Ever been influenced by marketing of a product and its features or by a sales pitch to later realize that you have made a bad investment?
Happens time and again and we are definitely vary of it now more than ever when every product is putting in more effort in marketing to attract customers. For hoteliers, perhaps not choosing the best PMS may prove to be more costly than merely a bad investment. So how does Cloud PMS help you avoid getting into a situation of buyers’ remorse?
Most Cloud PMSs Offer Free Trial
Cloud Property Management Systems have a subscription model and give full access to the system for trial. Benefits of a free trial are many. Firstly, you are able to verify that the features that made you shortlist the product are actually working and the product is a good quality product. Hotels get an opportunity to try out the different features of the product extensively without any hurry.
Demo Vs Trial
Most legacy systems or on site systems have specialized presales teams for giving demos to hoteliers giving them a feel of the working of the product.
The biggest disadvantage of a demo viz a viz a trial is that a lot of practical aspects of your business may not come up during a demonstration.
There are hoteliers that come well prepared for a demo with questions and different situations in daily operations that they would like to see the product solve. However meticulous the list, it may still miss out on the nitty-gritties of a complex hotel environment. With various rates and packages, billing scenarios with groups and travel agents, integrations with external devices and online distribution systems, there are a lot of features that cannot be verified without using them for a period of time in a real time environment. A free trial gives the hotel that added advantage over a demonstration.
Staff Training
Training of the staff is very important to be able to derive maximum advantage out of your property management system. With a free trial the hotel is able to give its staff access to work with the system for an extended period of time. The staff is able to get answers and clarifications, get comfortable and are well prepared before the system is bought and implemented. It also makes the training session much more effective with your staff already having used the system for some time.
Free Trial of Product as well as Product Support
A very important aspect of the free trial period in my view is that hoteliers even get to test how good the support is. During the trial you get a good idea about the quality of support staff, their issue resolution response time, professionalism and overall level of customer service. With a cloud property management system, a good support is a must have and to be able to get a trial of the support and service is a great plus.
Cloud Property management systems have brought in a lot of new entrants into the hospitality space. It’s not just the traveller but also the hotelier who is internet savvy. We see a lot of hoteliers going online to check the options available. To be able to go to a product site and immediately sign up for a trial and see the system working is much more effective for decision making than calling up the sales number or writing a request for call and waiting to be contacted by a sales team, talk about the product, see some brochures and presentations followed by a demonstration and then make a decision. Small and mid-size hoteliers are making optimum use of free trials to their advantage for choosing the best PMS fit for them.
Take a free trial and see how it works for your hotel.
