TrayAway's wireless tray-retrieval devices now operate in more than 300,000 hotel rooms, with the New Orleans-based company planning to reach 1 million rooms over the next 18 months, according to co-founder and CEO Josh Johnston.

The technology addresses one of the least glamorous line items in hotel operations: room-service trays that sit in hallways, sometimes for hours, while staff hunt them down manually. TrayAway replaces that guesswork with a 2.5-inch-by-2.5-inch Wi-Fi-enabled tracker. The kitchen places the device on the tray at order fulfillment. When the guest finishes eating, one button press sends an alert over the hotel's Wi-Fi network telling staff exactly which tray is ready for pickup — whether the guest leaves it inside the room or 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 receive the alert, 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 manual tray-hunting rounds that consume staff time, and Johnston frames the payoff in both labor and reputation terms. The devices cut staff inefficiency and labor expenses while protecting the property's cleanliness standards, he said. An abandoned tray of half-eaten food invites a negative online review, and reviews move careers.

"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."

Origins in F&B operations

Johnston developed the concept while working in food and beverage operations at multiple Four Seasons hotels, where unattended trays were what he called "one of those really unusual pain points" with no 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 device as a weekend project before founding the company. The Fairmont in Austin, Texas, deployed the first TrayAway tracker in 2018 and remains a subscriber today.

The company's customer base skews toward luxury: four- and five-star properties plus a smaller number of full-service hotels with in-room dining. Deployment is remote-friendly — more than 90% of TrayAway's customers across more than 50 countries have been onboarded remotely, which lowers implementation costs for properties and lets the company scale without field teams.

Pricing and what it replaces

TrayAway sells the product as a subscription running "several hundred dollars per month," a figure that includes onboarding, training and staff support. The system deliberately stays standalone: it does not integrate with the property's PMS or POS, an approach Johnston said hotel owners prefer. That separation also carries a security benefit — the devices store no credit card numbers or other proprietary guest data, which simplifies IT review.

Positioning matters to the company's strategy. While POS and PMS vendors compete in crowded categories, TrayAway works what Johnston calls the "white space of the market" — problems on the "outskirts of the property" that larger technology providers have not addressed.

The next target is the minibar, which Johnston describes as a "necessary evil." A forthcoming product, tentatively named "Mini Bar Pro," aims to reinvent hotel minibars by making inventory tracking and guest charges more accurate. No launch date is set beyond a coming-years window.

"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.

If the company hits its 1-million-room target within 18 months, tray retrieval will move from an overlooked operational annoyance to a measured, subscription-funded workflow across a substantial share of the world's full-service room stock — with the minibar, another chronic margin leak, queued as the next candidate for the same hardware-plus-software treatment.