Hotel Management Software Is All About Centralizing and Streamlining Hospitality Business’s Workflows By Riddhiman Roy, Technical Content Writer and Market Analyst at Selecthub
Hotel management software is a one-stop solution for holistically taking care of hospitality real estate. It covers all aspects of supervising and overseeing day-to-day functions for a smooth hotel operation.
The platform automates marketing, administrative and front desk operations, leaving room for you to focus on guest experiences and business scaling. It also helps you remotely manage every aspect of your property from a mobile screen.
There are unique solutions to suit different property and business sizes. In this guide, we’ll help you identify your personalized business requirements and find a suitable vendor who can tailor features to suit property-specific needs. Let’s dive in.
Executive Summary
- Hotel management software handles finances and customer relationship management.
- The solution is user-friendly, optimizes time and revenue and minimizes errors.
- With robust channel managers and booking engines, reservation is a lot easier.
- Figure out a requirements checklist before searching to find the most suitable platform.
- Always ask questions to yourself and the vendor based on your needs.
What This Guide Covers: What Is Hotel Management Software?
Hotel management software is a type of solution designed to manage hotel operations in an efficient, paperless way. It helps you:
- Market rooms on online channels
- Design property websites
- Centralize bookings from multiple sources
- Streamline front desk operations
- Offer guests contactless experiences
- Simplify housekeeping and maintenance activities
- Track and manage inventory
- Accept digital payments
- Record finances
- Automate reporting
- Manage employees and team members
In the past, a hotel management platform completed front desk operations such as check-ins and check-outs, scheduling, booking reservations, room management, and billing.
But, today, the platform can not only integrate with EMRs, CRMs and OTAs but they also provide financial capabilities, event management, staff management, business intelligence tools, website builders and mobile-compatible applications.
How Does It Work?
Hotel management encompasses workflows of diverse nature, and it’s tough to believe that a single solution can help you manage and streamline all of them. But it’s true. These solutions help you manage the five pillars of hotel management from a unified platform — marketing, management, guest experience, maintenance and reporting.
Let’s closely look at a typical guest’s journey throughout their association with your business to understand the role of these platforms.
- The system helps you design branded websites and post vacancies on OTA, global distribution systems (GDS) and social media. It boosts your business’s online visibility and helps prospective guests find your hotel on online channels.
- You can publish property and room details to help travelers make an informed decision. Travelers can log in to your website’s application portal to request bookings and reservations.
- The system collects booking requests from every channel and serves as a single source of reservation data.
- Your front desk staff can check the availability of rooms and confirm or reject a booking.
- You can automatically send confirmation emails, including booking details, property location, tour guides and other information.
- Depending on the platform, your guests receive a mobile portal or app to check in and out, receive invoices, send payments, request housekeeping, and chat with managers.
- Post checkouts, you can define rules to automatically send feedback forms and urge guests to leave online reviews.
Beyond the guest journey, hotel management software acts as a link between your front desk and backend processes. The system relays room information to concerned departments pre-check-in and post-check-out per user-defined rules. You can track inventory and housekeeping, take guest orders, accept online payments, and automate reporting.
Types of Hotel Management Software
Hotel management software, at the end of the day, are specialized property management modules and depending on your property type, there are different solutions available.
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Bed and Breakfast: These systems automate major administrative tasks, enabling you to focus on guest experiences and offer that personal touch. You can track rooms and beds by the hour and use inventory management capabilities to manage breakfasts.
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Motel Software: These platforms are also known as hotel management software for small businesses. They offer intuitive tools to help a small team effectively market, manage and maintain motels and other small hospitality real estate.
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Vacation Rental: Market and manage short-term rental properties using these unified solutions. You can create property websites, design short-term leases, handle external maintenance vendors and offer guests a stellar experience.
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Restaurant Management: These specialized modules help manage a restaurant’s diverse workflows. You can keep track of inventory and offer customers a point-of-sale system to submit orders and make payments. Define rules to schedule agents and track delivery from a dashboard.
- Hotel Chain Management: Ideal for enterprises and large hotel chains, these all-in-one platforms can manage multiple brands, properties and workforces. They serve as your primary source of reservation and revenue data and help improve collaborations across geographies.
Primary Benefits
Hotel management solutions work to simplify processes so the administration can concentrate on guest satisfaction. Here are the key benefits that the platform can render:
Maximize Revenue
The platform lets you customize prices according to demand using a channel manager. You can use the reporting module to compare prices with competitors and chart market trends.
