Managing the operations your hotel brings with it a host of responsibilities. Apart from room revenue, your hotel’s point of sale (POS) acts as an additional source of income. Multiple POS outlets may set the cash registers ringing. While this should bring in more cheer, the situation behind the scenes is far from reality.
What appears to be lucrative also brings with it a number of issues hoteliers find it difficult to deal with. The reason behind this being your hotel POS system can be many for various properties.
Typical Point of Sale Outlets:
A POS outlet can be different for different properties. These include but are not limited to the following:
- Restaurants and Bars
- Gift Shops
- Spas, in-house Beauty Salon
- Local tours for Guests
Common Issues in Hotel POS Management
As mentioned earlier, any POS brings about certain issues in the day-to-day routine.
- Maintaining multiple folios
- Management of different counters (e.g.: Bill transfers to the room bill if requested, addition of travel bills, etc.)
- Time spent in communicating within teams
- Incorrect entries, manual errors
- Increased paperwork, and so on.
Sell More = Less Paperwork?
While most properties certainly don’t rely only on the room revenue, working smart is the only way to get the maximum revenue with minimum operational overhead. Some of the major hoteliers have already adapted to the changing times.
Point of Sale Software: Truly Fantastic or Just another promise?
While everything is being automated, wouldn’t it be easy if the POS system could also follow the same route? Well, management of multiple POS counters will certainly be a breeze if embracing the latest technology can solve manual errors. With the advancement in technology, the hotel POS system can now be easily automated to save time, costs, and errors. But how?
POS-Integrated Hotel Management System
The secret to flawless management of major successful and well-established names in the hotel industry lies in the use of a smart hotel property management system (PMS) that has an integrated POS module.
A PMS allows you to manage your front desk, housekeeping, accounts, and operations in the cloud. A cloud-based PMS is currently the only way small and large-sized hotel properties can run their day-to-day tasks much more efficiently. While reservations, check-ins, check-outs, guest information, payments, staff management and more can be managed on the cloud, it’s the way forward to simplify POS operations.
Too Complicated? Not Really!
PMS with an integrated POS module simplifies many actions throughout the day. This process does away with methods that only add up to the amount of time spent on each task particularly in billings and accounts. Let’s check out how.
Guest 1 orders a special dinner at the restaurant. He prefers to pay the bill at the time of check out.
Traditional Method:
It’s the attention to detail that matters when it comes to guest experience and reputation management of the hotel. This cannot be possible with multiple layers in the process.
PMS + POS:
Let’s check the same situation when a hotel has a cloud-based PMS integrated with a POS module.
The combination of PMS + POS reduces the number of calls, instructions, and multiple checks improving the efficiency of a hotel’s staff. Guest experience is thus enhanced. Quite simple, isn’t it?
How many POS outlets does your hotel have? Do you have a specific strategy that simplifies POS billing with front desk operations? Let us know your thoughts.