From the dawn of humanity, we needed tools for different purposes. So today I am discussing the tools to integrate with the hotel management system.
The hotel business is not an easy affair. It is not only about taking bookings and hosting guests. There are several more tasks behind the curtain holding similar significance.
We go on to counting them then the list is long. But if we try them Marketing, Staff Management, Property Management, Inventory Management, Sales and Accounting are some of the important tasks.
If any of the tasks are messed up or procrastinated the result if the loss of revenue.
Although a hotelier has so many issues, he also has an equal number of solutions. Thanks to modern tech.
So now a hotelier just has to focus on tools he uses in his hotel. Then he is exposed to a spectrum of opportunities.
This will lead to a better business, with better customer acquisition and revenue generation. So let us list down and discuss some tools a hotelier should have.
ERP
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. This a tools which integrate your various business processes. No matter your hotel is small or big you need your different departments to work in sync.
And that is the job of an ERP. It keeps everything aligned.
Obviously, good hotel management software gives you features to manage all these things but there may be some limitations. ERP will bring a whole new dimension.
Moreover, you can trap all the operations during the whole guest journey in an ERP. When a guest checks in then he interact with different departments of your hotel. So an ERP maintains the record of his activities to ensure his satisfaction.
For example, if he orders a portion of food from his rooms. All the related department like the kitchen and the room service gets the notification.
The kitchen staff updates the status to cooking and once done the status changes to ready for pick up. Now the task is forwarded to the room service department.
When the food is served the status again changes to Done.
This is was the most simple example I can put up. The scope of an ERP in a Hotel goes far long.
CRM
Next in our list of tools to integrate with the hotel management system is a CRM.
CRM stands for Customer Relation Management. This piece of software captures your relationship with the customer.
As I keep mentioning again and again that a happy customer is the best thing you can have. He will keep coming back to you hence generating more sales opportunities. Furthermore, he will create a word of mouth for you.
So for a hotelier, it is very important to create and maintain a customer base.
Ergo, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) builds a comprehensive database containing all information pertaining to the customers. Facilitating the hotels’ long term growth by forging strong ties with the guests.
Channel Manager
This is one of the most important tools for a hotelier.
Hoteliers depend a lot on online bookings these days. The travelers have shifted all of their planning and booking to online platforms.
So to capture these online bookings the hoteliers list their inventory on Online Travel Agencies. OTAs are responsible for most of the online bookings.
Because the inventories of a hotel are listed on several platforms and booking can come from any of them, there is always a threat of overbooking or underbooking.
Let us assume that one of the room gets booked via one of the OTA. Then a user comes and bookes the same room from your website. Then what will you do?
So there is a need for software that manages your inventory on these platforms. A channel manager updates your inventories, prices, and bookings on all the platforms you have listed your rooms on.
So if there a booking on a platform then it decreases the inventory from all the platforms. So that there is no overbooking.
Email Tracking
Email Marketing is at that the core of marketing the digital world. In the past few decades, we have seen several marketing techniques. But emails are still the best performers. And why not? They are the best when it comes to ROI.
Emails have an average ROI of $38 for each $1 spent. And one in five companies reports an ROI of over 70:1.
(source of above info: http://bit.ly/35SG9cf )
So an Email Tracking tool helps to analyze how your emailing campaign is going on.
It answeres some simple questions like whether your guests open the mail or not. Have they clicked the link you share in the mail?
This will help you in understanding how your emails are performing. So that you can modify your mailing content. Or you can remove your inactive subscribers.
Online Payment Gateways
After all the tantrums you want money. But the question is how will you receive it if you do not have a proper tool for that.
Online Payment gateways allow you to collect payments from your customers on online platforms like your website. A payment gateway solves many problems for you. It not only allows you to take online payments but also make sure that they are safe.
Payment Gateways work on their platforms day and night to fight with any kind of internet forgery. They take all the certifications and compliance in order to do the business.
It there are no payment gateways then you will need to take care of all these things.
Conclusion
So this was my list of top 5 tools that you should integrate with your hotel management system. I hope this list will come handy to you. You may agree or disagree with my list but your opinion matters the most. Please drop what you think in the comment box.
At QloApps also we make sure that the system is integrable to any of the tools you require. So there are no limits in the integration part.
If you want to know more about QloApps then read here. And contact the team here.
Thanks for the read.