As technology continues to become an integral part of everything one does. It is important to understand how it can be utilized and incorporated into your daily work.
As an operator of a small hotel, cottages, serviced apartments or really any place that can serve as an accommodation for guests your resources are always stretched. Most likely you are working with a small team and also spending long hours at work. However, this doesn’t always have to be the case. Using technology like a property management system or hotel booking software you can help ease some of the operational burdens you have.
When it comes to operations how are you managing your business?
Are you still using pen/paper or have you moved to a cloud-based property management system?
A property management system is a software that helps you with not only managing your guests’ reservation but also provides the guests with a way of making reservations for your hotel using this software.
It can also provide you with insights into the business. All systems have basic reporting built into the tool and using these reports you can easily optimize your business. Some of this you might know intuitively as you experience the performance of the business but you don’t have to memorize the data. All information is securely stored and it can be accessed from anywhere. Yes, that is why cloud powered solution is a better fit.
Access, manage and monitor your business from anywhere. That is the efficiency it provides.
If you have team members that need access to start helping you in managing the business then you have the option of adding team members to your account. You can also control how much access they have. This gives you the peace of mind about the type of information someone can access. As some information might be confidential and you don’t want everyone to be able to access it.
If in case you ever wanted to monitor what your team is up to you can also review their activity as well.
Manually entering bookings made on 3rd party channels becomes a thing of history. As you can leverage the direct connections of the booking system with these sites to integrate all your reservations automatically. The added benefit is you don’t have to manage rates and inventory separately on each channel as well. You can update one system and it will update all connected platforms.
There are dedicated channel managers who can handle this for you as well.
Your website is also a big source of reservations and as most reservations are being made online it is important to provide a way to make a reservation.
Any hotel reservation software you choose should also have the component a Booking Engine. This Booking Engine should at least have the basic functionality of being able to display the availability for a specific date, should be able to facilitate reservations and be able to accept a payment method in a secure way. It also needs to be able to handle different types of devices.
Operational efficiency leads to hours saved that can be applied to other aspects of the business.
Hotel Owner's Manual 