Common PMS Challenges of Running Independent Hotels and Chains

Modern hoteliers are facing challenges on an everyday basis, as running an independent hotel or a hotel chain puts a lot of obstacles in their way.

Complexity in management due to large amounts of collected data, accessing multiple properties, providing personalized services, managing guest complains and feedbacks, monitoring revenues, organizing bookings, hotel and departmental P&L are just some of the challenges that hotels face every day.

Fortunately, with the proper use of cloud-based hotel PMS, hotels can consolidate data and control information across brands to provide better customer services and user experience. In return, hotels get a chance to increase customer satisfaction and, of course, revenue.

Integrated single hotel software platform definitely offers an array of capabilities and features that make business management easier and allows for better productivity at the same time. Guests expect memorable experiences and services and it’s up to hoteliers to provide the expected.

The Inevitable Challenges

Every hotel faces some of the inevitable obstacles such as:

• Risking reputation
• Difficulties with increasing the scope of guest wallet shares
• Problems with building visibility and brand awareness
• The brand image alone isn’t enough to attract guests (this goes especially for independent hotels)
• Risks of revenue loss
• Problems with OTAs

These are just some of the most common challenges, but there are more where these came from.

The Benefits of Implementing a Comprehensive PMS

Fortunately for chains and independent hotels, implementing the best hotel PMS can help overcome these challenges in many ways such as:

• The ability to establish real-time communication.
• Providing solutions to overbooking hassles.
• Ensuring that no reservation goes unchecked.
• Real-time connectivity between OTAs and PMS.
• PMS allows for centralized and transparent inter-departmental communication, ensuring that each guest gets what they need and more.
• Improved guest satisfaction means improved hotel reputation.
• Staying ahead of hotel reviews on popular review sites by responding proactively to reviews.
• Opportunities to cross-sell and upsell with ease to cater to every need of modern guests.
• Digital POS, as these are excellent at increasing revenue.
• The chance to diversify revenue sources.
• The ability to drive more bookings at affordable prices by using metasearch engines.
• Engage guests by offering online reservations via integrated web booking engine.
• Using feedback from guests to improve hotel rating.
• PMS allows every hotel to create guest-specific offerings to increase revenue.
• PMS allows hotels to make reviews visible on their websites which improves ranking.
• More reviews ensure more bookings.

Single ERP Platform

Every hotel chain needs a single ERP platform for numerous reasons. ERP helps integrate, streamline and standardize all hotel business processes across all hotel departments such as e-distribution, front desk, food & beverage, purchase, stores, human resources, and finance. Put simply, both independent and hotel chains can improve their effectiveness and efficiency by using a single ERP platform. These platforms are used for:

• Integrate complete data at the head office.
• Consolidate revenues, guest data, purchase, and accounting.
• Central guest histories and corporate/travel agent profiles.
• Improve operational efficiency with central data access that will help take quick data-driven business decisions.
• With central guest data, better manage guest programs and marketing.
• Collecting guest information to provide valuable insight into guest needs and behavior and discarding or designing new services.
• Speeding and standardizing business processes to increase productivity, reduce cost and save time.
• Increasing Internal efficiency because of software automation, and managing services centrally hence reducing costs and human errors.
• Centralize purchases and payments, share, move and distribute resources across properties based on need.
• Data consolidation and realtime business analytics to understand the business better.
• Enhanced security.
• Monitor real-time operations.

Data Consolidation Helps in Better Business Management

Data consolidation helps hotels by allowing them to remain relative and competitive in an overcrowded business landscape. Since OTAs or online travel agencies are changing this landscape quite often in unforeseeable ways, hotels depend on modern business techniques and methods to survive.

One of these techniques is data consolidation which is especially important for large hotel chains that need all their business processes in one place to obtain maximum functionality and track their markets, business sources and at the same time keep an eye on the competition.

This also allows them to know their business sources, guests’ needs, behavior, travel patterns, and so on in detail, which helps drive better quality and tailor-made business offerings or personalized guest service. In return, hotels get better feedback and increased interest from their guests and everybody wins. Data consolidation is also an excellent way to increase operational efficiency and achieve better cost savings. It helps hoteliers on cutting down on resources at properties and consolidates data at head office to improve on operations and centralize processes and SOP. It provides a better view of operations with a single view of data across the chain and helps to take a quick decision because of all analytics and reports availability at head office.

Having a Central Operations Platform Reduces Costs and Improves Revenue

A cloud-based property management system removes the need for hiring expensive IT experts and it’s a real time-saver, especially if it’s integrated with other similar value-added systems. Since there’s no need for physical hardware, it’s also a cost-saver.

It also allows for automation and real-time monitoring os operations across business sources, properties, distribution network, which decreases human errors and reduces all operational costs.

Such systems also allow direct bookings, meaning that a hotel avoids paying OTAs a commission for reaching their capacity.