I recently had the opportunity to learn more about Butler Hospitality during a conversation with founder Tim Gjonbalic. In 2016 Gjonbalic decided, after finding hotel room service lacking and a discouraging burden to guests, to take over the process. Butler Hospitality reinvented the age-old hotel amenity of room service by using cloud kitchens to bring better-quality, more affordable meals to New York City-area hotels.

Butler Hospitality menus are found in hotel rooms as the room service menu; guests can call, text or go online to place an order, delivered to their hotel room door in under 30 minutes. The charges appear directly on the guest’s hotel folio, but they’ve stripped the process of added fees, room service minimums and forced gratuities (there is an option to add a gratuity if you wish). And unlike GrubHub or Seamless, Butler Hospitality’s contracts with the hotels allow delivery directly to a guestroom door.

There’s an executive chef on staff. More than 30 items are offered on the menus, and they change with the seasons. Any hotel using Butler Hospitality in New York City will offer the same quality, menu and ease regardless of its star rating.

Plus, there’s nothing worse than an empty room service tray in your room or the hallway, not to mention the hassle of calling to have it removed. Butler eliminates all of that — all food is packaged in disposable packaging for easy clean-up and added privacy.

Removing room service from within its walls also allows hotels to focus their attentions on enhancing other aspects of the guest’s stay.

Butler Hospitality also connects with the guest beyond the one room service order. You’ll be welcomed with a pre-arrival email, and they learn about guest preferences to tailor the experience to them. Do you like to have a Coke with your dinner, but you forgot to add it? Butler might suggest that beverage option before check-out or connect through other touch points to enhance your experience.

While currently only available in New York City, Butler Hospitality is expanding both within the Big Apple and looking to other cities in 2020.

— Kim Krol, editor in chief