Managing a hotel involves a lot of complex factors. From handling reservations, offering check-in/out, tracking guest requests, selling online, changing room rates, managing F&B operations, keeping track of accounts and many others, everything comes under the gamut of hotel operations. And then, there is this biggest challenge: serving guests efficiently to win their loyalty.
“Property management system is the backbone of all things technology for hotels. Sitting at the core of the operation, it automates and streamlines repetitive processes, stores and manages guest and business data, and reduces errors. Everything boils down to this – the fact that it significantly improves operational capabilities, saves time, and allows hotels to take care of their guests and drive growth.”
The specifics
A good PMS can make a difference for both the hotel staff and guests, as it helps lower the workload associated with check-in and check-out. The housekeeping report gives users a thorough picture of the occupancy and status of each room in real-time, enhancing organisation, productivity, and guest happiness. Automated guest communications ensure that routine messages are consistent and delivered on time to increase visitor engagement and satisfaction. “Property management system (PMS) is the backbone of all things technology for hotels. Sitting at the core of the operation, it automates and streamlines repetitive processes, reduces errors, and stores/manages guest/business data. Everything boils down to this – it significantly improves operational capabilities, saves time, and allows hotels to take care of their guests and to drive growth,” says Aditya Sanghi, Co-Founder & CEO, Hotelogix. By facilitating communication and automatically updating booking information, booking channel interfaces offer a direct, two-way connection between the PMS and booking channel partners. They also save time. Generally, a company’s corporate office(s) uses visitor registers or visitor entry tablets to keep track of the people moving in and out of the establishment.
“At Qdesq we use a new-generation SaaS platform – Qudify, which is a QR-based visitor management system (VMS). It ensures contactless check-in and check-out of our guests and staff while simultaneously enabling us to track everything on a real-time basis,” says Paras Arora, Founder and CEO, Qdesq.
Advantage PMS
By using PMS, hotels can work on operational efficiencies. For instance, there will be no long queues at the reception as the visitors can easily scan the QR code and do their check-in/check-out while sitting in the lobby. Also, there are zero physical touch points during check-in and check-out, which helps ensure a sanitised environment. A digital record of all visitors, along with their photo, ID proof, check-in/out time, and reason for the visit, is available. Hoteliers can pre-invite visitors in case of pre-scheduled meetings to make the check-ins even faster. The range of functionality and integrations offered by PMS can meet or exceed the needs of any size hotel property.
“The benefits of a contemporary PMS for the hotel industry comprise, but are not limited to, managing workflows for both back office and front office day operations, such as reservations and guest profiles, room inventory and occupancy, pricing and RevPAR, check-in and check-out, housekeeping, invoicing, and reporting, is one of the PMS’s major responsibilities. It both automates and minimises human mistakes. It provides industry-leading reports and analytics that may be customised, and also incorporates data from software solutions from outside vendors. Hotel PMS gathers and safely stores all client information in one location, making it easier to create thorough guest profiles that guarantee compliance with relevant consumer data protection laws,” says Rahul Kumar, IT Manager, Holiday Inn Bengaluru Racecourse.
The consistent delivery of high-quality services is encouraged by the automation of routine business processes and administrative duties. Additionally, hotel PMS keeps track of visitor preferences and analyses comments, providing staff with helpful information to ensure better guest experiences.
Trend check
Cloud-based computing is quickly becoming the new standard for many businesses and industries, especially in the hotel industry. The cloud offers a platform for innovation and can increase corporate process efficiency, which can be a significant source of competitive advantage. Hotel PMS has gone cloud. Most hotels, irrespective of sizes and offerings, both standalone and groups, are now shifting to cloud-based Hotel PMS. A few important reasons for such a trend are – anytime and anywhere access, reduced total cost of ownership, and a faster go-live timeline.
“Hotels no longer consider hotel PMS a medium to solve a specific issue. Instead, they have realised that it has become imperative to drive overall growth. We have noticed this trend of hotel groups embracing cloud-based multi-property solutions to gain centralised control over their hotel operations, including reservation, distribution, and group-wide reports. Most importantly, it helps them add new properties and go live quickly. The need for rapid digitisation, followed by the pandemic’s effects, has undoubtedly led to increased adoption of cloud-based Hotel PMS,” explains Sanghi. Cost is the primary benefit of the cloud. Installation costs and service agreements for conventional hotel PMS systems can be high and frequently out-of-date. Working in the cloud eliminates the requirement for onsite server hardware and related costs. “It is also flexible and expandable for the future.
