are compressing for a third consecutive year. CBRE’s Trends in the Hotel Industry data shows gross operating profit margins slipping from 35.1% in 2024 to 34.8% in 2025, while EBITDA margins fell from 23.3% to 22.8%, and the firm’s Hotel Horizons forecast projects RevPAR growth of just 1.2% in 2026 and 1.7% in 2027. With top-line growth close to flat and expense growth running ahead of it, every remaining lever matters, and labor, which CBRE research puts at roughly half of what it costs to operate a hotel, has already been managed close to the bone.

Supplier payments are among the largest levers most hotels have never pulled. Managed intelligently, they can improve cash flow, reduce operating costs, strengthen operational controls and create a whole new source of financial value. In other words, one of hospitality’s most overlooked profit centers may already be moving through the Accounts Payable department at hundreds of thousands of properties worldwide.

The blind spot in hotel payments

The hospitality industry has traditionally invested heavily in making it easier for guests to pay. Booking engines, property management systems, payment gateways and integrated technology partner relationships have all evolved around payment acceptance. This is understandable, since guest payment and the resulting revenue is visible, immediate and central to profitability, as well as to the hotel experience as a whole.

The outbound side, however, is becoming equally consequential. Mastercard puts the global commercial payments opportunity at roughly $80 trillion and estimates that some $77 trillion of that total still does not move on card, which is a fair description of how most businesses, hotels very much included, pay their suppliers today. Longer-range projections point in the same direction. Juniper Research expects global B2B payment value to reach approximately $124 trillion by 2028, roughly four times the value of payments from consumers to businesses.

Yet every hotel also supports a substantial outbound payment economy. Properties and management companies pay for a multitude of products and services, including food and beverage suppliers, linen providers, maintenance contractors, utilities, technology vendors, distributors and many other partners. Across a hotel property or an entire portfolio, those transactions represent significant and recurring spend.

Too often, the process remains fragmented. An approved invoice may still trigger a manual handoff, a check run, a bank file upload or a payment action disconnected from the accounting workflow. Digital invoice approval frequently leads into a manual payment process. That gap matters because approval represents only one stage of Accounts Payable. Payment execution determines how, when and through which rail a hotel’s money moves, and those choices carry significant economic consequences that very few hotels actively manage.

Profitability is broader than revenue

The term “profit center” requires some context. Each payment carries its own economics, and the broader payment strategy can make a measurable contribution to the business. The most obvious opportunity is payment economics. Commercial payment methods can generate rebates or other shared financial benefits on qualifying spend. The result depends on supplier acceptance, payment type, program structure and transaction mix, so it should never be reduced to a blanket promise. At hotel scale, routing eligible payments through the right methods can convert existing spend into incremental value, and the property creates that value from activity already underway.

The second opportunity is working capital. A strategic payment program gives finance teams more control over timing, while still paying suppliers according to agreed-upon terms. That can keep cash available longer, create more predictable outflows and reduce ad hoc payment decisions. For an industry shaped by seasonality, renovations and uneven demand, the greater liquidity that creates can be substantial.

The third opportunity for hotels lies hidden in the optimization of operating efficiency. Payment processes built around checks, spreadsheets and disconnected bank portals consume staff time and invite potential for human error and revision. Automation can reduce manual touchpoints, exception handling and reconciliation effort. A 2025 American Express survey of 1,000 U.S. business decision-makers found that only 17% had fully automated their payment processes, while 15% had automated none of them at all. The savings from automation directly affect the cost to process every invoice and the profitability of the operation.

Suppliers experience much the same friction, which undercuts the objection that hotel finance teams tend to raise first. In a global Mastercard survey, 93% of B2B suppliers said digitizing their payment processes is a top priority for the business, while two-thirds acknowledged that they regularly fall short of what their buyers expect. Manual processing and reconciliation ranked at the top of the obstacles, cited by 42% of U.S. suppliers as a barrier to accepting card payments. Vendor resistance, on this evidence, tends to reflect outdated plumbing on both sides of the transaction rather than any settled preference for paper.

Finally, modern payment strategies improve visibility and control. Centralized data can show what was paid, when, by whom and through which method. Payment credentials designed for a specific purpose and clear authorization rules can reduce exposure. Better controls help prevent leakage, duplicate activity and fraud, while making audits and reconciliation less painful, a benefit that compounds across a multi-property portfolio where ownership groups and asset managers often wait for the month-end package before they see anything at all.

