You run your hotel beautifully, crafting wonderful experiences for guests – whether they are joining you for business or pleasure. But in today’s digital age, industries of all kinds are looking to the future and considering how they can use data to optimise and enhance their market position. The hotel and hospitality industries are certainly no exceptions.
In fact, the need for a strong digital strategy is even more acute in these industries, largely because of the profound impact that Covid-19 has had in the sector. Revenue for UK hotels has declined year on year throughout the pandemic and beyond due to government restrictions, public fears, and a flagging tourism sector. While a strong rise is predicted for the 2022-2023 season and in the coming years, it will take the right digital setup to navigate these enormous shifts in the industry.
So what does this digital setup look like? Let’s take a look at seven tools your hotel business needs today – tools that you can start using immediately to revolutionise your business.
Property Management System
Hotels generate huge amounts of admin, all of which needs to be taken care of if the business is to run smoothly. From handling occupancy levels and setting rates to taking care of internal and external reservations, hotel teams have traditionally found themselves busy with a wide variety of tasks – many of which require high levels of data accuracy. Property Management Systems, or PMS, are overarching digital solutions designed to lessen this workload and to guarantee precision and reliability across the board.
Booking Engine
Integrating with your PMS is the booking engine – essentially the driving force behind reservations and revenue for your hotel business. You need to make it easy for your guests to make bookings. At the same time, you need to make it easy for your teams to process and receive payments. The booking engine supports both of these things, feeding data directly into the PMS via secure integration.
Channel Manager
You might receive bookings directly from your website, or you might work with a travel aggregator platform and gain reservations this way. On the other hand, you may work with travel agents and other partners who send bookings your way. This leads to a confusing situation at best, and double-bookings, lost revenue, and poor customer service at worst. Your channel manager solution – which again will integrate with your PMS – cuts through this confusion and avoids negative repercussions.
Reputation Management Platform
As a client-facing business, your reputation is critical. Your reputation management platform, or RMP, automatically monitors reviews left around the web, so you can respond to any of those that need attention. Staying on top of reputation in this way can help you turn bad publicity into a shining example of customer service.
Customer Relationship Management Solution
While reputation management focuses on past customers, a customer relationship management (CRM) solution is more immediate, helping to ensure that guests receive an experience that exceeds expectations. A great piece of CRM software brings together data from customer interactions across multiple sources, analysing and assessing this data to identify where the experience can be improved.
Enterprise Resource Planning
ERP systems help your hotel to boost efficiency when it comes to resources so that you always have everything you need to operate your hotel effectively. The system ensures that resources are not over- or under-ordered, while great solutions will integrate with ordering portals and supplier inventory data to further enhance operations.
Revenue Management System
Revenue operations, or RevOps, are vital to the success of a hotel – but these operations are dependent on vast amounts of data. This is where a great revenue management system can make all the difference, utilising predictive algorithms to optimise pricing based on current performance as well as competitor activity. Solutions like Lybra Assistant RMS achieve this in real time, and they can also integrate with distribution channels to further streamline the process.
System Integration Is Key to Successful Hotel Management
Integration of the above mentioned systems systems allows for the free flow of data between them, which can increase efficiency and improve the quality of service provided to customers and the efficiency of strategic operations. Using integrated systems for hotel operations can save time, reduce costs, and provide a better guest experience. Integration also improves accuracy and consistency in operations, as well as providing an easy-to-use interface for staff to access the information they need. It also allows for improved automation, which can reduce manual labor and free up staff to focus on providing excellent customer service.
Therefore it is very important that digital tools used for the management of any hotel are chosen always keeping in mind integration between them.
Explore Lybra’s Revenue Management System and Learn More About Its Benefits
Lybra Assistant RMS is a cutting edge Revenue Management System providing advanced information and rate and availability management features to hoteliers. It is also integrated with the most popular hotel management software used by hoteliers worldwide!
Discover how Lybra Assistant RMS can help you optimise your hotel business – book your demo today.
