Before the 1940’s, reservations were booked by mail, telegram, or telephone, and often resulted in lost or forgotten reservations.
NB: This is an article by StayNTouch
Fast forward a couple of decades and some hoteliers are still trying to managing bookings using traditional means, whether its pen and paper, email, forms or something more sophisticated like spreadsheets. However such a process creates extra paperwork and overhead for the hotel, and even the most organized front desk can face discrepancies and lost reservations. If you want to maximize your hospitality business, it’s essential to use reservation software. Moving to a hotel reservation system provides hoteliers with a host of benefits that can improve efficiency and enable you to generate more revenue. Below are a just a few reasons why you should consider investing in one:
Maximize Bookings
Technology is shaping how hotel rooms are found and booked by travellers. In an increasingly connected and automated world, consumers are searching for the best deals and the competition is extremely stiff. To sell rooms to capacity and to appeal to a global audience, an online hotel reservation system is required. Not only does it make your hotel as visible as possible but it plays a central role in the distribution of your product, pricing, live availability, enabling hoteliers to maximise bookings across all booking channels simultaneously, from the hotel’s own website, to OTA’s, GDS, etc. all in real time.
Reduce Errors
The accuracy of bookings in a hotel reservation software is much higher. With a cloud-based hotel reservation system hoteliers can easily manage all inventory and channels via one interface and one platform. This helps to simplify operations by enabling hoteliers to maintain room inventory and rate parity uniformly across all channels via one platform while at the same time reducing errors and minimizing the risk of double or overbooking.
Simplify Operations
As mentioned, a major big benefit of reservation management software is to help simplify operations for your reservations team and improves your efficiency as a business. Availability is updated immediately upon receiving a reservation, not only in your own system, but across all of your channels. Any reservation that is cancelled, or changed, gets updated in real time. Similarly, hoteliers can manage several reservation tasks simultaneously and rooms are automatically allocated to guests using various parameters, such as, cleanliness, availability, occupancy, and so on. A system such as this helps staff save time on administrative tasks allowing them more time to focus on the guest.
Improve Guest Experience
With a hotel reservation system, hoteliers have the ability to collate and retain pertinent guest information and stay history. With a single view capability hotels can access and leverage rich guest data such as time of reservation, channel, guest preferences etc. Optimizing and utilizing this data provides hoteliers with greater opportunities to increase revenues by engage with customers and providing an enhanced and personalized experience.
The dynamics of the hotel business are changing every day to meet the needs of consumers and a reservation system has become a key tool for attracting and retaining hotel guests. A hotel reservation system does more than just book rooms – it organizes reservations and availability, provides a smoother booking experience, improves efficiency and enables to maximize revenue opportunities. With the introduction of newer cloud based systems there is absolutely no longer a need, (or excuse) for hoteliers to go old school. Hoteliers, big and small, now have the chance to avail of affordable, best-in-class technology allowing them to manage their assets more efficiently and generate more revenue.
