Until recently, the advantages of a single enterprise solution executing all the functionality of your hotel technology could be justifiably argued.
A single system providing everything from reservations through check-out would ideally minimize the number of different user interfaces for staff and reduce the potential for errors in data storage and processing.
The idea of a functional enterprise system from a single vendor — offering a booking engine, PMS, CRM, RMS and channel management, for example — means that there is only one user interface, one database and one support number to call.
On the flipside, one could argue that advancements in hotel technology, particularly cloud computing, have all but eliminated the advantages of a single enterprise solution.
First, it’s hard to envision a one-size-fits-all solution that appeals to hotels of all shapes and sizes. Additionally, nobody is confident that one provider is able to match best practices for specialized products in the fields of property, guest, channel and revenue management.
Simply put: You can’t be the best at all things. If you have a single provider that does everything for you, there’s little chance it can do everything well.
So smart hoteliers are considering a hybrid approach, consisting of many different solutions all plugged into the same centralized, cloud-based platform.
This type of setup fixes three things immediately:
- The number of integrations is greatly reduced
- Guest and transactional data is centralized, not replicated or broken
- All applications can move to the cloud, saving hosting and hardware costs
A best-of-breed approach also solves for gaps in a software suite, where a provider might be proficient in channel management, for example, but lack sophistication in revenue management.
