Things You Need To Know Before Investing In A PMS

Hoteliers need to work constantly on keeping abreast with the latest happenings in the hospitality and travel world in terms of technology, trends and best practices. To ensure best performance and increased revenues, hoteliers need to constantly monitor their processes and foster a culture of constant improvement.

The property management system is the storehouse of a lot of important information. In a limited capacity, it is a big data centre for the hotels where all the information on the guests like buying habits, trends, patterns etc. is captured. The PMS also holds information on the reservation trends, sources of business, the sale patterns for rooms, point of sales and other add-ons. By accumulating this information and analysing it in the correct manner, we can provide a lot of foresight and help in forecasting and strategizing in order to improve the hotel business.

The art of being able to constantly improve processes and performance begins with asking the right questions. Here are questions that hotel’s need to ask their property management service providers to achieve improved revenues.

1. Property Management System and Customer Profiling

Knowing your customer is the first step towards formulating a strategy to improve guest service and bring in a guest centric culture. The PMS should be able to give you a report on the guest history, buying trends and number of repeat guests. Customer profiling can give you an indication on the type of guests that visit your hotel like corporate guests, leisure guests, families, singles etc. This information can be very important in building the guest persona and marketing strategies around them. You can also get an idea of the repeat guests and areas that need to be focussed on. This can help bring in ideas for promotions, special benefits and member services for repeat guests.

 2. Sources of Business

The property management system should be able to give a concise and in depth report on the sources of business like where are the reservations coming from? What is the percentage of bookings coming from your online channels like OTAs, GDS? What is the share of booking from your own marketing channels like hotel website and call centre? Lastly, how is the performance of your third party vendors –travel agents and corporate account? All this information is important for the hotelier to decide which source of business is most profitable, which source needs more focus and which source is draining our resources with least output.

 3. How to Maximize Room Inventory and RevPAR

Yes, property management systems can help in maximizing both. Reports on room occupancy can help predict the low season and the rush season and help the hoteliers plan the offers and promotions in advance. Also, reports on what packages and promotions have worked the best can help hoteliers create packages based on previous trends. Another possibility for increased revenues is the add-ons. Looking at the reports from the PMS, information can be derived on which add-ons sell the most. Based on this information, the packages can be designed better and the online strategy on marketing and promotions can be designed to include the most attractive add-ons. With integrated revenue management and PMS reports, you can learn more on your pricing strategy and consumer behaviour to see what works and what doesn’t.

So, before opting for a property management system, make sure you keep in mind all the above criteria in order to optimize and improve your hotel’s performance and increase revenue.

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