Harbour & Pine runs five boutique hotels along Devon's South West coast, each with its own spa, restaurant, and front-of-house operation. It's a business built on a promise: that a guest returning to any property in the collection will find the same warmth, the same seamlessness, the same sense that everything is handled. Niamh Doyle, the group's Operations Director, describes her job as protecting that consistency across all five. What she discovered was that the system underpinning it was working against her.
When every department peaks at once
The structural problem at Harbour & Pine was not a shortage of staff. It was a shortage of coordination. On any busy Saturday, housekeeping, front of house, the restaurant, and the spa all hit their peak simultaneously, each managed by a department head who had built their rota in isolation, weeks in advance, without sight of what the others were planning or what the actual occupancy picture looked like.
The consequences landed on guests. Rooms weren't ready at check-in. Guests waited in reception while, fifty feet away, a fully staffed restaurant sat quiet at lunchtime. The department heads weren't making bad decisions; they were making decisions without the information they needed.
"The departmental silos were invisible to us internally, but the consequences were extremely visible to the guest. A guest whose room wasn't ready doesn't think the housekeeping department was understaffed. They think Harbour & Pine let them down."
One particular Saturday crystallised it. A large checkout, a large check-in, and a wedding in the evening had converged on the same day at one property. Housekeeping was overwhelmed. The restaurant team was standing around. The duty manager was apologising in reception and handing out drinks. It wasn't a staffing crisis; it was a planning crisis, entirely caused by five departments scheduling in their own separate worlds.
The reactive fix, calling in agency staff and authorising overtime, was expensive and unsustainable. But the deeper cost was the one harder to measure: inconsistency. A guest who has a flawless stay at one property and a ragged one at another doesn't separate the experiences. They conclude that Harbour & Pine is unreliable. In a business where repeat guests are the foundation, that conclusion is existential.
Building one plan for the whole property
Northpeak Crew changed the fundamental unit of planning. Instead of each department building its own rota against its own assumptions, the platform schedules every department off the same occupancy data - housekeeping against actual arrivals and departures, the restaurant against covers, the spa against treatment bookings. For the first time, a general manager could look at a Saturday and see the entire property as a single picture.
That visibility changed what was possible. If a department looked light ahead of a busy patch, a manager could move a trained person across before the imbalance became a problem at the front desk. The system also holds cross-training records, so it surfaces not just that a gap exists, but who specifically has the skills to fill it.
"Before, even when a manager sensed an imbalance, they often didn't know off the top of their head who could safely cover where. Now that knowledge is in the system and it surfaces the option for them."
Niamh is candid about one decision she'd revisit: the spa was brought into the platform later than the other departments. Once it was included, the value became immediately clear - spa demand tracks closely with in-house guests and the packages they've booked, making it a natural fit for occupancy-based scheduling. Her advice to anyone implementing a similar approach is to bring every department in from the start, because the benefit comes from all of them operating off the same plan, not most of them.
A group that now works like one
Northpeak Pulse, extended the same logic across all five properties. Niamh can now see the staffing picture for the whole group at once, which unlocked something that hadn't been possible before: a genuine group staff bank.
When one hotel faces a big wedding weekend and another has a quieter patch, staff who are willing to travel can move between properties rather than both hotels independently calling agencies. Familiar faces replace strangers. Culture travels with the people. And the cost of reactive cover falls.
Agency and overtime combined are down by around a third - a significant figure in a business operating on hospitality margins. Check-in complaints related to rooms not being ready have all but disappeared. And something harder to quantify but equally real has shifted: the general managers have their evenings back.
"An experienced manager told me she used to spend Friday afternoons dreading the weekend, mentally war-gaming where it would go wrong. Now she walks the floor on a Saturday and it just flows. A relaxed, present general manager is part of the product."
In a sector where burnout drives good people out of the industry, that change in working life is not a soft benefit. It's part of how Harbour & Pine retains the people who carry the standard.
What the numbers don't fully capture
The properties now feel, in Niamh's words, like one group rather than five hotels that happen to share a name. Shared staffing has built shared culture; people who move between properties know colleagues elsewhere and carry consistent practices with them. Niamh can see when one hotel is consistently running smoother than the others and facilitate knowledge-sharing across the group. The strongest properties are lifting the rest.
For other hospitality groups weighing a similar move, Niamh's message is direct: stop scheduling department by department. Guests don't experience departments. They experience a stay, all at once, as one thing. The problems that look like staffing problems are often planning problems, and planning problems have planning solutions.
The category of service failures that Harbour & Pine had quietly accepted as the cost of doing business in hospitality turned out not to be inevitable at all. They were the product of building five separate plans where one connected plan was needed.