The technology problem is also an organizational problem

If the opportunity is so compelling, why has hospitality been slow to pursue it? System fragmentation is one of the key reasons that hotels have not adopted a more efficient and profitable payment strategy. Hotel finance often spans property teams, management companies, ownership groups, accounting platforms, banks and suppliers. No single system governs the entire journey, so technology investments tend to stop at invoice approval, leaving execution outside the core workflow.

Another barrier to transformation is the way some organizations define Accounts Payable. When AP is measured primarily on invoice processing and timely supplier payment, there is little incentive to optimize payment mix, working capital contribution or financial return. Accuracy and timeliness remain essential, but a function carrying strategic responsibility should be expected to contribute a good deal more than either.

Hotel CFOs should evaluate supplier payments with the same discipline applied to guest payments. What percentage of spend is addressable through each payment method? Where are manual processes adding cost, and what does it actually cost to move a single invoice from receipt to settled payment? How much visibility exists across properties in real time, as opposed to a month-end close? Are suppliers being segmented according to acceptance, urgency and economics? Which performance measures belong on an executive dashboard? Answering those questions requires coordination among finance, treasury, procurement, technology and operational leadership, and a team that cannot answer them readily has already identified its own starting point.

A better way to think about the future

The strongest payment strategy accommodates several rails. Checks, ACH, commercial cards and other methods will coexist for years to come. The goal is intelligent orchestration: selecting the right method based on supplier relationships, security, cost, speed, cash flow and economic return. That requires connected systems, so invoice approval, accounting data and payment execution should operate as one financial workflow rather than three loosely related ones. As hospitality technology becomes more integrated, payment capabilities should become part of the industry’s core infrastructure.

In order to grow and compete in an evolving global market, today’s hoteliers need practical ways to protect their margins and make existing revenue work harder. Supplier payments offer exactly that opportunity. The money is already moving, and hotels now have an opportunity to manage that movement so it creates a strategic financial asset that contributes to the bottom line, rather than depleting it.

Five questions for your AP team this quarter

1. What percentage of our total supplier spend is addressable through each payment method today, and what would it take to move the next tranche?

2. Where are manual processes adding cost, and what does it actually cost us to move one invoice from receipt to settled payment?

3. How much visibility do we have across properties in real time, as opposed to at month-end close?

4. Are our suppliers segmented according to acceptance, urgency and payment economics, or are they all paid the same way out of habit?

5. Which of these performance measures belong on the executive dashboard, reported at the same cadence as revenue?

A finance team that cannot answer these readily has identified its own starting point.

Sources

1. Mastercard on the scale of the commercial payments opportunity, approximately $80 trillion, of which roughly $77 trillion does not go on card today. Raj Seshadri, chief commercial payments officer, Mastercard, in FinTech Magazine: fintechmagazine.com/articles/mastercard-transforms-b2b-payments-with-virtual-cards. Corroborated by Nick White, senior vice president of commercial acceptance, Mastercard, in PYMNTS: pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2026/mastercard-and-wells-fargo-target-the-friction-slowing-b2b-cards/

2. Global Mastercard supplier survey, on digitization priorities, buyer expectations and barriers to card acceptance: mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/press/2025/july/mastercard-accelerates-b2b-payment-automation-globally-with-acce.html

3. Juniper Research, Global B2B Payments Market 2024 to 2028: juniperresearch.com/press/b2b-payments-to-reach-124-trillion-globally-by-2028

4. American Express, Amex Trendex B2B Payments Study, published 2025: americanexpress.com/en-us/newsroom/articles/amex-for-business/amex-trendex--b2b-payments-study-finds-8-in-10-businesses-plan-t.html

5. CBRE Hotels Research, Trends in the Hotel Industry and Hotel Horizons Q4 2025, as reported in LODGING Magazine: lodgingmagazine.com/profitability-under-pressure-how-2025-u-s-hotel-performance-reshapes-valuation-underwriting/

6. CBRE Hotels Research on labor as a share of hotel operating cost, per Robert Mandelbaum, research director, CBRE Hotels.

About the Author

Brian Dass is the CEO and Founder of OneJourney, a disruptive embedded payments and automation platform purpose-built for hospitality, travel and mobility. As a three-time hospitality tech founder, he has spent over 30 years doing what most founders in this space have only done one side of: both running hotels and building the software they run on to simultaneously maximize both efficiency and profitability.