10 Signs Your Hotel PMS System Need an Upgrade or Replacement

 With so many options available to customers for booking a hotel, it has become essentials for hotel owners and managers to keep pace with the changing demands and growing competition in the industry. If you own a hotel, it’s time to assess the capabilities of your hotel property management system.

 

Here are 10 signals that your hotel PMS system needs a replacement.

 

#1. Declining hotel ROI

 

Study the ROI by month, season, and year. If you see a constant decline in the hotel ROI, then it means something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The loopholes can lie with customer acquisition, hotel room occupancy, operational excellence, or guest experience management. Chances are high that your hotel PMS is not complementing the principles and goals of your business. For example, the above or below average pricing of a hotel room can lead to loss. When you ask for above the average, it kills the occupancy rate, but when it's otherwise, your profit takes a hit. Does your hotel PMS provide help with room pricing? If not, look for an alternative.

 

#2. Lack of or poor automation

 

From marketing campaigns to booking conversion, and from check-in to check-out and everything in between – Is your hotel property management system capable of handling everything? Is it substantially replacing people’s efforts? Is it contributing to your agility, accuracy, and security? If you doubt, it is time to rethink your hotel management software. It must streamline your hotel operations and make sure that information flow from one department to another uninterruptedly with little or no human interference. It must reduce or eliminate the latency and errors and give you a competitive edge.

 

#3. Inability to track your business on the go

 

Does your Hotel PMS System have features to help you monitor your business when you are not there? Can you see how your marketing, admin, front desk, pantry, housekeeping, engineering and maintenance, and security staff are working? Do you have a real-time dashboard to tell you about room occupancy, requests, and complaints of existing guests? If you said no, you must not delay in replacing your hotel property management system.

 

#4. Limited third-party integrations

 

Scalability is the need of the hour. By scalability, we mean, not just the capacity to support more users at a time, but also about supporting more features that can add value to the business. Enough support to third-party integrations or connectors allows you to expand the usability of your software. For example, if you want to sync Google Map with your marketing campaign or integrate the QuickBooks feature with your billing process, you should be able to do so without spending any extra bucks.

 

#5. Lack of prompt software support

 

In a business as dynamic as the hotel industry, you can’t wait for good to happen. For example, when you are unable to process credit card payments or view room status due to any software issues, you need immediate resolution. Does your software vendor provide real-time support? If you don’t get it, there is no point in paying for it.

 

#6. Your people find it difficult to operate

 

You can’t expect your sales and marketing staff or housekeeping people to be as tech-savvy as your IT? Alternatively, you can’t recruit IT, persons, to handle all operations. If your non-tech people spend more time understanding or exploring the software and less time in getting things done, it’s concerning. One way to counter the problem is to ask the software vendor to provide training on the usability of the software, but if it doesn’t prove worth it, then you must think of substituting your current hotel PMS software system with an easy-to-use one.

#7. You find it challenging to handle multiple vendors

 

You might need to coordinate with multiple vendors or suppliers like property owners, developers and real estate stakeholders, travel agents, interior design and furnishing companies, architects, management and training service providers, marketing companies, industry consultants, and information and computer technology (ICT) manufacturers to run your business. and finding it challenging to manage them all - it’s time to switch to the right hotel property management system.

 

#8. It doesn’t add value to the guest experience

 

Can travelers browse your inventory, navigate to the right categories to find the right room on a desktop or mobile? Can they customize their experience by adding or removing services and amenities as per their interest? Can they perform a booking using their preferred mode of payment, and make changes to their itineraries depending upon their needs? Can they do check-in and check-out in a fast and easy manner? How helpful is your self-service section to the users - log requests and get a resolution to their grievances? Are they able to request a cancellation or get a refund (if applicable) effortlessly? Many ways customers are engaging with your business, and every experience counts. Any failure on the guest experience front blemishes your brand reputation and impacts your revenue. While you invest in hotel PMS software, make sure the technology responds to the healthy and safety concerns of your guests. Make check-in and check-out or food ordering a touchless experience. It’s the demand of the hour and is to stay in the post-Covid world. The faster you adopt it, the better would be the outcomes.

 

#9. It provides little or not-so-vital BI

 

Change is the only constant and business intelligence (BI) helps you keep pace with the change by helping you understand what customers or guests are expecting. It helps you knowing what you have and where you are lagging. Engagement with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders in the business leads to the creation of a vast amount of data, but is your business PMS capable of turning those raw data into actionable insights? Does it have query and reporting analysis tools that can answer your questions and help you improve your business? Can you validate the answers if you get them? If not, it’s a sign that you must upgrade or replace your current hotel PMS software system.

 

#10. The software fails to respond to compliances

 

Finance, occupational health and safety, police, labor, bar, food, and tourism – there is a growing list of windows of compliance management in the sector. When is the renewal due date? What are the expenses involved? Who is responsible for what? What is done and what is yet to be done? Are you able to track how well your business meets the existing and recommended compliances? Your PMS must have an answer to each. If it doesn’t have it, you should think of moving to a better one.