From Complexity to Clarity: How Leonardo Hotels Transformed HR with Kainos & Workday

Leonardo Hotels UK & Ireland is one of Europe’s fastest-growing hospitality brands, with a strong presence across the UK and Ireland and more than 300 hotels worldwide. The UK and Ireland business, formerly known as Jury’s Inn, was acquired by the Fattal Group in 2017–2018 and officially rebranded in 2023. Since then, the company has continued to expand rapidly, adding several new hotels each year and building out a diverse portfolio that includes lifestyle and boutique properties.

With over 5,500 employees in the UK and Ireland alone, Leonardo Hotels operates in a fast-paced, people-driven industry. As the business grew, so did the complexity of its operations – especially when it came to managing HR and Payroll across multiple hotel chains, each with its own policies and systems in place. To support business growth and simplify these processes, Leonardo Hotels needed to modernise its technology stack for better automation and visibility across its workforce.

Processes were heavily manual and paper-based, which made everything from updating employee records to tracking absence a slow and error-prone task. There was no easy way to report across the group, and data security was a growing concern.

The lack of visibility across business processes, particularly in areas like absence tracking and payroll, was a growing concern – especially given the complexity of managing different annual leave policies across multiple hotel chains.

As a result, Leonardo Hotels needed a modern, scalable solution that could unify its operations, improve data accuracy, and support its ambitious growth plans. After exploring their options, Workday was the clear choice – not just for its functionality, but for its best-in-class security, ease of use, and mobile accessibility.

It offered the kind of flexibility and visibility the business had been missing, and crucially, it could grow with them.

Choosing Kainos: A Workday Partner with a People First Approach

When it came to choosing a deployment partner, Kainos made a strong impression on Leonardo Hotels. The team appreciated how Kainos were able to translate technical language in a way in which their HR teams could easily understand, “Kainos stood out because they humanised the technical language - they translated what was complex and made it simple and relatable to our organisation,” said Adrian Bingham, Head of Customer Contact and Data Integration at Leonardo Hotels.

The first phase started in April 2024 and went live successfully and on-time by April 2025. The second phase is currently in progress, with Leonardo Hotels focused on adding the Recruiting and Talent Management modules to their Workday roadmap.

The Switch from Fragmented and Manual to Unified and Automated Processes

The shift to Workday has had a transformative effect across Leonardo Hotels. Visibility across the organisation has improved dramatically, with clearer insights into headcount and more accurate tracking of hours worked. In just one month, over 311,000 employee self-service interactions were recorded, highlighting strong user adoption. What used to be fragmented and manual is now unified and automated.

HR, finance, and operations now have the insights they need to make faster and better-informed decisions – giving Leonardo Hotels the crucial competitive edge they need in the fast-paced world of Hospitality.

Workday’s Prism analytics have also enabled Leonardo Hotels to forecast costs more accurately. This level of insight has helped the business make smarter financial decisions and plan more effectively.