Have you ever imagined running your hotel without bulky servers, without a large IT support team to manage your property requirements or having numerous servers clogging up the space? Well, this is possible by moving from traditional Property Management Systems (PMS) to cloud-enabled PMS.
Technology keeps advancing at a day-to-day basis and guests continue to expect only the best from your hotel. Cloud-based property management solutions have opened a whole new world of possibilities to hotels of all sizes globally. If you’re still a little hesitant, we give you 5 reasons why you should move from a traditional PMS to the cloud:
1) Avoid cost overheads:
A cloud-based PMS helps save costs at multiple levels. There are no hardware costs and software licensing issues. Just your current computer and internet access is sufficient to migrate and get started.
Your hotel only pays for what it needs, therefore there are no upfront costs. You can customize your requirements and pay as you go, and there are no annual maintenance charges. A legacy system requires an expensive IT team to monitor all the servers, software and hardware being used, adding unwanted cost overheads.
2) Security:
Since data is managed on high-end data centers that have powerful and comprehensive in-built data security systems, constantly monitoring your servers for breach or viruses doesn’t exist. Data gets backed up at regular intervals, and the uptime guaranteed by modern cloud data centers is nothing less than 99%.
Any data transferred over the wire is encrypted and there is complete accountability and audit trails of data accesses. This kind of security can only be possible in a cloud-based PMS.
3) Flexibility :
Flexibility can be considered in a couple of ways. A cloud-based PMS can allow hoteliers like you to access information from any device, anywhere and at anytime, they don’t even have to be in the same country.
Also as mentioned earlier, a cloud based system allows you to pay as you go and as per the requirements of the hotel. When your hotel scales up, so does your cloud-based PMS without any hardware, software upgrade headache.
4) Distribution:
More than 40% of all travel bookings are done online. Your hotel has to be available on the online market place. Cloud based technologies are better suited to integrate with the global online marketplace than what legacy systems can do. A cloud based PMS integrated with an online distribution system allows your hotel to market effectively and leverage OTAs, GDS and channel managers via a centralized console.
5) Keeps up with the times:
Today the biggest segment of travellers are millennials, and they require information to be available at their fingertips via their smartphones, tablets and so on.
With a cloud based PMS, your hotel staff have the option to communicate with your guests via the guests own tablets or smart phones. They can integrate apps or pages with the PMS allowing a 2-way interaction even if the guests are not at the hotel. This helps elevate the guest experience to a completely different level. This is also a great opportunity for hotels to upsell their other services directly to the guest.
The above points are just the tip of the iceberg; your hotels will see better profitability and lesser burden on the staff once you switch over to cloud. Your staff will get more time to interact directly with the guests leading to better guest satisfaction.
