How to build a more resilient hospitality procurement strategy

Picture this: it’s a packed weekend in Napa Valley. A boutique resort runs out of biodegradable cutlery right before dinner service, while the property next door seamlessly restocks from a local supplier and delights guests with zero disruption. 

What made the difference? Procurement.

As hospitality leaders look toward the future, procurement is no longer just about keeping costs low or shelves stocked. Instead, it’s become a strategic lever that directly influences guest experience, brand perception, and operational resilience. From navigating tighter margins to meeting evolving guest expectations around sustainability and personalization, procurement has stepped into the spotlight.

To give guests memories that last a lifetime and enhance the employee experience along the way, organizations in the travel and hospitality industry need to change how they source, negotiate, and manage vendor relationships. Read on for actionable strategies to help you future-proof your procurement, no matter your property’s size or the scope of your operations.

Strategic procurement in hospitality

Procurement used to just be about keeping shelves stocked and creating cost savings. Now, it’s a direct line to guest satisfaction, brand consistency, and operational control. Hotels, restaurants, resorts, and multi-location operators all rely on procurement to stay competitive.

Across every location, shift, and touchpoint, smart purchasing choices shape guests’ experiences. When sourcing is efficient and aligned, teams avoid costly delays, meet evolving expectations, and free up time for high-impact work. Because of this, a well-oiled procurement process can mean the difference between a five-star review and a frustrated customer.

These high stakes are why hospitality leaders no longer see procurement as just background support. Instead, they treat it as a business driver that influences everything from cost structure to reputation. When procurement functions lead with strategy, hospitality businesses gain the visibility and flexibility they need to adapt and scale faster.

2025 hospitality procurement trends

Procurement leaders in hospitality face a shifting landscape due to rising guest expectations, regulatory pressure, and digital transformation. Here's what’s coming into sharper focus as 2026 approaches:

Sustainable sourcing mandates

Sustainability for hospitality is quickly moving beyond guest preferences—it’s now becoming a procurement requirement. Public and private organizations alike are under growing pressure to align with responsible purchasing and corporate social responsibility goals, particularly when sourcing food, amenities, and supplies.

But this shift isn’t just happening in boardrooms. According to Booking.com’s 2025 Sustainable Travel Report, more than half of travelers are keeping tourism’s impact on the environment top of mind. That number keeps climbing as climate concerns grow and eco-conscious travel becomes the norm.

Today’s hospitality teams need procurement processes and tools that support this shift without driving up costs or complexity. That’s why Amazon Business tools that help customers with responsible purchasing are imperative. Tools like Amazon Business Analytics help organizations track spending across products with sustainability certifications and offers visibility that maintains compliance without slowing down operations.

Digital transformation and procurement automation

The days of spreadsheets and manual tracking are fading fast. In their place, digital tools are helping hospitality organizations make smarter, faster purchasing decisions at scale. In particular, hospitality procurement data allows teams to flag spending trends, conduct precise forecasting, prevent waste, and improve budgeting accuracy across locations.

Automation also reduces human error and frees up time for strategic work. With customizable workflows and real-time analytics, teams can gain tighter control over inventory, gain-to-spend ratios, and contract performance. 

Overall, when procurement goes digital, it makes cross-functional alignment easier, from finance to operations to guest services.

Ongoing supply chain volatility

Supply chains have always been a complex challenge for hospitality operators, but the past few years have made just how fragile they can be painfully clear. From delayed shipments to fluctuating prices and product shortages, procurement teams now operate in a shifting service landscape that requires both vigilance and flexibility.

Rather than trying to predict every supply chain disruption, smart organizations should build resilience into their procurement strategies. That might mean diversifying suppliers, prioritizing flexible contracts, or investing in tools that flag fulfillment issues before they reach guests. After all, visibility and communication are the new must-haves in hospitality.

Procurement agility across distributed properties

As more hospitality organizations scale across regions and continents, they face the challenge of balancing consistency with rigidity. Though each property has its own community and customer needs, procurement teams still need a unified strategy that aligns brand standards and budget targets.

That’s where a tool like Guided Buying, a Business Prime feature, comes in handy. It helps procurement administrators highlight preferred products and suppliers for their hospitality organization and streamline compliance across locations. At the same time, it enables local buyers to support small, diverse businesses in their communities. Overall, this helps teams balance central control with local impact.

By leaning into tools that support agility, hospitality leaders can empower their teams to source smarter, adapt faster, and transform the guest experience, no matter the ZIP code.

4 common hospitality procurement challenges

Hospitality procurement teams must juggle speed, scale, and service quality, often with fragmented systems and limited visibility. Here are four procurement challenges that can get in their way:

• Supply chain fragmentation across properties: Coordinating orders and vendor relationships across multiple locations can create costly delays and inconsistencies.

• Tail spend: Untracked, one-off purchases add up fast and make budgeting a guessing game without the right controls.

• A lack of vendor performance visibility: Without centralized reporting, it’s hard to compare suppliers or flag issues before they affect guests’ experience.

• Food safety and hygiene compliance: Staying current with local regulations is a must. To help with this, Amazon Business’ tools for compliance management helps teams track certifications and ensure that products meet organizational standards.

To start solving these challenges, it helps to understand what a modern hospitality procurement process should actually look like.

Hospitality procurement process explained

Transforming hotel procurement starts with getting the fundamentals right. From identifying needs to analyzing spend, each step shapes both guests’ experiences and operational efficiency. 

