Before you invest in any technology, it’s critical that you consider how much value the product brings you. But how do you measure this return on your investment?
There are three major areas you should focus on when measuring ROI –
1. Reduction in expenditure
2. Increase in revenue
3. Time savings
Let’s explore each of these in more detail, and how cloud-based technology makes a difference:
Lowering your expenses
If you use a legacy system, it can be intimidating to switch – especially considering the investments you’ve already made on your software. However, what you really need to think about is the ongoing expenses associated with your system.
To better understand this, we’ll ignore the numerous smaller costs associated with integration, maintenance and energy bills, focusing on the major ones instead.
Let’s say the IT guy you hired to manage your in-premise system commands $20,000 a year – a conservative estimate. This cost alone represents a significant cut from your bottom-line.
With a competitively priced cloud-based system, you’re paying as little as $4 per room. Even with a 50 room property, that works out to an annual cost of just $2400 – remember, you’re also paying no overhead expenses or running costs.
Increasing your revenue
So maybe you aren’t using a legacy system – let’s say you run your hotel with an Excel spreadsheet. No IT costs, no maintenance costs, it’s free and it’s saving you money, right? Indeed, it is. However, it’s also inhibiting you from optimizing your hotel for maximum revenue generation.
Hotel rooms are perishable commodities, not unlike food – once it expires, the opportunity to earn from a room night is lost forever. In today’s lightning paced industry, guests are online making reservations every second. Pen and paper systems would have been ideal before the internet, but they simply cannot cope with the pace of incoming bookings today.
Hotel’s today have the opportunity to attract bookings from any part of the world via global OTAs, and with millions of travelers visiting these sites, selling your rooms on as many as you can vastly improves your reach. This directly translates into more bookings!
The internet allows you to leverage your region’s tourism appeal to build your own occupancy. With a property management system (PMS), you get to integrate with dozens of global OTAs in real-time – meaning bookings and inventory are automatically updated instantly. This allows you to dramatically boost your exposure and sell on multiple channels, without having to worry about the complexity of managing so many channels.
Saving time for your staff
Every minute that your staff spends in front of a workstation is a minute they’re away from your guests. With all the manual entry and updates required by both, spreadsheets as well as legacy systems, your employees are sacrificing valuable time they could be dedicating to your guests instead.
Since it’s not as tangible as costs and revenue, it’s a lot harder to measure this impact – however, its significance is paramount. In today’s millennial dominated age, guests expect personalization, they don’t want blanket services that cover everyone. They want to be appreciated, and traditional systems are robbing your staff of the opportunity to make them feel special.
A comprehensive management system allows you to automate core processes at your hotel. Night audits are carried out systematically, reservations are automatically organized, inventory is updated in real-time, and even your room prices can be set to fluctuate dynamically in accordance with pre-defined rules.
This allows your staff to continue delighting guests, ensuring that they leave your property with a great impression.
Owners, managers and staff, all have the hotel’s best interests in mind – however, that doesn’t mean they’d be happy to work harder! You may be fine with spending your weekends working at your hotel, but you can’t expect your staff to share that enthusiasm.
Looking at things from their perspective doesn’t just allow you to understand how to derive more productivity from them, it helps you maintain a healthy work atmosphere.
Hotelogix’s cloud-based PMS was designed with not just the owner’s best interests in mind – we realize that your employees and managers need to see value in the system for themselves as well.
“What’s in it for me?”
As an owner, Hotelogix lets you –
a) Manage your property from anywhere, with just an internet connection
b) Boost staff morale by simplifying their tasks and saving time for them
c) Track occupancy, and measure performance with over 100 customizable reports
As a manager, Hotelogix lets you –
a) Set special discounts and packages in accordance with market conditions to increase occupancy
b) Track guest history and preferences in order to personalize the experience and build loyalty
c) Monitor the status of rooms, take actions and delegate tasks from a single point-of-control
As an employee, Hotelogix lets you –
a) Automate routine operations like night auditing and reservation organization
b) Decrease manual errors and eliminate major issues like overbookings
c) See all tasks for the day and prioritize accordingly, allowing for better time management
No matter which way you look at it, switching to the cloud is always a win-win!
If you’re still not convinced, why not try it for yourself?
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