Have you ever wondered how hotels price their rooms or ensure that they don’t double-book guests? Every traveler is used to the concept of booking a hotel for the night – you’ve all been on various websites and gone through the process of finding an available room, selecting any add-ons, and paying for your stay. It all goes by smoothly, but did you know there’s hidden technology at work behind the scenes?
Everything is managed via software nowadays, and the hotel industry usually has four core pieces that every business needs:
- Property Management Systems (PMS)
- Booking Engines
- Booking Engine Analytics
- Revenue Management Systems (RMS)
Property Management Systems (PMS)
Your PMS is the beating heart of these operations. Anyone who runs a hotel business will know how valuable this technology is in the modern era. With a hotel property management system, you can effectively run the entire business and see everything from a bird ’s-eye view. It’s capable of letting hotel owners see the following:
- How many rooms are available at any given time
- All the current guests and their check-in/check-out times
- The status of housekeeping services throughout the hotel
- Any upselling opportunities to deliver to guests or people looking to book
- All money paid or owed by guests
- Any cancellations from people who’ve booked
- Any special requests a guest has put in
As you can see, it basically lets you do everything. You can manage the entire property and ensure that all of your guests have a great time. For people staying in hotels, the next time you make a booking or send the team a message, just know that it probably all goes through the PMS.
Furthermore, hotel teams can use the PMS to handle common tasks. It’s normally responsible for creating key cards to issue to guests when they arrive. When someone checks in or out, the person behind the desk will handle this via the property management system. Best of all, modern systems are designed with AI technology to help handle the load. This allows hotels to automate lots of processes, for example:
- Send an automatic notification when a guest checks out so the cleaning team knows which rooms to tend to.
- Automatically send out welcome emails as soon as a guest books a room or checks in.
- Automatically send out feedback forms when a guest checks out
You can imagine the possibilities, but it all happens behind the scenes and allows guests to book rooms and manage their stay with ease.
Booking Engines
Let’s imagine someone is planning a family getaway and they want to book a hotel room for a few nights. The guest will either go directly to the hotel’s website or use an online travel agency – in either case, they encounter a booking engine.
Booking engines are the main piece of front-end technology for hotel businesses. They’re what every guest interacts with, and the purpose of this software is simple: it lets people see room availability and pricing options so they can book their stay. Every modern hotel has one of these – and it usually syncs with a PMS to provide the following:
- Live updates of room availability
- Live pricing options based on room demand
- The ability for guests to make special requests or add things to their rooms
Some small hotels or B&Bs can get away with just having a booking engine, as they don’t have enough rooms to warrant buying a PMS. Booking engines are immensely powerful and will tell hotel owners a lot about guests or prospective leads. They also make the hotel booking experience much easier for everyone – there’s no longer any need for people to phone hotels and ask for rooms; it’s much simpler.
Booking Engine Analytics
As good as booking engines are, hotels won’t get the most out of them without hotel direct booking metrics. In simple terms, this refers to the analytics data a hotel gets from its booking engine. You receive this by using booking engine analytics software, and it can provide all the following metrics for you:
- The number of times a guest looks for availability via your booking engine
- How many visitors land on your hotel website and then go to the bookings page
- How many website visitors end up reserving a room
- How long the average guest books a room
- How many guests book breakfast along with their rooms
- How long it takes for website visitors to book a reservation
- How much money you earn from total bookings
The right platform can do so much more, but you get the idea. It’s a tool that connects to both your website and the booking engine to make sense of everything that’s going on. In fact, most hotel businesses rely on booking engine analytics to break free from the grip of online travel agencies. As you may or may not be aware, OTAs charge for their services, which means hotels don’t maximize their profits when using them.
The goal is, therefore, to secure as many direct bookings as possible – and good booking engine analytics software helps businesses achieve that. If a hotel can understand demand and work out the best way to source guests and secure more bookings, then it will slowly be able to remove itself from the various OTA websites.
Revenue Management Systems (RMS)
Lastly, you have revenue management systems, which handle the financial side of things. Despite being the simplest piece of software out of the four, it’s also one of the most important. The RMS will track and manage hotel prices in real time so everyone can see how much rooms cost at any given moment.
It’s why one day a room could cost $100, but the next it goes up to $125.
Revenue management systems can also track competitors and provide forecasting, so hotels maintain competitive pricing all year round. Without this technology, a hotel would simply keep pricing the same at all times, which would negatively impact both it and its guests.
Evidently, there’s more technology than most people realize when it comes to booking hotel rooms. The most interesting thing about all of this is that today’s software solutions are beneficial to everyone involved. Hotels can secure more bookings and implement better pricing strategies while guests get to book rooms easily and enjoy discounts or more convenience.
Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash
