When Elsa Roldan finishes vacuuming and emptying the trash in a hotel room on the Las Vegas Strip, the 64-year-old housekeeper removes her latex gloves and taps a chili pepper icon on her cellphone. She logs her progress on the app and reviews which room to clean next.

She used to have near complete control of the order of the rooms she cleaned, checking them off on a clipboard as she worked her way down long hallways. That changed with the app, which provided a list of where she and her bulky cart — loaded with towels, toilet paper, and glasses — should navigate to next.

“You have a device telling you, ‘move here, move there,’ like if you were a robot,” she said. 

Artificial intelligence chatbots have yet to replace housekeepers’ labor-intensive work of tucking tight hospital corners on a king-size bed and polishing bathtubs to perfection. But automation is creeping into the lives of hospitality employees, as industry leaders invest in workforce management software that pledges to increase profitability, reduce labor costs, and track worker productivity.

For the app HotSOS Housekeeping, this means using real-time data to speed room turnover: Guest checkouts, requests for early check-in, and VIP status data are fed into an algorithm that ranks which rooms to clean. But union leaders report that thousands of unionized hotel workers — from San Francisco to Minneapolis to New York — have pushed back against the hospitality industry’s embrace of algorithmic managers. 

Proof News spoke to one housekeeper who is unfazed by HotSOS Housekeeping. But two others told us it felt intrusive, arguing it eats away at their professional autonomy and makes a strenuous job more stressful. They balk at the app’s ability to track their every move, clocking how long it takes to clean each room. 

Roldan’s hotel started using the software in 2019. Instead of driving efficiency, the app sent Roldan zigzagging around the massive hotel, pushing her heavy cart onto crowded elevators, crisscrossing multiple floors to chase checkouts. She said she would sometimes spend 20 minutes traveling through the hotel, wasting precious time she might otherwise use for a bathroom break or to down a protein shake for lunch.

The Las Vegas hospitality union declined to name Roldan's employer, citing their collective bargaining agreements. Proof is not naming the employer of other workers in this story because they fear doing so could jeopardize their jobs. 

Amadeus, which did not respond to Proof’s request for comment, was founded by four European airline partners — Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, and SAS — nearly 40 years ago to create what it describes as a standard system for connecting airlines with travel agencies. The company initially focused on travel and technology. Seeking to expand into the hotel IT sector, Amadeus in 2014 acquired Newmarket International, maker of HotSOS.

More than 70% of global hotel brands in 70 countries relied on the company's suite of HotSOS offerings, including HotSOS Housekeeping, according to a 2021 promotional video. Remington Hospitality, which manages hotels nationwide including Hilton, Marriott, and Westin properties, uses HotSOS, according to a 2024 press release, and Marriott has approved HotSOS Housekeeping for use on its properties, Amadeus says on its website. 

Last fall, the president of the local union representing thousands of hospitality workers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island hotel workers testified before a US Senate committee about the "deluge of AI-based technologies” hitting the industry. 

“When given free rein,” Carlos Aramayo said, “these programs ‘manage’ a housekeeper’s day in ways that no human would.” 

SKIPPING BREAKS FOR CREDITS

Luz Nuñez started using the app several years ago at a Palm Springs-area resort with lush golf courses, glittering pools, and a luxury spa. She has found the app forces a relentless hunt to reach her daily quota.

Under the HotSOS Housekeeping system, Nuñez said she is required to earn 420 “credits” daily, with the credits roughly translating to the number of minutes housekeepers should be spending in each room. Workers who regularly miss their daily quota may face questioning from their managers, she said.

In the past, if Nuñez encountered a “do not disturb” sign on a doorknob, she could use that extra time in her next room, swishing a feather duster behind headboards and high above bathroom mirrors. Now, Nuñez logs the guest’s preference on the app and another room number appears in her queue, pushing her to chase credits and leaving no time for detailed work.

