If you want a custom hotel management system to send personalized notifications to your guests, you’re in the right place! This article explains how to create one. For e.g., you can notify your guests about the booking status and room check-in and provide key access once they arrive. Likewise, an effective hotel management system can help you in several ways, such as booking system management, pricing strategy, room inventory, and marketing campaigning. You will also discover how this system can help you take advantage of the newest hotel industry opportunities, enhance your hotel services, and provide high-end user experiences.
Hotel management systems play a crucial role in the operation of any hotel, motel, resort, condo, RV park, or bed and breakfast house. A recent report estimates that the market size of hotel management systems will reach USD 34020 mn by 2028. Owning a dedicated custom software can help you manage important tasks like booking, property maintenance, staff scheduling, custom relationship management, and accounting.
First, let us look at some recent top trends in custom hotel management systems.
Top 3 Trends of Hotel Management System
As an expert custom software development company, we noticed three major trends determining the direction of the entire travel industry. In the coming years, hoteliers will experience considerable disruptions in their hotel management processes and will have to reconsider their outdated approaches.
Helping Yourself With Mobile Apps
As the new generation travels more, they prefer smartphones for bookings. Around 50% of journeys begin with a mobile device. Millennials and Generation Z travel by themselves, and they love using fancy mobile apps to book hotels of their choice. Less than 10% of millennials prefer checking in through hotel lobbies. This means smartphones are becoming an essential part of life. The latest mobile technologies prefer service automation for daily interactions between guests and hotel staff. With a custom hotel management system on a user’s mobile phone, you can provide them with the following benefits:
- Auto notification on room getting ready for check-in
- Ordering exceptional service through mobile
- Self-check-in and check-out without reception formalities
- Sending event reminders
- Getting final bill on the account
- Sharing restaurant menu
- Mobile room key access
- Heating and cooling control
- Online restaurant reservation and pre-order access with menu
- Mobile payment and discount information.
On the other hand, employees will also be less burdened. They will need fewer stationary receptionists, as everything will be executed through a mobile app. Hence, they can focus on enhancing user experiences and providing more personalized services.
Personalized Services
Exhibiting positive responses to customers is the trend. Many marketing specialists are attracted to this strategy. Getting closer to clients can increase their brand loyalty and enhance engagement. Small gestures such as greeting the guests on arrival, serving a good coffee, and providing a silent working area with Wi-fi can create a positive impression. Some of the best personalization tips you can consider while having custom hotel management software are sending birthday cards and welcome emails, sending information about places of interest and electronic maps through email, newsletters with promotions, and asking for post-stay feedback.
More Direct Hotel Over OTA Bookings
Booking hotels through aggregate platforms like Expedia, TripAdvisor, Agoda, etc. provides many benefits to guests. They can plan their entire journeys by choosing their best hotel after comparing prices, discounts, rewards, and comfortable payment options. Using OTAs can boost traffic. It can help you save on commissions and give you the chance to increase customers’ loyalty through direct communication. To provide direct bookings, you can use a custom hotel management system to provide the best-personalized experiences.
Key Features To Consider When Developing Custom Hotel Management System
If you want your staff to get rid of performing the same actions daily and redirect their energies to focus on enhancing guest experiences, you must introduce HMS to them. Your hotel business will start showing excellent operational efficiency as mundane tasks like personnel management and data collection will get automated. Moreover, a robust HMS will aggregate this data and will create insightful reports that will save you time and effort to make informed decisions and getting higher revenue.
So, while building a custom hotel management system, you must focus on the four core areas.
Booking Automation
Online Booking
This feature will determine the occupancy of your rooms. Ensure the ‘book’ button is highly visible on your website and that your app is more intuitive for the reservation process. Once a booking is done, your system should auto-send a guest reservation confirmation. Simultaneously, all guest data, bookings, and payments must be passed to the HMS, where all the staff can view them.
Property Listings
Make sure you can list your hotels and add descriptions, categories, videos, photos, rates, promotions, amenities, and reservation availability.
Reservation Management
When the booking details are received, your system should acknowledge the room occupancy for a definite time period. Your hotel manager must manage all such reservations through a calendar view of the entire image of current bookings.
