Home / ANALYSIS / Hospitality Trends / Virtual reality

Hotelier India examines the different software solutions that cater to the hospitality industry.

It is hard to imagine a world without computers and software in today’s time. As the world connects seamlessly and goes virtual, hospitality is making all the right moves as far as software is concerned.

And considering that maintaining guest relations is supreme, software has become an ideal tool to achieve this primary goal.

Story continues below

Advertisement

COMMENT Comment on this article

Software solutions
There are several companies that offer specific solutions for different areas of hotel operations. For example, there are pure property management software companies that offer solutions for the front office.

Then there are revenue management software companies that offer solutions for revenue management. Most of the property management software offers integration to room access solutions like key cards.

Also, there are companies that create software only for inventory management. In a highly customer-satisfaction dependent industry like hospitality, enterprise solutions are rapidly helping hospitality providers get faster, more efficient, more productive and more seamless in their offerings.

From helping manage bookings, tariffs and room availability to optimising logistics, supply chains and inventories, a wide range of solutions are driving hospitality brands to provide the complete 360 degree experience that matches up with the best in the world.

These solutions don’t just reduce human effort, but also increase accountability and uptime.

The vital software modules are reservations, front office, telephone call accounting, internet access and billing, door lock interface and back office accounting. In addition, points of sales, banquets booking, purchase, inventory and costing are also employed.

Other modules are need based. Hotels with spas may use a booking diary, larger hotels with yieldable customer profiles may use revenue management, luxury hotels may use guest response management, many hotels are beginning to use digital signage, and provide instant reservation at their website, chain hotels require a central reservation system and some hotels use interfaces with the airline systems and internet reservation portals.

Solution providers are increasingly seeing the huge opportunity in the hospitality sphere to develop and deploy solutions that can greatly enhance the efficiency and reduce overhead costs for hospitality brands.

“Unicel, the enterprise mobility specialist in the VAS sphere, has developed various solutions specific to the hospitality industry i.e. Inventory Management, IVR Booking solution, Customer SMS feedback mechanism, SMS booking and enquiries, Workforce Management solutions to effectively manage and allot resources on a day-to-day basis,” says Vinay Agrawal, founder and MD, Unicel Technologies.

“Changes are more in the technologies used to implement them. Examples from our own company include handheld point of sales, SMS messaging for coordination of guest services tasks, web based multi-property operations, software (instead of hardware) based Internet access & billing, similarly software based voice mail and more.

There are some application innovations also, driven by changes in business needs. For example, we offer a comprehensive guest profiling system for improved CRM, we offer industry standard interfaces for integration of third party systems, progressively we are adding more features of business intelligence,” says Amlan Ghose, Managing Director, Prologic First.