Along with these financial benefits, cloud-based PMS also provides instant benefits like remote login for any time, real-time access, distribution management, automated tasks, multi-property administration, mobile guest journey, and real-time data analytics. The incapacity of legacy systems to change with the times is one of their characteristics. Because legacy systems are fixed systems, employees are bound to a fixed point. But with new PMSs, technology has advanced to the point where it can instantly convey any kind of data to any device,” explains Kumar.
Driving efficiencies
PMS enhances a hotel’s guest service capabilities via streamlined check-in/out and pre- and post-stay communications. The PMS’s guest history module enables hotels to offer personalised services to their guests to exceed their expectations and win their loyalty. Additionally, via its integration with guest service apps, it can also enable hotels to offer a host of contactless services. “Through its integration with the channel manager, a hotel PMS ensures the real-time update of rates and inventory across all OTAs, leading to more bookings while significantly reducing overbookings and double bookings. Booking engine integration is another area that gets hoteliers more direct bookings from their websites and Facebook pages,” says Sanghi.
A Hotel PMS also plays a critical role in revenue management. Today’s intelligent hotel PMSs equipped with AI can automatically suggest rate changes by considering a hotel’s occupancy, availability, and length of stay. They also integrate with leading revenue management tools to allow hotels to know competition pricing, local market conditions, and forecasts. The PMS stores everything and offers a single view of all data – about guest preferences, marketing, sales channels performance, etc. It also generates MIS and manager flash reports to aid in making data-driven decisions to see the desired outcomes. Mahesh Pillai, Information Systems Manager, Grand Hyatt Mumbai, says, “PMS with cloud integration helps to login from any location, which eases work of the back office. Interface with different third-party tools helps integrate other applications to achieve desired outcomes. Sales & Catering is Opera’s customer and event management platform and integrates directly with the main PMS application.”
Tech edge
Cloud-based technology is being used for PMS. A notable advantage here is that multiple offices can be managed centrally from anywhere across the globe. Another technical feature is the deployment of a QR code registration. Where masses today are used to transactions by scanning a QR code, so the adoption of this technology is easy. An important feature here is that of digital record keeping of the visitors entering the hotel premises. “This includes not only the ID, but also the check-in and check-out time, authentication by the in-house person and more. In cases where the visitor has not left the hotel premises after their meeting, security would get an alert. It is also easy to sift through the records digitally rather than checking a manual register, which increases efficiency. Not only visitor check-in and check-out, pre-invite, visitor approval on WhatsApp in real-time, and meeting room booking are some of the important features of Qudify. We are also planning to roll out the attendance management system as well,” adds Arora.
On-premises and cloud technologies are the foundation of PMS. A thorough infrastructure and set of technology requirements are often needed for an on-premise PMS. These consist of IT infrastructure, databases, hardware, and software. A SaaS (Software as a Service) platform accessible over the internet powers cloud-based PMS. This creative approach to managing hotel operations is simple and inexpensive in terms of IT. Any contemporary internet-connected gadget can run a top cloud-based PMS. In the past, servers inside the hotel were used to run property management systems. They frequently required dedicated IT personnel to run them; if the server went down, it could impact all aspects of the hotel’s business. However, cloud-based hotel PMS software has become more popular over the past few years. One of its main advantages is a cloud-based hotel management system’s ability to readily link to other software programmes, even if those programmes do not use the same provider.
Scalability matters
Hotel PMS has come a long way in assisting hoteliers with improved management of their daily tasks. It transforms their business by helping them with simplified yet efficient handling of guest preferences, inventory and rates, business-critical data, and many more. Because they are simple to use, quick to implement, available from any device at any time, and generally more secure than the preceding systems, they are an excellent option for hotels of any size. A lot of different technologies can be easily linked with cloud-based property management systems to expedite several procedures within your business. “It integrates with several third-party solutions to enable hotels to work with tech partners of choice. It includes POS, accounting, materials management, HR & payroll management, maintenance management etc. For hotels, all these integrations are quite important in ensuring 360-degree operations. That’s why a Hotel PMS is often referred to as the holy grail of successful hotel management,” concludes Sanghi. An automated way to manage a hotel is what PMS does, and with the new age customer, it is the small things that matter, and with PMS, hoteliers can create personal touches for their guests and curate the experiences that they seek.
