One way or another, most hotels, if not all are required to change their hotel Property Management System (PMS) every once in a while. This is because the hospitality industry is always changing but mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But it’s not as easy as it seems. There are various aspects to consider before choosing the best PMS there is today.
Hotels are one of the businesses where hospitality is highly valued. While choosing a new PMS, one should keep in mind that with the evolving era, technology is becoming the trend in all aspects of life.
Therefore, whatever software the management chooses to go with ought to produce remarkable results when it comes to running the hotel operations for both the staff and most especially the guests. Otherwise, why the change in the first place!
So, here we go with the factors to put in consideration when choosing a new hotel PMS;
The hotel Property Management System of choice should be mobile friendly
A mobile-friendly PMS ensures that you can empower your guests with guest self-services throughout their stay at the hotel. More so, even before they come since they are able to make their preservations and check-ins by themselves with any device accessible to them. Most especially on their smartphones.
This can however operate in two ways; You’ll have made the staff experience at the hotel easier as well. They’ll be able to access information anytime and anywhere they are. Even on the go. This increases the customer care and efficiency of operations.
The PMS should be able to streamline all your hotel operations.
The main purpose of getting a PMS for your hotel is to streamline all the operations. It would therefore be useless if some of the operations are left out and have to be attended to manually.
One of the ways to do this is by choosing a PMS which offers third-party integrations. This highly increases the efficiency of operations at the hotel.
You can choose to integrate operations like door locking systems, ID scanners, and payment systems with your PMS to simplify operations.
The PMS should be able to operate as the central system in the hotel.
The security and stability of the PMS
Almost all PMS’s are secure. However, the level of security and stability varies across several other factors.
For instance; there are on-premise hotel PMS and Cloud-based hotel PMS. Whereas on-premise PMS store their information on the desktop, Cloud-based PMS store their information online.
This provides different levels of security to the hotel data.
In relation to security, also ensure that the PMS vendor company is reliable and you can access them anytime in case of any emergency.
Ease of use
After purchasing your hotel Property Management System from your software provider, you are surely not willing to incur more charges to train your employees on how to use it. Unless of course, the provider has a free training package in addition to the purchase.
Otherwise, ensure that the PMS you obtained is easy for the staff to use.
The ability of the Property Management System to interact with guests.
The new PMS should have convenient features like the ability to charge for beverages and other services in the room as long as it’s a hotel service for instance in the hotel restaurant or other events.
This provides convenience for the guest and ensures more return visits since most things have been simplified for them. This is based on the fact that guests nowadays rely more on their devices for everything.
For a hotel business to be successful, the key factors are the reputation of the hotel, recommendations from previous guests as well as maintaining continuous guest return visits. And this all depends on the hospitality that hotels provide.
And hospitality all stems from the PMS which ensures the smoothness and efficiency of operations like automatic reservations, check-ins and check-outs, availability and occupancy management, and many other operations.
The better the PMS, the better the expected results.