Operating a large independent hotel with 200+ rooms, 4-5 in-house restaurants, a couple of gyms, spas, and gift shops is multifaceted, where precision, efficiency, and guest satisfaction are paramount. Without the orchestration of advanced technology, many things can go wrong at every level across departments, leading to operational inefficiencies, fewer sales, unhappy guests, and diminished revenues. This exploration delves into the intricate operational requirements of large hotels, the pitfalls of wrong management practices - either manually or via outdated on-premises solutions, and how a cloud-based hotel management software or a hotel property management system (Hotel PMS) acts as a savior, ensuring a seamless performance across the board.
Here are some operational challenges large hotel management faces without the right solution
Front desk and reservations
The front desk sets the tone for a guest's experience. In a 200+ room establishment, manually managing bookings, arrivals, and departures can lead to errors such as booking conflicts or delays in service, immediately impacting guest perceptions and satisfaction.
Housekeeping and maintenance
Impeccable rooms and facilities are non-negotiable. Orchestrating housekeeping and maintenance schedules manually for an extensive property is fraught with challenges, risking guest dissatisfaction due to unavailability or unpreparedness of rooms.
Inventory and supplier management
Efficiently managing inventory for dining, bars, and room amenities is vital yet challenging. Traditional methods are prone to inaccuracies, resulting in overstocking or shortages that affect service quality and financial health.
Financial management and reporting
With vast amounts of financial data generated daily, manual handling can lead to inefficiencies and inaccuracies, obstructing strategic financial planning, regulatory compliance, and informed decision-making. For example, when you have multiple in-house F&B outlets, you can't post F&B charges to the guests' bill if you don't have a Hotel PMS that comes with a POS or easily integrates with a third-party POS. It will lead to revenue leakage. Also, guests wouldn't like it if you made them wait longer near the lobby while you checked whether the F&B bills were reflected on the final bill.
Online distribution
Managing online distribution across various channels (OTAs, direct bookings, GDS) without an integrated system is arduous in today's digital age. Plus, it leads to complexities such as rate parity/inventory disparity, overbookings, and guest dissatisfaction.
Rate/revenue management
A large hotel with 200+ rooms will have multiple room types. It makes it very difficult to change and optimize rates frequently when handled manually or via a solution that's not intuitive enough. Failure in doing so in today's competitive world will lead to revenue losses.
Attracting potential guests
Competition is heating up, and guests have become more price-conscious. They need value for what they pay. In this context, attracting the right mix of guests becomes more challenging. Without the right insights, it becomes tough to develop a marketing strategy to attract guests from all segments for more sales, occupancy, and revenue - leisure, family, corporates, large groups, etc.
Staff inefficiency
This is one of the most important issues, especially when hotels across the size face acute staff shortages. If you make them handle daily department-wide tasks manually, they will make mistakes, negatively impacting your business in many ways. Also, even if you make them work on an outdated on-premises Hotel PMS with limited features and not-so-easy-to-use functionalities, it, too, will negatively impact your business.
To effectively drive growth for your large hotel, relying solely on manual processes or solutions with limited features is not a viable strategy. Such approaches are inherently inefficient and prone to errors, which can escalate quickly, negatively impacting every facet of service delivery and guest satisfaction. Embracing more sophisticated and integrated systems is essential to streamline operations, enhance accuracy, and improve the overall guest experience, fostering sustainable growth.
Migrate to the cloud and see the difference
Comprehensive automation
A cloud-based hotel management software comprehensively automates your hotel's daily operations end-to-end and across departments - front office to housekeeping, F&B to accounting, etc. This orchestration minimizes human error and ensures smooth operational flows.
Enhanced guest experiences with personalization
Capture guest details and access and analyze them to understand their preferences. It helps in offering personalized services as per their likes and dislikes. Also, with cloud hotel management software, you can easily integrate contactless services and offer the same to your guests to project yourself as a tech-savvy hotel brand.
Informed decision-making with real-time insights
This is very important, and that's why you need a smart cloud-based solution to access hundreds of reports on various aspects of your operations/business with utmost accuracy. Those reports would be lucid and easy to understand so that you can make the right decision at the right time. Also, it makes it easier to access those reports centrally.
Seamless integration with third-party solution
You can work with any third-party hospitality technology solution of your choice. For example - a cloud hotel management system will seamlessly integrate with a channel manager, revenue management system, accounting, guest feedback management system, customer relationship management tool, point of sale system, human resource, passport/guest ID scanner, and many more to help you manage your large hotel's 360-degree operations with ease.
Saves costs and offers mobility
You will be able to significantly lower your IT overhead/hotel management software ownership costs with a cloud-based solution, as you no longer have to worry about investing in costly servers and hardware. Another important benefit you will see is - mobility. You can access the system on the go to keep track of your hotel position. You will also be able to access all operation/business-critical reports from wherever you want to.
Enhanced staff capabilities
Cloud solutions are easy to learn and use. Your staff can quickly learn the nitty gritty of the solution with your vendor-provided training. This helps you quickly onboard your new staff with minimal training while not wasting time. Plus, with improved productivity, they do more in less time, adding value to your operations.
Improved scalability and operational flexibility
Cloud hotel management system or a Hotel PMS easily scales with your hotel's growth, adapting to changing operational needs without significant new investments. Their cloud-based nature allows access from anywhere, ensuring managers and staff can respond swiftly to any operational requirements. Let's say you want to add 50 more rooms; the system will let you do this in a snap.
Additionally, in high-demand periods, you can expand your cloud-based infrastructure to accommodate the surge in demand. You can swiftly add new users, workstations, mobile devices, and more to navigate through peak operation times efficiently. This capability guarantees that guests are provided with quick and effective service, enhancing their overall experience.
More online sales
A cloud-based hotel management system seamlessly integrates with tools like channel manager and booking engine, etc, to help you sell more online - via OTAs and your hotel website. The point we are trying to make here is that you can generate indirect and direct sales when you have the right solution. This is a great way to sell more and increase occupancy and revenue.
Better rate/revenue management
Do you want to change your room rates daily or weekly? Go ahead. The cloud hotel PMS will let you do this efficiently. It will also integrate with a revenue management tool to dynamically change your room rates based on demand, occupancy, guest booking window, length of stay, and competitive pricing. It will optimize your room rate for the right channel to offer it to the right guest at the right time to improve occupancy and RevPAR.
In today's highly competitive and rapidly evolving hospitality landscape, you can't manage a large hotel without the right solution by your side. You can't gain the much-needed control over your vast and full-service operations to save costs, save time, and boost efficiency. Ultimately, you can't cater to the changing needs of your guests. That's why you need a cloud-based hotel management software like Hotelogix that is comprehensive and has won the trust of 12,000+ hotels in 100+ countries.
What more? Here it is - we recently have rolled out the version 2.5 of our solution that is smarter, better, faster, and simpler to boost your efficiency by about 60%.
Sounds about the right solution for your large hotel?
