UiPath Fusion 2026 - how Travelodge is scaling intelligent automation. It starts with the business owner, not the bot

Travelodge is not a company that tends to do things quietly. With one of the largest budget hotel estates in the UK, operational scale is a given. So when Martin Oswald, Head of Operational Transformation, describes the organization as "not afraid to be first to market with things", he means it as a statement of intent, not a boast.

Oswald has been at Travelodge for seven years, responsible for what he describes as 'strategic, operational digitization and automation programs across the business.' The organization is now two years into its intelligent automation journey with UiPath, and the results are starting to compound. He explains:

As we exited last year, we had over 20 automations live within the business – hundreds of thousands of transactions now being automated that would have otherwise had to have been done by colleagues, or things that we weren't doing before.

The target for this year is 50 automations live. The projected benefit trajectory is significant: from month one to the end of this year, Oswald expects to see 20 times the value delivered in that first month.

Start with the head office, then follow the thread

Travelodge's approach was methodical from the outset. Rather than trying to automate hotel operations immediately, the team started with head office processes – running structured workshops to surface opportunities and build a clear picture of where automation could flow. Oswald recalls:

We started off knowing that we had lots of systems that didn't talk to each other, processes that were fairly manual, but we didn't really understand at that stage what the full extent of automation could do for us.

From those workshops, a prioritization matrix emerged – one that weighs financial benefit, secondary benefits, ease of delivery, and critically, what the business needs to believe in order for an automation to succeed. What the team started to find was a thread: back-office processes that, when automated, had positive downstream effects on hotel teams. That has shaped the roadmap into this year, where the focus expands toward individual hotels across what Oswald describes as "a quite large portfolio".

The colleague question

Any conversation about automation at scale in a workforce-intensive business has to address the elephant in the room. Oswald is direct about it:

We don't want people to be afraid that they're going to lose their jobs as a result of automation being applied.

At Travelodge, the program has been built around a broader definition of value. One of the clearest examples Oswald gives is a process that was generating errors and, as a result, costing the business revenue:

We had a leaky bucket, and we wanted to plug that – so we use automation to do so. Through doing that, you were removing a task from a colleague that was quite manual and boring – hence the reason why there were mistakes being made in the first place. They can then divert their attention to things that are more valuable for the customers.

The up-skilling aspect has turned out to be self-reinforcing, Oswald observes:

Our staff have actually really liked being upskilled on how technology can help them. As soon as they get comfort with that, and they start to understand how the technology can help – that is also then helping generate our pipeline as well. Because ideas come back to us, and it sort of self-perpetuates in terms of the opportunities that we shape into our roadmap.

Getting people the time and space to engage is harder. He is candid: 

It's a challenge – especially when we're trying to look at automation to try and free up time for people.

The solution has been to secure genuine senior leadership commitment, with the operating board aligned on targets and willing to "free up capacity to put in the time and effort to think about how automation can really benefit their area".

The contract model

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Travelodge's approach is what Oswald calls the contract. Before any automation goes into build, the business owner signs a document that sets out exactly what the automation is expected to deliver, across which benefit layers, and how those benefits will be measured. The language he uses is deliberate:

This is what we need to believe in to make this automation a success. This is how we see the benefits flowing through, and this is how we're going to go on to measure that.

Once the automation is built and delivered, accountability transfers. 'It's then over to the business owner to deliver that benefit,' Oswald explains. Finance is involved throughout. The result is a program that can speak to senior stakeholders in terms they recognize – not technology metrics, but business outcomes. He continues:

It really comes back to how you define and quantify the benefits, and then how you go on to work with the business owner to measure and track those so you can talk back to the business in meaningful terms. That's been the thing that has caused the program to continue to have a huge amount of traction.

The implementation partner

Travelodge works with Centelli as its implementation partner – and Oswald describes the relationship as something closer to integration than vendor management. 'Centelli is essentially part of the Travelodge team,' he says. What Centelli brings, beyond specialist skills, is perspective. Oswald notes: 

Sometimes Centelli will bring to the table things that we haven't thought about – tools that we haven't yet seen. That's a really good way of being able to push the scope of automation, in some cases stretch those benefits.

He remarks that the relationship is built on transparency and a three-way hyper care period after go-live, where feedback from end users shapes the next iteration before the automation moves into steady-state maintenance.

The moment it lands

When asked for a standout use case, Oswald reaches for a powerful but simple one. The organization had a high volume of transactions, each taking up to 20 minutes for a person to process, with a persistent backlog as a result. Automation – combined with an Application Programming Interface (API) – reduced that to three seconds. (When Oswald said "three" I was fully expecting him to say "minutes". Reader, I nearly dropped my pen!) He explains:

It runs seven days a week, 24 hours a day,' he says. 'For me, that one, whilst it's quite a simple one in terms of taking away manual processing, is one that stands out purely because of the immediate impact.

The development had a big impact because of what it did to people's perception of what was possible. Meanwhile, Travelodge has begun landing its first use cases that incorporate AI and agentic capabilities, with more in build and in the pipeline. Oswald describes this in a way that echoes a theme that ran through UiPath's Fusion London event: 

We don't like to start with AI. We like to start with the problem and make sure the right tools are in place to solve that problem.

The lessons from the first AI use cases are feeding directly back into ways of working – making sure colleagues understand what the automation means for them, especially "where you've got lots of different component parts coming together – being AI, RPA, having a colleague in the loop, other departments."

My take

Travelodge's automation story is not the flashiest on the circuit. Oswald is precise, measured and not given to hyperbole – which is probably exactly what you want in someone responsible for getting automation to stick across a large, operationally complex business.

The contract model is genuinely distinctive – it solves a problem that quietly de-rails a lot of automation programs: the gap between what a vendor delivers and what a business owner actually measures. Tying those together before build starts, and making finance part of the loop, is practical governance in action. Automation programs that treat workforce concerns as a communications problem, rather than a design problem, tend to run into resistance. Travelodge has made the colleague journey part of the build process – not an afterthought. The fact that staff are now generating pipeline ideas is the proof point.

The jump from 20 to 50 automations this year is ambitious. But given the early successes, it suggests the groundwork has been laid to make it plausible.