As Nuñez describes it, this quota system hardly captures the unpredictability of hotel guests. It fails to account for when kids have eaten or peed in bed or when guests attending the nearby Coachella music festival leave the carpets and furniture dusted with glitter, turning what should have been quick stayover cleanings into longer, messier ordeals.

“They only count credits,” she said in Spanish. “The phone doesn’t know how dirty the room is.”

California law requires employers to provide a 10-minute break for every four hours worked, and she used to take hers regularly. But under the HotSOS system, she dutifully logs a break but keeps working, fearing she won’t reach her quota by the end of the shift.

Instead of taking a break, Nuñez said she just tries to take it a little easier. “I don’t sit down or anything, but I work a little slower.”

Brian Justie, a senior research analyst at the UCLA Labor Center, said tech companies frequently push workplace technologies that claim to streamline but in reality do the opposite. Apps in many cases speed up work, raise production quotas, and make jobs “a little bit worse,” he said, while workers themselves rarely see higher wages as a result.

“The on-the-ground experience of AI in the workplace,” he said, “looks a lot more like, ‘wow, this app just showed up, and I’m now being forced to use it. Management is all of a sudden evaluating me based on my fidelity with the app’s recommendations.’”

In a promotional video, Amadeus claims HotSOS Housekeeping increased housekeeper productivity “by double digits.” Hotels using the software save an average of $166 per room per year, the company claims, “based on increased number of rooms cleaned, incidents prevented and paper printing eliminated.” 

Another housekeeper who spoke with Proof News shrugged off complaints about the app. Flores, who only provided her last name, traded minimum-wage work harvesting crops in the sun-baked fields of Southern California for the better-paying housekeeping job at the Palm Springs-area resort.

She said she will rush to a room if the app commands it. Otherwise, she said, she finds it handy to have a list of her daily assignments, and the ability to communicate with her supervisor at the touch of a button.

“It’s useful,” she said in Spanish. “If I need a bedsheet, I just put that in the app.”

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

In 2019, the union representing some 60,000 hotel workers in Las Vegas and Reno brought concerns about the HotSOS app to the biggest employers on the Strip, kicking off a three-year fight to reclaim worker autonomy.

Housekeepers represented by the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 held about a dozen meetings with hotel management, packing hotel meeting rooms and union headquarters to share their experiences using the app, union officials recalled.

“We were able to show the company that you’ve got guest room attendants crisscrossing all over the hotel and you’re losing efficiency,” said Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer.

Pappageorge declined to name the hotels the union negotiated with, but newsletters posted on the union’s website refer to a multiyear fight with MGM Resorts over its use of HotSOS.

The union reached agreements with major Strip employers in late 2022. The employers agreed to a software feature that mostly keeps workers near their stations, eliminating treks across hotels, union officials said. Housekeepers now have the freedom to sequence their cleaning of assigned rooms and rely on their own judgment: If they see a vacant room that’s not on their digital list, Roldan said, they can clean it.

“Nobody else but us knows how to manage and handle our time,” Roldan said.

The Culinary Union has since reached agreements over HotSOS with the city’s casino resorts where it has members, which includes most resorts on the Las Vegas Strip and in downtown Las Vegas. 

Since then, hotel worker unions in other cities have “used the Vegas language as a template to start the bargaining,” said Ben Begleiter, a research director for UNITE HERE, the national hotel workers union.

Labor advocates warn that reliance on union negotiations has its drawbacks. In the absence of federal legislation on AI in the workplace, unions are using bargaining to establish basic protections, said Michelle Miller, director of innovation at the Center for Labor & A Just Economy at Harvard Law School. But with the country’s union membership rate hovering at 10%, the majority of workers remain vulnerable.

“It’s absolutely a patchwork of protection,” Miller said, “and I think it’s a massive problem.”

Today, Roldan is grateful to have regained some autonomy from HotSOS Housekeeping. But she remains suspicious of her robot boss. While her union has negotiated that the app’s GPS capabilities be turned off, it still clocks how long she takes to clean one room and travel to the next.

“Maybe for management everything is better,” she said, “but we don’t like to be monitored.”