The hotel and tourism industry was booming for several years before the pandemic brought the world to a standstill in early 2020. By 2019, the
average daily hotel occupancy rate in the United States had skyrocketed to 66.20%. However, the pandemic proved to be a watershed event for the hospitality industry as the hotel occupancy rates plummeted to a shocking 44% in 2020.
Two years later, in 2022, the industry demonstrated its resilience with another boom. A
PwC report expects the occupancy rate to rise to 63.1% this year, almost but not really equal to the pre-pandemic level. Clearly, the competition will only get hotter, and hotels will be under sustained pressure to attract more customers, reduce costs, streamline operations, and increase profits.
Yes, that’s easier said than done. Still, the right hotel management system (HMS) can help your hotel to radically improve the efficiency of operations and grow revenues in several crucial ways.
With nifty benefits like automation of repetitive tasks, access to real-time information on bookings and other hotel information, and channel management capabilities, hotel management software offers new opportunities to improve your business
5 Strategies to Improve Your Business Using Hotel Management System (HMS)
Competitive hotels use the latest technology to effectively manage their daily operations. An HMS or software helps a hotel manager handle room reservations and guest servicing transactions. A business must optimize the use of a hotel management system by seamlessly integrating it into its operations. This can effectively maximize the contribution of the HMS hotel software to the overall productivity and the realization of business goals.
The following are the strategies used by businesses to improve their hotel’s profits using hotel management software:
1. Effectively Handling Booking Management Tasks
An HMS software for hotels should effectively and efficiently handle customer bookings. If the hotel still uses manual inputs to process customer bookings, the company is not effectively using its hotel management system.
Automation capabilities should be the most important features to look for in an HMS management system. The hotel HMS should be able to automate all or most of the low-level, simple tasks so that the staff has more time to promote company products and services and deliver outstanding customer satisfaction.
2. Enable Direct Online Bookings
Hotels should get an HMS (hotel system) capable of facilitating direct bookings on the hotel’s website. This improves the quality of customer experience when they’re making the bookings. Most customers prefer hotels with direct booking features as they are more convenient. This reduces the potential for customers’ hassle in dealing with travel agencies.
As customers are provided with convenience in bookings, this increases the volume of the hotel’s daily guests, leading to higher revenues.
3. Maximize Channel Management
Large hotels tend to function effectively through strong relationships with business partners, such as vendors and other partner firms. These business partnerships help them optimize the use of their combined resources for improving work processes, increasing revenues, reducing costs, and increasing brand awareness, besides realizing other goals.
A hotel with multiple business partners in the industry should extensively utilize the channel manager feature of its HMS. Hotel management solutions with a channel manager module .allow hotels to formulate and execute a diversified channel distribution strategy. Effective utilization of the channel manager feature should result in centralized bookings, organized sourcing of materials and services, and smooth transactions between the hotel and all its partners.
4. Utilize Online Features
Perhaps, the biggest advantage of a hotel management system is that it helps hotels take their business online. It offers the backend infrastructure to help hotels launch a website and reach existing and potential customers online.
Businesses can also use this feature for advertising their services across social media. The software can be integrated with tools to determine the marketing strategy’s success. You can check
FinanceOnline Social Media Analytics Guide to help you leverage the power of social media. Businesses need to have a website because most consumers rely on the information on the internet to make shopping and booking decisions. Hotel management software helps businesses create their website so that potential customers can easily review and purchase their products and services. This increases the number of new customers as well as returning customers to the hotel. Offering
online table ordering for hotels can also improve guest experience.
5. Get In-depth Analytics and Reports
Modern businesses in every industry are driven by data. Gone are the days of winging it and relying on gut feeling. Highly efficient enterprises rely on data to make smart decisions that waste fewer resources in trial-and-error initiatives and guarantee better success for businesses. The hospitality industry is no exception to this. Some of the best-managed hotel businesses make critical decisions based on data supplied by their HMS. Hotel systems without an analytics module are worthless in today’s economy. That’s why a robust hotel management system like Orderlina has powerful analytics and reports-generation features that allow you to get in-depth insights into your hotel operations.
You can dive into your hotel analytics to learn more about what’s costing you and how much; whether the cost justifies its value to customer satisfaction and your revenues; what’s making your customers happy or unhappy; which areas require your immediate attention. Analytics brings you answers to questions you never knew to ask.
Creating A Unique Guest Experience With Hotel Management Software
Like any other hotel and tourism business, hotel operations require complex planning and execution. Every hotel manager must oversee many components of the hotel operations. The hotel management software helps them achieve their company goals and objectives.
Currently, there are many possibilities that hotel management software can offer. It can help a business create a
digital menu by using your hotel’s latest mobile ordering system. Guests can be directed to the digital menu app when the booking is confirmed. With a hotel concierge chat feature, your business can start interacting with guests before they arrive. Tours, events, and dinners can already be suggested to the guest.
Some advantages of using hotel management software include the generation of accurate outputs, timely report preparation, real-time result generation, and integration with other software. It can likewise assist in the fast processing of information and other repetitive administrative tasks and prevent duplication of information in the system.
Hotel businesses that invest in hotel management systems (HMS) can drastically improve their profitability by fully utilizing the features available with their HMS. A hotel system’s key features, like booking management, online connectivity, and channel management, can usher in a new wave of efficiencies that can bring cost reduction and increased customer satisfaction. Together, these small benefits accumulate to increase the revenues and profits of the hotel businesses.