Hotel industry runs on the essentials of proper management at every stage. All internal teams/departments need to find a cohesive way to work together to create the ideal experience for the guests. As you plan to expand your hotel business, the task of manual data organization and maintenance becomes even more time consuming and cumbersome. This is where an automated hotel booking system comes to your rescue. Moving to a hotel booking system provides hoteliers like you with a host of benefits that can improve efficiency and enable you to generate more revenue. Let’s see some of them.
1. Simplifies Front Office Tasks –
A hotel booking system can provide the ‘real time’ status of the hotel rooms. Front desk staff can draw bookings directly on their front desk console and update them with complete ease. A booking system like Hotelogix, even has a ‘Dynamic Room Allocation Manager’ which automatically allocates rooms to guests by scanning through various parameters, such as, cleanliness, availability, occupancy, and so on.
2. Enables distribution –
Hotel booking software enables hotels to be present in the global marketplace in real time. Competition is extremely stiff in the hospitality industry, and your guests have numerous hospitality options when they are travelling – B&B’s, hostels, hotels, boutiques, Airbnb and so on. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to ensure that your hotels are as visible as possible. The hotel booking software enables hotels to not just maximise bookings via the hotel’s own website but also be present in various online channels – OTA’s and GDS. Also with the booking software, your hotel can manage all the channels via one interface, therefore maintaining their room inventory and rate parity uniformly across all channels via one platform. This helps simplify operations for your reservations team and also ensures that issues such as double or overbooking are eliminated.
3. Improves guest reservations –
Many OTA’s now promote their site by offering free cancellations or changes in the booking up to a certain date. If your hotel doesn’t have its own booking system and has to deal with various vendors manually this can create a lot of confusion in bookings and result in huge losses. An integrated booking system allows information to be synced via all systems, so any reservation that is cancelled or changed via the OTA gets updated, in real time.
4. Increases multi-tasking –
With the booking system, a hotel with minimal staff can effectively manage several tasks simultaneously. They can manage group check ins, check out of other guests, confirm reservations, and so on, all at the same time.
5. Centralizes hotel management –
The centralized approach of the booking system helps keep everyone informed. Housekeeping can update rooms which are ready for check in, the front desk can in turn inform which rooms have been checked out, and tasks can be assigned quickly and easily. This ensures complete transparency and reduces the chances of any crucial information being lost due to lack of communication.
It’s not rocket science; booking systems are extremely easy to use, simplifies operations and at the same time maximizes revenue. When technology is there to aid hotel owners, there is absolutely no reason to go old school. So, take a step back and see if you would want to spend your day managing operational overheads or improve efficiency and take care of your guests better.
