Hotel industry’s leading performance data gathering and reporting agency, STR, released its US hotel industry report of 2014 with an outstanding year-on-year results across key performance areas. Take a look.
– Occupancy: 3.8% increase to 71.6%
– Average Daily Rate (ADR): 5.4% increase to $118.49
– Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR): 9.4% increase to $84.90
– Demand: 4.8%, or 5 million rooms, increase
– Supply Growth: 1% increase
– Group Occupancy: 2.9% increase
The US hotel industry is booming and will continue to surge in 2015. As you can see the above figures, hoteliers can take great advantage of the rapid increase in the ADR. Performance results clearly show that travelers are ready to spend more on hotels compared to the last few years. As we are approaching the holiday season, hoteliers should gear up for a strong demand for hotel rooms that will increase the revenues.
Jan Freitag, Vice President STR, says, “So far this year, U.S. hotel occupancy is 66.0 %, the strongest performance in the last 17 years. Demand is driven by the increase in travelers on business and leisure trips as well as prolonged strength in the group segment. Group occupancy increased 2.9 % for the month and 3.3 % year to date. These strong demand increases put hoteliers firmly in the driver’s seat with regard to pricing power. Room rates increased 5.4 % in August, the highest rate since January 2008.” (Source: STR)
Nonetheless, even with this growing demand there are many hotels that do not have proper management tools to handle their day-to-day operations. This way, hotels end up losing business and lack a strong chance to stand in the competition.
A cloud based PMS is a one-stop-solution that will help in simplifying the hotel operations. More than just managing your property, it is designed with the aim to make your life easier. It will help you perform those day-to-day tasks in a simple and streamlined manner. Since the PMS runs on cloud, you don’t have to install anything. All you have to do is log in to access the information any time and from anywhere. This system acts like a personal assistant to you. What more do you need?
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Most small and mid-sized hotels still use spreadsheets or outdated legacy systems to manage their hotel operations and don’t feel the need to invest in a property management system. That is a good thought but we beg to differ. A PMS can manage all the crucial functions of a hotel like accounting, marketing, reservations – all in one place and with anytime, anywhere access.
Take a look at some of the critical hotel operations below and see how a cloud based PMS comes to rescue:
Reservations: Imagine you assign a person at the front desk who is manually updating the check-in/check-outs, handling reservations, sending out mails, assigning tasks, taking orders from guests and performing all the other routine duties manually. Time consuming and is prone to a lot of manual errors.
A PMS will simply take care of all these activities. It will handle multiple tasks at once like checking in groups while checking out other guests, sending confirmation for upcoming reservations & following up for pending deposits.
Reports: As all of us know, reports are a crucial part of a hotel business. This is an area where one can’t afford to make any errors.
A PMS is designed to help gather information on fingertips, check forecasts and track the progress of the hotel via reports. Moreover, you can access up to 100 reports to get a clear insight of your performance. You can also export the reports in csv format to view it offline.
Online Distribution: There are over 600,000 travel agents on the GDS which cannot be solely connected by an individual and even a legacy system cannot update them in real-time. This way you are sure to lose out on business. Now what do you do?
Switching to PMS will help you manage bookings from all sources. A powerful combination of a Channel Manager and GDS with the Distribution System will automatically update room availability across all channels, along with the front desk. This way the availability and rates everywhere stay in sync with each other.
Facebook & Web Booking Engine: Keeping track of the room bookings via emails is a tedious task as the bookings will not reflect in real-time and this may result in overbookings, cancellations and other human errors.
An integrated booking engine with the distribution system or a PMS will turn your website into a dynamic source to generate bookings. This tool will help the guests view room availability in real-time, it will send out instant confirmation, hotels will be able to leverage their websites to increase room occupancy and maximize bookings. You can also opt for a Facebook booking engine integration that will help your guests book on your social media page directly.
All in all, cloud based property management software is cost-effective & streamlines all the complex hotel operations which couldn’t be possible with a legacy system or using manual processes. Since cloud is here to stay, you don’t have to worry about not being able to access the operations from remote locations. With a simple internet connection, you can perform all the duties from anywhere in the world.
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