Here’s what a streamlined, modern procurement process should look like:

Step 1: Identify procurement needs

Hospitality procurement starts by gathering input across departments—housekeeping, food and beverage, facilities, and beyond. Each team has its own daily rhythms, urgent requests, and seasonal patterns, which can lead to inconsistent needs assessments or duplicate ordering.

Occupancy rates, upcoming events, and regional seasonality all affect what you need and when. Without a unified approach, teams risk overbuying, under-ordering, or relying on last-minute fixes.

Procurement leaders can solve these issues by aligning teams through shared catalogs, usage history, and coordinated purchase requests. Smart business buying solutions can help standardize demand through custom hosted catalogs, multi-user accounts, and access to essential hospitality supplies, which are all organizable and scalable across locations.

Step 2: Evaluate and select vendors

Once your needs are clear, the next step is vendor evaluation. 

Hospitality teams must weigh multiple factors when deciding between vendors: delivery speed, food safety certifications, eco-labels, sustainability claims, and brand consistency across locations, in addition to pricing. But manually tracking all these vendor qualities takes time. Additionally, vetting vendors for every new product or property can slow down the process—or worse, lead to missed compliance requirements.

To streamline sourcing, automate buying policies that help you prefer diverse suppliers and sustainable certification, making it easier than ever to prioritize products and vendors that meet organizational standards. Its Guided Buying feature also allows administrators to highlight pre-approved vendors and steer buyers toward preferred products to ensure consistency without micromanagement.

Step 3: Track and optimize purchases

In many hospitality operations, purchases happen across locations, teams, and systems. This decentralized approach creates blind spots. Common symptoms include off-contract buying, inconsistent approvals, and missed savings on high-volume items, like linens or pantry staples.

Procurement teams can gain greater control over this process by centralizing their workflows and tightening oversight. Simplify your purchasing processes with approval workflows, recurring delivery options, and quantity discounts. Additionally, robust tools for streamlined purchasing consolidate buying power, reduce tail spend, and help teams stick to contracts and budgets.

Step 4: Coordinate receiving, inventory, and delivery

Getting products where they need to go on time—and in the right quantity—is no small task. Oftentimes, hospitality teams deal with staggered deliveries, substitutions, limited storage, and overlapping shipments when coordinating product inventory. And managing this across multiple properties adds even more complexity.

As a result, visibility into what you ordered versus what actually arrived is essential, especially for back-of-house teams, since miscounts or missing items can delay service or increase waste.

For greater support via logistics coordination, select a partner that can deliver on your terms, with multi-location delivery, palletized shipping, and consolidated invoicing. These features help teams stay organized and reduce the back-and-forth that often slows down receiving and restocking.

Step 5: Set up post-purchase reporting

Once you make purchases, the final step is leveraging analytics to learn from them. 

Hospitality procurement teams often struggle to analyze spend across vendors, locations, and categories. Meanwhile, siloed systems, manual reporting, and limited data visibility all hold back optimization. But if you achieve a state where you have insights to act on, you can understand how spend aligns with budgets, policy compliance, and responsible purchasing goals.

Amazon Business Analytics and Spend Visibility (a Business Prime exclusive) dashboards provide this real-time reporting across spend types, including tax-exempt purchases and category-level trends. Its spend insights toolset also supports smarter decision-making and helps teams compare suppliers, track compliance, and fine-tune procurement strategies across every corner of their operation.

5 hospitality procurement best practices

The following five best practices can guide you as you streamline purchasing, improve visibility, and transform guest experiences while controlling costs:

1. Enforce brand and vendor standards: Align buyers with your organization's strategic sourcing goals by surfacing high-quality products and preferred suppliers. To help with this, Guided Buying tools support compliance without slowing down purchasing.

2. Use bulk and recurring ordering for predictable inventory: Streamline inventory management for commonly used items like toiletries, linens, and pantry goods. Leveraging bulk buying and recurring delivery features can help by reducing stockouts and allowing you to plan more effectively.

3. Consolidate vendors to improve delivery reliability and reduce costs: Strengthen supplier relationships and simplify operations by reducing vendor sprawl. After all, having fewer partnerships and more consistent service can lead to better pricing and more dependable delivery windows.

4. Apply automation tools to reduce manual tracking and reporting: Cut down on time-consuming manual processes by introducing approval workflows, analytics dashboards, and spend tracking. These tools increase accuracy and free up teams to focus on higher-value work.

5. Prioritize sustainability in procurement decisions: Contribute to more sustainable practices through responsible purchasing and preferring certified sustainable products. Consumers do pay attention to companies that aim for sustainability, after all. According to Deloitte’s consumer survey, 68% of people think climate change is an emergency—so now more than ever, they’re opting for brands that align with their own sustainability goals.

By putting these five practices into play, procurement teams can move from reactive problem-solving to proactive impact.

Evolve hospitality procurement into a strategic advantage

Procurement leaders in the hotel industry have the power to drive more than just savings. With the right tools and processes, they can also create more resilient operations, deepen their supplier relationships, and deliver experiences that guests remember.

To move forward, consider how a more data-driven approach can support both your day-to-day operations and long-term goals. For instance, tools that offer better visibility and reduce manual work free up teams to focus on service. Forming strong relationships with suppliers also creates space for more consistency, reliability, and cost control. Together, these changes protect your bottom line and position your organization to grow, no matter the economic climate.

That’s where smart business buying comes into play. Its hospitality solutions can help you simplify procurement across locations, stay agile in a fast-paced environment—and better serve your guests as a result. 

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