Most hoteliers are continuously checking out the smartest and best practices to operate their hotel in the most efficient manner. They look for methods and systems that help them utilize their property’s potential to the maximum.
For small and mid-sized hotels, it’s always a task to manage all the operational areas of the hotel since funds and resources are limited. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, there are many tools, practices, and resources available to the hospitality industry which aids and assists them. It’s about finding the right fit.
Over the next couple of months, we at Hotelogix wish to share with you some of the practices that can help assist the hospitality industry and even increase their revenue. Practices which offer a good mix of technology and operations, something which would allow your staff to multi-task without compromising on the guests experience in any form. After all, the greatest validation for a hotel is in providing an excellent guest experience.
We start of our series with a blog on the benefits of Night Audit.
Smart Practices: 1) Benefits of Night Audit for Small Independent Properties
Travel and tourism might have taken the hospitality industry by storm; but the efficient streamlining of day-to-day operations still remains a major challenge for small independent properties. Simultaneous execution of multiple tasks, many times, results in errors that hamper daily operations.
Operating counters, managing check-ins and check-outs, managing Reservations received through different sources, Housekeeping updates, and many more transactions need to be closed daily to make way for next day’s transactions and there is no room for errors. A corrective measure here can be a Night Audit; it helps streamline the gamut of daily operations performed in a small Hotel. A Night Audit not only takes care of the daily operations mentioned above, but it also helps in detecting any errors, verifies financial transactions as well as room revenue. It is the answer in running smooth and seamless operations.
Despite many benefits, small properties tend to see Night Audit as an unnecessary overhead. But tell me, a tool that systematically arranges routine activities within an uninterrupted time frame of just 15 minutes, a task which would otherwise take hours which a small hotel can’t afford to spare, how can it be seen as unnecessary?
Hotelogix offers an intuitive Night Audit feature which allows a hotel to perform multiple functions such as:
- Extend a guest’s reservation,
- Change room of a split reservation,
- Early check-out of a split reservation,
- Charge no show,
- Close or carry forward counters and many more.
Many small and mid-sized hotels miss out on charging a guest for a NO Show since they are multi-tasking on so many other operations. Night Audit automatically detects a guest who has made a Reservation but has not checked in on the specified date, and also displays the No Show charge that you need to take from the guest. This saves the hotel from facing a potential financial discrepancy.
Hotelogix also allows the hotel to customize their Night Audit Summary and get detailed reports of Rooms, Accounts, and Housekeeping etc. as per their requirements. This report is important as it enables one to efficiently analyze operations and ascertain revenue generated through Room Bookings (received through different sources) and Points of Sale.
The Night Audit shall help a hotel to efficiently manage core areas of Hotel Operations and highlight any discrepancies or mistakes made.
