A common misconception is that if you run a small hotel, you can do everything on your own and that you don’t need much technology to run your business.
This can’t be further from the truth—Small hotels face the same challenges as their bigger counterparts, just on a smaller scale.
You also need to manage reservations and ensure efficient daily operations while catering to guests’ needs and satisfaction, right?
The key to successfully streamlining these processes lies in leveraging powerful tools, such as hotel management software.
Not sure if you’d benefit from it? Read on to find out more about this robust software for small hotel management.
Let’s dive in!
What is Hotel Management Software(HMS)?
Simply put, hotel management software helps you streamline your daily operations.
It brings together different hotel departments and services in one place, acting as the central hub for all hotel activities.
Hotel management software covers all hotel front and back office hotel operations, such as:
- Reservation management,
- Room assignment,
- Housekeeping management,
- Point of sale (POS) integration,
- Billing and invoicing,
- Guest management, and
- Reporting and analytics.
Thanks to its robust functionalities, automation of the hotel operations leads to faster and more accurate task completion.
8 Main Types of Hotel Management Software
Hotel management software comprises multiple solutions for the seamless running of your hotel. Each solution caters to different aspects of hotel operations:
✨ Property Management System (PMS)—Represents the core of hotel operations, managing tasks like reservations, check-ins, check-outs, room assignments, billing, etc.
✨ Booking Engine—Enables guests to book rooms directly through your hotel’s website, eliminating the need for third-party booking platforms.
✨ Channel Manager—Conversely, the Channel Manager helps you manage your availability and rates across various OTAs and booking platforms to maximize reach.
✨ Customer Relationship Management (CRM)—Helps you track guest preferences, manage loyalty programs, and personalize guest communications.
✨ Revenue Management Software—Assists you in optimizing pricing strategies based on demand, occupancy rates, and competitor pricing to maximize your revenue.
✨ Point of Sale (POS)—Handle transactions at various hotel outlets such as restaurants, bars, gift shops, etc.
✨ Housekeeping Management Software Streamlines housekeeping operations by assigning tasks to staff, tracking room cleanliness status, and ensuring timely turnarounds.
✨ Inventory Management—Helps efficiently manage and track hotel assets, supplies, and consumables.
? ProTip:
Although initially, you may not need all the options but rather a single functionality, it would be a good idea to immediately look for software for small hotel management that comprises all or most of the functionalities.
As your business grows, so will the demand, and being able to implement the system to digitalize your hotel’s operations immediately, will give you a competitive advantage.
For example, with OTA SYNC, you can address the full hotel management rather than a single functionality.
This way, you’ll get a clear overview of all the operations without switching tabs or using separate tools to achieve the same.
How Can Hotel Management Software Improve Your Business in 8 Amazing Ways?
Instead of just listing the benefits of the hotel management system, let’s get practical and check the actual ways in which the software can boost your hotel’s management.
1. Automate Operational Tasks
Imagine the following scenario: a guest is checking out of a hotel room.
Without the HMS, meaning without automation, the front desk staff would:
- Manually update the room status,
- Check the minibar consumption,
- Calculate the bill and
- Update the room’s availability for cleaning.
The emphasis here is on manually. However, with the HMS in place, here’s how automation would go:
✅ Room Status Update—When the guest checks out, the software automatically changes the room status from occupied to vacant in the PMS.
✅ Minibar Consumption— The system tracks minibar consumption and automatically adds these charges to your guest’s bill based on predefined rates.
✅ Billing—The system calculates the final bill for the guest, including room charges, minibar consumption, additional services used during the stay, and any discounts or loyalty points.
✅ Availability Update—Once the room is vacant, the HMS updates the room availability in real-time on your website, booking engine, and OTAs through the Channel Manager.
✅ Housekeeping Notification—The system notifies the housekeeping staff to clean the room, ensuring efficient turnover for the next guest.
The emphasis here is on automatically.
Thus, the HMS saves time, reduces human error, improves efficiency, and enhances the overall guest experience.
Moreover, it allows your staff to focus on delivering exceptional service rather than getting bogged down in administrative tasks.
2. Minimize The Chance of Overbookings
Channel Manager, one of the cornerstones of hotel management software, ensures all your advertising channels, such as OTAs, GDS systems, and your website, are in sync.
What does that mean in practice?
When a guest books a room through an OTA, the channel manager instantly updates the room availability across all connected channels.
For instance, if someone books a room on Booking.com, the channel manager immediately reduces the available room count on other channels and your hotel’s website.
Since the channel manager monitors real-time availability and automatically syncs changes across all channels, the risk of overbooking is minimal.
? Furthermore, you can even set thresholds for each room type.
When the available rooms reach a predefined threshold, the system can stop further bookings for that room type to prevent overbookings.
? In case of any discrepancies or issues with inventory updates, the channel manager can alert the hotel staff immediately to address the problem promptly.
? ProTip:
OTA SYNC’s Channel Manager has a 2-way connection and integrates natively with the PMS and Booking Engine, so it syncs all prices and bookings across all sales channels and on your site.
3. Increase Online Visibility
The Channel Manager isn’t only handy for syncing all the booking info, but it is also a great asset for promoting your hotel online and expanding reach.
