TrayAway, a New Orleans-based technology company, has deployed its room-service tray-retrieval devices in more than 300,000 hotel rooms and plans to reach 1 million rooms over the next 18 months, according to co-founder and CEO Josh Johnston.

The product attacks a narrow but persistent labor problem. When room-service trays sit in hallways for hours, staff must track them down manually, wasting labor hours and exposing the property to guest complaints. A tray with half-eaten food left outside a door can generate a negative online review, Johnston said, which carries direct career consequences for operators.

"Someone outside the industry might say, 'Who cares? Do any of these problems really matter?'" Johnston said. "But for the people that run these operations — the GMs, the hotel managers, the director — their careers literally prosper and perish based on customer feedback."

How the system works

The hardware is deliberately simple. When a kitchen sends up a room-service order, a staff member attaches a 2.5-inch-by-2.5-inch tracking device to the tray. Once the guest finishes eating, a single button press sends an alert over the hotel's Wi-Fi network telling staff the tray is ready for pickup. The guest can leave the tray in the room or place it outside the door.

"Even if someone does just place it in the hall because they don't want to be bothered, they're willing to click the button," Johnston said. Once staff receives the notification, the tray is "only going to sit in the hall for a few minutes rather than hours."

When the tray returns to the kitchen, a staff member marks the room number as completed through the TrayAway Pro app or a desktop computer.

The system replaces the manual process of staff walking floors to locate abandoned trays. Johnston said the devices improve staff efficiency, reduce labor expenses and support hotel cleanliness.

Standalone by design

TrayAway does not integrate with other hotel systems. Most owners prefer an "easy, standalone solution," Johnston said, and the separation carries security benefits: the devices store no credit card numbers or other proprietary guest data, which simplifies adoption from an IT perspective.

The company's growth strategy leans on remote implementation. More than 90% of TrayAway's deployments across customers in more than 50 counties have been administered remotely, Johnston said, which cuts installation costs for hotels and lets the company scale without on-site teams.

TrayAway's customer base skews toward luxury: four- and five-star properties form the company's "sweet spot," alongside a smaller group of full-service hotels that operate in-room dining.

From Four Seasons floors to a subscription business

Johnston developed the concept while working in food and beverage operations at multiple Four Seasons hotels, where unattended trays stood out as "one of those really unusual pain points" without a clear fix.

"[Managers] would get upset about it, and they would get frustrated, and kind of bark down to the person below them, but they never had a solution or suggestion on what to do," he said.

He built the first prototype as a weekend project before founding the company. The first device went live in 2018 at the Fairmont hotel in Austin, Texas, which still subscribes to the service today.

TrayAway sells on a subscription model that includes onboarding, training and staff support, at a cost Johnston described as "several hundred dollars per month." Rather than competing with POS and PMS providers, the company positions itself in the "white space of the market," targeting operational problems on the "outskirts of the property."

Next product: the mini bar

Johnston said TrayAway plans to launch a new product in the coming years, tentatively called "Mini Bar Pro," aimed at reinventing the hotel mini bar — which he called a "necessary evil" — by making it easier for hotels to track inventory and charge guests accurately.

"We're creating unique solutions designed specifically for very painful problems, but doing it in a unique way of hardware plus software, which is fun, but it also is challenging," Johnston said.

With 1 million rooms in its 18-month sights and a second hardware product in development, TrayAway is betting that hotel operators will keep paying monthly subscriptions to solve the operational problems larger tech vendors have ignored.