The Five Ways in Which Hospitality Technology Can Improve Hotel Efficiency

Presenting excellence is the goal of hospitality. Whatever the guest’s needs or wants, hoteliers will try to anticipate and meet at the drop of a hat. Throughout the years this has led to countless innovations in the industry, culminating with the adoption of hotel property management systems (PMS) which now act as the centre of a hotel’s daily operations.

Industry innovation has allowed PMS solutions to evolve to the point where their usefulness has revolutionised hotel efficiency. Here are some of the ways in which hotel PMS solutions can aid a hotel in improving daily operations:

Increase RevPAR via Direct Bookings

Online travel agencies (OTAs) allow hoteliers unlimited access to a large pool of potential guests, charging a commission for every booking made through them. With an increasingly competitive online hospitality marketplace, hoteliers are actively looking for ways to avoid this commission and redirect guests to their website where they can easily complete their booking with the aid of the hotel’s direct booking engine.

Read more: How Technology is Changing Hospitality for the Better

A direct booking engine has to be able to perform on a level similar to the one set by OTAs. Guests are easily frustrated by ill-adaptive solutions, which don’t sit well with mobile devices or require too many authenticators to complete a transaction. In short, if they are to book directly through your hotel’s booking engine, guests need the same ease of access and flexibility that is offered to them by OTAs.

Read more: Essential Hotel Key Performance Indicators Hoteliers Must Track

As a result, a great booking engine needs to be both mobile-friendly, easily integrated into your hotel’s website and to allow a degree of flexibility when it comes to bookings, a guest should be able to complete the full transaction and book several rooms for a whole party of people.

Manage Room Inventory

Your hotel’s occupancy is the main metric by which you judge how well your business is doing at the moment. But as you know it is often easy to book out, if you go low enough with room rates, that said, booking out does not necessarily translate to improved revenue or guest loyalty.

Keeping track of your room inventory and your room rates without an analytical tool to aid the process can cause more damage than good, especially if you wish to remain competitive in this field.

A direct channel manager which integrates with your PMS can provide you with the chance to manage your rates and inventory simultaneously. The channel manager will actively apply all changes made to your inventory across all distribution channels.

Read more: Hotels vs. OTAs: Which Way Does the Scale Tip in 2020

A guest books a room through an OTA, the booking is instantly noted in your inventory, another guest cancels at the last minute, and the room is automatically up for sale again on every channel. Having complete control over occupancy 24/7 will certainly cut down on the manpower it takes to keep inventory in order and prevent unwanted overbookings.

Simplify Pre-Booking Customer Relations

If you manage a hotel chain you know that keeping up with reservations and meeting guest demand on certain bookings can require special attention from your staff. After all, the biggest part of the job is securing, more lucrative guests who expect you to show a degree of flexibility in making arrangements for their stay in exchange for the appropriate upsell.

Central reservations and management system will allow you to keep an active overview of your various properties' inventory so that you can keep track of availability and capacity while setting up events and meeting specific guest demands.

Your staff will always be able to find out which room at which establishment can meet a guest’s demands and use the information to secure the booking. Guests who engage with loyalty programs in hotel chains rely on such flexibility so that they can always find the room that best fits their needs.

Improve Revenue Management

Revenue management tools are the height of innovation in hospitality technology. While automation might be the bane of the many industries’ existence, in hospitality automated revenue management allows hoteliers a sense of security.

Your hotel’s fully integrated PMS can collect information from various sources, and create a comparative analysis used to generate room rates in real-time. In short, you will always have the most appropriate room rates for any given day, without having to worry that you might be missing out on data which would affect distribution.

Allow Guest Autonomy

Guests need to feel like they have the freedom to manage their stay as they please. Arrival hours and check-ins are often a bother, and whenever guests are offered round-the-clock check-in services they tend to favour the establishment.

Self-check-in kiosks allow guests to manage their time as they wish, and once they have arrived they can complete their registration and check-in with the help of the kiosk, rather than your staff.

Read more: 5 Ways Hotel Self-Check-In Technology Can Help You Through 2020

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About Clock Software

Clock Software is a global provider of cloud-based property management systems (PMS), integrated online distribution, online & kiosk hotel self check-in solutions and mobile & in-room guest engagement systems with customers in more than 65 countries.