Boost Profits
You can optimize inventory and rates. Manage group bookings easily and efficiently with intuitive booking engines. You can also avoid paying hefty third-party booking commissions and fees by directing traffic to your website and using the native booking engine to take applications.
Reduce Manual Errors
With hotel management software, you can improve the guest experience by minimizing mistakes like double booking. Streamline multiple tasks by leveraging automated distribution processes such as scheduling room cleanings, check-ins and check-outs, and sharing data across properties.
Simplify Integrations
Uncomplicate everyday operations by juggling various solutions effortlessly with a few clicks. Most platforms can accommodate marketing, guest experience, reputation management, guest communication, ID scanning, invoicing and more.
Create Seamless Guest Experiences
You can create intuitive booking experiences for your guests, which in turn help boost your business’s conversion rate. On top of that, in an age where customers expect contactless experiences, offering a mobile portal or application is essential to attract customers and retain their loyalty.
Improve Decision-making
Hotel management solutions collect your business’s operational and financial data. You can track RevPAR, ADR, GOPPAR and other hotel management metrics to adopt a data-driven decision-making approach.
Key Features & Functionality
Here are the basic features necessary in a modern solution to succeed in hospitality businesses. Most hotel management software features mentioned below are available as individually deployable models, allowing you to pick and choose the ideal set of tools for your business.
| Channel Manager | An integrated channel manager is vital to expanding sales for hotels. Connect with external OTAs like Expedia, Airbnb, Tripadvisor and so on to manage and increase sales efficiently by customizing rates and dates from a single place to prevent overbooking and ensure maximum occupancy. Sync all bookings automatically. |
| Reservation Software | Reservation software, also known as a booking engine, allows you to accept direct bookings through your website. You can avoid paying booking commissions to OTA’s and personalize the application experience for your guests. It converts the application portal to various languages and accepts multiple currencies, enabling you to deal with an international audience. Guests can select accommodation types, additional services, products and discounts, and the engine conveys the information to a central reservation system (CRS) to check availability. |
| CRS | While a channel manager helps you publish accurate ARI information across channels, CRS enables you to consolidate bookings from every channel on a single screen for easy trackability and reduced errors. You can collect booking applications on a centralized dashboard, block selected rooms after confirmation and inform every concerned department, including the front desk and housekeeping. |
| Point-of-Sale | A POS system allows customers to pay for their services at different kiosks and self-service orders. It can charge for additional services and products like spas, Wi-Fi, room service and more. Furthermore, you can use it for in-house bars and restaurants. |
| Analytics | A reporting module helps track daily, weekly and monthly revenue, accounting, sales and more. Predictive insights allow better functioning. You can monitor rates, revenue goals, occupancy rates, surge seasons, net sales and the average daily rate. Track performance through custom and reconciliation reservation reports. |
| Housekeeping and Maintenance | Schedule and assign the maintenance of property regularly. This feature includes coding keycards, scheduling wakeup calls for guests, checking the progress of cleaning workers and assigning them to specific rooms or assignments. |
| Front Desk Module | Manage reservations, check-ins and check-outs, and adjust bookings and rates with an intuitive calendar and a configurable dashboard. You can allow mobile check-ins, check-outs and access to hotel room keys and contactless transactions. Guests have a stress-free booking experience with speedy booking confirmations and multi-room and group reservations. |
| Payment Gateways | Hotel software solutions enable management to accept customers’ credit/debit card payments. Process quick transactions, collect deposits, and send and receive pending requests and income in a secure manner. With the help of third-party payment gateways and partner merchants, securely process transactions. Create and transmit invoices, cash receipts and e-invoices. To accommodate online wallets like PayPal, use payment processing integrations. Most platforms are PCI-DSS and GDPR compliant with end-to-end encryption to ensure safe payment processing. Manage expenses, chargebacks and deposits with negotiated processing rates and a centralized payment dashboard. |
| Guest Communication | Create client profiles, keep track of preferences and history, and combine data from different hotels and bookings. Send automated pre- and post-stay messages, feedback forms, and customized communication to drive repeated bookings. |
Software Comparison Strategy
While benefits and features are important in deciding on the perfect platform for your property, one size does not fit all in this scenario. It’s imperative to map out the needs of a hotel depending on the size of the building, individual rooms and priorities.
