A property management system, the heart of a hospitality property, is a systematized process that manages the link between guests & services.
Welcome to another edition of Hospitality Property School.
Today I’m going to talk about Property Management Systems.
Your property management system or PMS, also known as a front desk system, is the heart of any hospitality property. It is the systematized mechanism that oversees and coordinates the relationship between the customer and your services.
Without one, a hospitality property will labour to professionally manage all of their daily operational tasks.
What are the benefits of a property management system?
In choosing the variety of options available to you, it’s important to think about what features would best suit your hotel, resort, inn or bed & breakfast.
Here are the top features you should consider when making your selection.
- A system that streamlines your front-desk management
Your PMS should give you all the tools you need to be totally systematized in running your hospitality property.
To give your guests the best customer service from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave, you should be able to easily:
- Check guests in and out
- See all of your reservations on a calendar page
- Add additional rooms and extra sale items to a booking
- Add rate-plans to existing rooms
- Closeout specific rooms for a thorough cleaning”
- Ability to move existing bookings
- Produce invoices
- To keep track of your returning guests
All the information you need in one place, with the ability to complete necessary tasks faster.
- Gives you freedom from your desk
Your system should be cloud-based.
No matter what device you are using, you need to be able to access your backend system.
You need to have the capability of going about your day and still keep an eye on your reservations. All you need is your smartphone or tablet.
- Manages sales channels effortlessly
If you don’t have a system that allocates your rooms in an orderly fashion, you run the risk of double booking your rooms – resulting in upset guests, lost revenue, and wasted time to try to remedy the problem.
That is why the PMS you choose should also serve as your channel manager. This means that travellers booking hotels through online travel agents (OTAs) see your availability as it is updated in real-time because your property management system distributes all of your available rooms across a number of booking sites.
The channel manager element should:
- Allow for live rate and availability updates
- Allow you to manage all your booking sites from one place
- Allow you to upload your inventory 400 days in advance
- Allow you to easily see an overview of how your channels are tracking
Because your inventory is automatically decreased across all sites when a booking is made from any site, no manual work involved, and you maximise your revenue. This method of distribution is called the ‘pooled inventory‘.
Pooled inventory means that you evenly distribute all your available rooms across a number of sites – including your own website. In this case, all inventory is automatically reduced across all booking sites when booking made from any site.
- Accommodates international bookings
Making sure global travellers can easily book with you should be a top priority for any hospitality property. Your PMS system should help you do this by:
- Allowing you to partner with international OTAs. The more sites it connects you to, the better.
- For example, Little Hotelier connects with hundreds of different booking sites. https://www.littlehotelier.com/
- Providing multi-language & currency options. It should support at least 5 languages and at least 80 different currencies.
The fact that global travellers can go to your website and book means that you don’t need to manually accept bookings.
- Manages guest communications
Your PMS must make it easy for you to communicate with your guests in a systematized way. This means that you can send pre and post-visit emails, and customise each email template to match your brand’s look and feel.
If a guest’s experience is inconsistent, it will reflect badly on you. All hospitality property – regardless of size – should strive to be as professional as possible. Each and every guest needs to receive the same level of service.
- Increases revenue per customer
In addition to increasing your number of guests, you should also work on increasing profits from each guest.
Your property management system should allow you to:
- Package extras like late check-out, breakfast, and spa packages
- Customise upsells
- Add extra sale items to reservations during your guests’ stay
Upselling relevant products and services to your guests can give them a more pleasant stay while adding to your bottom line.
If you have any stories about Using Property Management System for Your Hospitality Property and would like to share or have any questions or feedback you can leave them in the comments section of the show notes.
You can find them at:
keystonehospitalitydevelopment.com/KHDC074
That’s it for this session of hospitality property school.
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So, as always, let’s work together to put heads in your beds.
Until next time, have a fun day.
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