Thanks to its integration possibilities, the good Channel Manager can connect your property to a great number of OTAs, GDS systems, metasearch engines, etc.
? Advertising your hotel on high-traffic platforms will expand your reach and visibility, allow you to tap into new markets, and increase bookings and occupancy rates.
? Furthermore, multi-channel distribution allows you to integrate with international and niche OTAs, attract guests from different regions, and target specific traveler segments.
? ProTip:
With OTA SYNC, you can easily integrate with major OTAs to drive bookings from diverse sources and improve revenue streams.
For even more customization, you can use our iCal link generator to share calendar data smoothly across different platforms and apps.
4. Boost Direct Bookings
Another potent “weapon” for increasing your hotel’s booking rate is your website.
The biggest perk is that you don’t have to pay any commissions, as you do for OTAs.
By the way, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use OTAs but rather combine all the resources you have for a maximal impact.
? But getting back to direct bookings—The Booking Engine allows you to create and customize the booking page to align with your brand and raise brand awareness.
? Furthermore, direct booking is also beneficial for your guests because they can immediately see availability for selected dates.
Thus, they only need to fill in the necessary reservation data and book their stay in your hotel.
? ProTip:
OTA SYNC’s Booking Engine offers a user-friendly interface for visitors to check room availability, view pricing, and complete secure bookings in real time.
You can also customize system branding with your logo and colors and customize booking forms, emails, invoices, and settings to make your brand recognizable.
5. Maximize Revenue
Same as the Channel Manager, the Booking Engine also has more than one functionality.
Besides being an excellent assistant in sending direct bookings your way, you can use it as an additional source of revenue.
The Booking Engine enables you to upsell or cross-sell additional services and offer special promotions, discounts, promo codes, etc.
? ProTip:
For example, OTA SYNC allows you to sell additional services or amenities and use promotional and discount codes to say “thank you” or attract new guests with promotional offers.
6. Streamline Financial Management
At the core of any hotel management software is automation.
In addition to automation of everyday operations, the HMS also automates financial management by providing solutions to:
- Generate various invoices directly from the system
- Track expenses
- Send payment reminders.
Furthermore, many hotel management systems integrate with accounting software, allowing for seamless transfer of financial data such as revenue, expenses, and tax.
? A great benefit regarding financial management is that the HMS can integrate with payment gateways.
They facilitate secure online payments, manage pre-authorizations, and process refunds efficiently to simplify payment handling.
? OTA Payments, for instance, is such a system—It allows you to instantly process transactions securely and automatically charge virtual credit cards.
As a result, you can add to the guest checkout experience.
Moreover, OTA SYNC operates in over 150 countries and supports multiple currencies, with automatic daily exchange rate updates.
7. Get Valuable Actionable Insights From Reports
Naturally, financial management is inseparable from analytics and reports.
Thus, integrations with accounting systems facilitate financial reporting and ensure consistency between operational and financial records.
Furthermore, the HMS reporting functions provide insights into revenue performance, occupancy rates, average daily rate (ADR), and total revenue generated per period.
Besides revenue reports, the HMS generates detailed financial reports, including profit and loss statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and occupancy reports.
All these reports should help you identify areas for improvement and make informed business decisions.
?ProTip:
Did you know that OTA SYNC offers advanced revenue, finance, and in-hotel reports for a comprehensive overview of your hotel’s financial health and performance metrics?
Additionally, you can get any report by email at your desired frequency without logging on to the system and adjusting the parameters manually.
8. Improve Guest Communication
Hotel management software can significantly enhance guest communication because it enables you to:
- Personalize interactions,
- Streamline messaging processes and
- Provide efficient ways to engage with guests before, throughout, and after their stay.
Even more importantly, it shows that going digital doesn’t have to mean going cold or impersonal.
Truth be told, I have the feeling that embracing digital methods has sparked our creativity to come up with tools to make guests feel at home.
So, how can you break the ice with your guests?
? ProTip:
OTA SYNC’s Guest App checks all the boxes above and enables you to adapt to your Guests’ needs and personalize their stay by providing:
- Quick check-ins,
- Tailored recommendations, and
- Instant notifications to create meaningful interactions and address their needs promptly.
What’s more, with automated welcome, thank-you, and a variety of other automated messages, you can enhance their overall experience from booking to post-stay feedback.
How Can OTA SYNC Help You Improve Your Hotel Management?
There is a special power in having greater and more flexible control over your hotel, knowing that you can:
- Easily control all functions in the overview system and
- Use your time more efficiently.
OTA SYNC, an all-encompassing software for small and big hotel management, can do just that and help you:
? View all your bookings and multiple properties on a single dashboard to have real-time updates and status.
? Handle recurring invoices, split billing, and invoicing for group bookings seamlessly to facilitate financial management.
? Benefit from dynamic pricing and optimize prices depending on seasonality, holidays, special dates, occupancy rates, etc., to maximize revenue.
? Rest assured knowing your sensitive data is secure due to our fully PCI DSS- compliant system, backed by tokenization, end-to-end encryption, and other security standards.
? And the list goes on.
Ready to test OTA SYNC?
Try OTA SYNC for free and uncover the ways to transform how you manage and grow your small hotel business.
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