One of the first considerations is to choose between deployment modes. Investment is a factor, and that’s where choosing the right type of solution comes in. There are SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) systems and on-premise solutions.
The former is an economical option that delegates the software hosting and maintenance duties to the vendor but puts a cap on the number and depth of platform customizations.
On the other hand, on-premise deployment gives leeway for unlimited customizations but requires a heavy initial investment to buy the software license and install the necessary IT hardware.
Before entering the market, we recommend you prepare a personalized requirements checklist to outline your functional needs. You can start by assembling a committee including your business department heads, stakeholders, owners and managers to discuss and prioritize features.
Here are a few pointers to consider while devising the checklist:
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Type of Portfolio: Different properties have different requirements, and you need a platform to handle each type in your portfolio.
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Business Scale: A front desk module, booking engine and channel manager can suffice small businesses. But enterprises and hotel chains require more comprehensive solutions that can handle customer experiences, complex accounting, business analytics and even AI in some cases.
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Legal Compliance: Property and hotel laws are constantly changing, and you must ensure that your platform is up-to-date with the latest local and federal standards and regulations.
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Marketing Channels: One of the primary objectives of hotel management solutions is to simplify and automate marketing operations across multiple channels. It’ll be a waste of time and money if the platform of your choice can’t connect with your preferred marketing channels and OTAs.
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Integrations: Look for platforms that can connect with your existing software stack and other solutions your business might use in the future. A few useful integrations are accounting software, analytics modules, payroll management systems, ERP and inventory management.
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Team Size: Most solutions don’t offer unlimited team onboarding, and you need to ensure that the software of your choice can comfortably onboard and manage the entire team.
You can use our free requirements template to kickstart the process. We also advise you to research user reviews and consult other customers to understand better how a vendor and its products operate.
Cost & Pricing Considerations
Hotel management software prices vary from vendor to vendor. We won’t recommend free hotel management software as these solutions have bare-bone features and can be detrimental to business growth in the future. But suppose it’s your first time using hotel management software. In that case, you should try out free demos by innRoad, Hotelogix and eZee Absolute to test the waters before jumping into a paid solution.
The pricing of hotel management solutions depends on the deployment mode, number of rooms/units and features. SaaS involves a monthly or yearly subscription fee, while on-premise deployment requires a one-time lump sum investment.
Most platforms have a pay-per-room pricing model, and a few have tiered pricing based on room range instead of the definite number of rooms. The impact of features on software pricing is self-explanatory — the more advanced features you want, the higher it’ll cost.
Plans start from as low as $15 monthly for each unit and go north to $500 per month per unit. Other than that, a few vendors may charge you additionally for factors like:
- Setup and implementation
- OTA and GDS integration
- Priority support
- Team member onboarding
- Integration with third-party software
We advise you to prepare a realistic budget for software and additional features before starting the software selection process. Look for solutions that fulfill your requirements without going over the budget.
Questions To Ask
It must feel a little overwhelming to process so much information at once. But there must be some way to come to a definitive conclusion. The easiest way is to ask the hard questions. Wondering what to ask? Here’s a list of questions internally:
- What’s your online presence, and how can you increase your visibility to draw more customers?
- How compatible or extensive is your point-of-sale system?
- What kind of integrations does the hotel need to function better?
- Does the channel manager connect with the OTAs you want your organization to associate with?
- What’s the profile of your guests?
- How do you plan to engage with your guests? Do you require a customer relationship management module?
- What level of customization is required by your hotel?
After you have figured out what you need, there are some key questions you need to ask the vendor about the product. While you’ll know the best about the requirements of your product and your tailor-made needs, here are a few questions that can aid you in understanding the product better from the vendor:
- What is the kind of customer service they provide, and what is the average response time?
- What are the safety protocols that the vendor follows with regard to customer data?
- How secure are the third-party payment gateways?
- What kind of training is available for hotels to train their staff?
- Are there any reward or loyalty programs that can benefit your hotel in the long run?
- Are there any hidden costs in the long term?
- How long is the demo period?
Next Steps
It’s not easy to pick the right solution, and it requires a lot of research, time and investment. But you need to start somewhere. Begin by figuring out what the solution can do for you, the benefits and features you require, and which pricing model would best suit your budget and end by boiling it down to a personalized list of questions. Yes, it seems daunting, but trust us, it’s not as hard as it sounds.
You can use our free software comparison report to simplify the process. We hope this guide helped you find the ideal solution for your business that adds value and drives revenue. Happy selecting!
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