Hotel Management Software

Buyer's guide

Hotel and hospitality management software performs essential financial and organizational functions for hotels, motels, resorts and bed & breakfasts, as well as condos, RV parks and other forms of lodging. These functions include reservations, employee scheduling, accounting, property/maintenance management and customer relationship management.

Here's what we'll cover:

Common Features of Hotel Management Software
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Market Trends to Understand
Evaluating Hotel and Hospitality Management Software
Recent Events You Should Know About

Common Features of Hotel Management Software

Hotel property management systems should have strong reporting capabilities, as well as on-board business functions like accounting and employee scheduling. These features should be customized specifically for the hospitality industry to simplify and speed up your management and accounting processes—or, if they are not part of the software itself, should be compatible with the software you have.

Other essential features of hotel software systems include:

Reservations screen in innRoad

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Hotel management software buyers typically fall into one of the following categories:

Franchises. Many franchises have specific rules on what hospitality software can be used, while others, such as Holiday Inn, allow their franchisees to make the decision for themselves. Make sure you discuss your software options with the franchise to get their input on which products are recommended and why.

Hotel chains. At the other side of the table, if you represent a brand with multiple properties, you need to determine whether you want a single hotel PMS across them all or allow them to choose for themselves. Ask yourself how much—and what kind of—information you want to gather from each of your properties, and whether it needs to come in automatically or if manual reporting will be sufficient. If you do go with a single unified product, be sure to consider how the needs of each property differ—you may only have one hotel in Las Vegas, but it will need some of the features associated with Casino Management Software, which may necessarily impact your purchase decision.

Large hotels and resorts. The larger the property, the more robust a system you’ll need. Large hotels and resorts typically have lots of different products and services for people to buy, more maintenance requests and more complicated reservation and scheduling needs. It should be worth it to pay more for a robust hotel or resort product that can make all your processes smoother.

Small property owners. A bed-and-breakfast or a hotel with only a few rooms will have much less robust needs than a large resort. If you are just starting out, you may wish to consider a simple, but comprehensive system that includes property management and account capabilities. If you already have software that meets those other needs, be sure your new system is compatible with your legacy hotel management system.

Property managers. If you represent an RV park, a condo or some other form of communal living, you may wish to consider property management software instead of software for hotels. That being said, if there’s a lot of turnover at your property it may be easier to use this category of software, which is designed to handle reservations and accounting for high-turnover environments.

Market Trends to Understand

Software as a Service (SaaS). Most software is moving away from locally installed software and toward Web-based systems that can be accessed anywhere for a monthly fee. This drastically reduces the up-front costs of purchasing a system as well as the ongoing need for an IT infrastructure. The disadvantage is that monthly costs can add up over time, but most businesses prefer the flexibility associated with SaaS systems.

Market fragmentation. Because of the relative ease of developing software, there are lots of new companies entering the hotel management software market. Many of these come from Canada and Europe and are now looking to enter into the U.S. market. Though this will no doubt lead to better costs and quality in the long run, at the moment buying decisions may be even more confusing than they were a few years ago.

Evaluating Hotel and Hospitality Management Software

Pricing for hotel property management software is usually either per room/unit or per user. Keep in mind that for an on-premise system you’ll pay a single fee, likely with an annual maintenance upgrade, while Web-based systems (Software as a Service, or SaaS) will charge on a monthly basis.

Specific questions to ask when evaluating hoteling software include:

• Does your marketing strategy require customer relationship management (or will it, in the future)?
 
• Are you using social media like Twitter and Facebook to communicate with your guests? Does the software support that?
 
• Do you already have a property management system in place?
 
• Are your guests buying additional products or services from you, requiring a point-of-sale system? Do you already have one? Is it compatible?
 
• How extensive is your third-party hotel reservation software system? Is the system compatible with those sites you wish to be associated with?
 
• What kind of data do you want to collect about your guests? Does the software store that data? How many records will it let you have?
 
• Do you require a solution with large group and event management capabilities?
 

It’s important to consider whether you need something specific to your type of property (hotel, motel, resort), or something more gen