Channel Manager
You may use multiple methods to boost traffic and bookings. However, promoting your services via OTAs and other affiliate channels is the most common. The problem with working with such channels is it becomes challenging to keep an eye on each marketing strategy and keep changing prices to attract guests. This may also impact the brand’s reputation. With a robust hotel management system, you can connect it to the OTAs and GDS. Eventually, the channel manager feature will provide several opportunities for rate synchronization, multiple channel connection, commission accounting, and rule setting.
Guest Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management
With this feature, you can help hotels collect a variety of information in the electronic system without losing any data. HMS and CRM integration will collect data like user contacts, room preferences, payment details, guest types, booking methods, total guest spending, etc. All this information can be used for analytics, loyalty campaigns, statistical reports, and personalized services.
Notifications and Confirmations
When guests are in your hotel, you can send notifications for pre-stay, during the stay, and post-stay to keep in touch with them.
Bills and Invoices
With this feature, you can generate and print bills and invoices for customers and use them for internal purposes. Your HMS system must be able to show different types of information, such as payment details, the state of each transaction, etc. Most modern systems are well integrated with various secure payment methods.
Human Resources Management
HR Management
You can monitor all employee interactions when your HMS is integrated with HR Management. Other benefits include managing tasks, tracking time, and recording information about sick leaves, days off, etc.
Housekeeping Management
This feature will regulate your guest relationships and organize housekeeping tasks. Unlike traditional methods, where managers need to connect with maids and technicians over the radio, mobile apps will directly assign tasks and track their performance. The staff will view the status and ensure it gets completed.
Revenue Management
Revenue management is an essential element when deciding prices and creating marketing campaigns. It is a technique for calculating and anticipating situations that fetch higher revenues. With this feature implemented into your hotel management system, you can forecast customer behavior, determine the ideal time to sell, compare SWOT, optimize prices, and position your brand with competitors. A robust HMS can also help you analyze precisely through several other internal features.
Integral System Integration
When you create an HMS with dynamic UI/UX designs, you can indeed integrate it with other internal systems to manage various other facilities, such as gyms, bars, restaurants, and conference halls. Automated hotel management systems will track your hotel services and create final bills with all payments.
Integral System Integration
When you create an HMS with dynamic UI/UX designs, you can indeed integrate it with other internal systems to manage various other facilities, such as gyms, bars, restaurants, and conference halls. Automated hotel management systems will track your hotel services and create final bills with all payments.
Reports
A custom hotel management system will harness this feature to its maximum level. Using the entire range of data collected during the hotel’s lifetime, you can aggregate it and generate reports to get a clear vision of your hotel business. You can also check your hotel’s progress or anomalies and take necessary actions.
How To Apply This In Your Development Process
To build a custom hotel management system is a complex task, and you need expert mobile app development services to create one. You will need to hire a dedicated software developers team who are professionals in their areas and will provide you with a flawless software development process. Generally, the process is as follows:
Identifying Hotel Needs
Determine hotel requirements and analyze issues, finding suitable solutions. Asking several questions related to guest experiences will help you determine the exact hotel needs.
Designing Software Architecture
Create a robust software architecture that includes user interface, data flow, and other technical elements at the front and back ends. Ensure the architecture is scalable and flexible to changing demands.
Start Development Process
Start building the hotel management system by creating databases, writing code, and creating a user interface. Choose the best technology stack that provides easy-to-use, intuitive navigation and seamless functionality.
Test Software
Test your final HMS and ensure it is free of bugs and errors by using automated and manual testing techniques on your software.
Deploy Software
Deploy your software in hotel operations and monitor its performance to make necessary adjustments according to changing business requirements.
Maintain and Update Software
Update and maintain your software after deployment to continue providing your clients with services. Check for errors and issues and fix them to ensure software scalability and functionality.
Conclusion
A perfect custom hotel management software can streamline your hotel management operations dramatically. It can improve overall profitability and can meet all your business needs. So, do you need a robust, tailored hostel management system for your thriving hotel business? At Whitelotus Corporation, we are the top experts in developing aggressive hotel management systems with custom software architecture and features according to your hotel needs. Contact with our experts today to make your hotel business a grand success!
