Today’s hotelier’s work means operating a variety of online tasks. With more than 65% of reservations made online, so many channels available to distribute your hotel services, and online aggregators, it’s especially important to monitor and manage your hotel or resort’s online presence.
NB: This is an article from pickSaaS
Technology provides us with a vast number of tools dedicated to managing hospitality businesses more effectively. Starting with property management software, through channel managers, ending with the software to monitor what people say about your business online.
All of these solutions can turn managing your hotel, resort or simply an AirBnb room into a pleasant, effective process.
But how to make them work right in your hospitality business?
Let’s look into most popular software solutions, tools and automations which can help you manage your hospitality business more effectively.
Software solutions helping global hotel brands be more effective
On the hospitality market, we can distinguish between quite a few technology solutions:
- Booking calendars
Managing the schedule of your guests’ visits is often quite a pain and simple Google Calendar will not work, even for a simple hospitality business.
Hence, integration with software like Airbnb or Booking can truly be relieving. Displaying bookings in one place can save a hotelier a lot of trouble and effort.
Using a simple integrated calendar app like Bedbooking, you’ll be able to easily manage your Booking.com & Airbnb bookings in one place.
- Channel managers
Channel managers have already become an essential part of every hotel’s activity. The more channels you choose for distributing your product, the more burdensome managing them becomes.
There are hundreds of channel managers to choose from, only some of which operate on the global scale. So how to select the best channel management software and what features to look at?
a) Channel integrations
Channel manager should integrate not only with the channels you’re using right now but with the channels you’re planning to use as well. Changing the channel manager later can be costly.
b) Software integrations
Your channel manager should easily integrate with other software you’re currently using in your business.
c) Automation and analytics
Your channel manager should save your time spent on manual tasks, like sending automated booking confirmations and should let you manage your business in an automated way. It should also provide you with insight into your software’s booking data.
- Hospitality management software
If you’re looking for a more advanced software to manage your property in one place, you’d rather focus on more advanced hospitality management solutions.
Full-fledged property management systems will provide you with the vast amount of problem-solving features in one place, including rooms’ management, channel management, booking engine, payment processing & analytics.
With all of that in place, you’re ready to manage your property no matter where you go, using mobile or desktop.
10 Property Management Systems to Consider
Let’s look into some of the property management solutions to support you in your every day’s work.
BedBooking – best for calendar & mobile app
BedBooking is a simple calendar app, letting you sync your calendar reservations from Booking.com & Airbnb, solving one of the most common hotelier’s organizational problems which is visualizing your property’s schedule in one place. It provides an outstanding calendar app which can help you manage everything on the go.
Cloudbeds – best for an advanced property management system
Cloudbeds provides an all-in one property management system to help you in managing your property more effectively. This includes channel manager, booking engine, business analytics, payment processing or guest CRM. The software integrates with many different solutions, including Zapier, letting you set up automated workflows in your business.
Guesty – best for messaging automation
Guesty is an all-in one property management system especially useful for its easily customizable automation. Guesty will let you set up automated messages, depending on the timing or other triggers such as cancellation or changes to the reservation system.
Hostaway – best for booking websites
Hostaway is a booking & property management software, letting you set up a booking website by yourself. Something you should definitely be looking at if you’re a smaller property management business, not able to set up a more advanced custom website.
yieldPlanet – best for channel manager
yieldPlanet provides an effective channel manager, letting you sync between numerous distribution channels in one place. With 400+ channel integrations, it will let you connect with any preferred channel of your choice.
Smoobu – best for dashboard view
Smoobu provides you with some of the most popular features for a hospitality management system but it focuses on making all your reservations available at a glance by using a single cockpit/dashboard.
Stardekk – best for restaurant module
Among software solutions provided by Stardekk, you will also find a restaurant module, letting you manage a restaurant within your hospitality business.
Hotelfriend – best for built-in CRM
Hotelfriend offers an all-in one hotel management solution with the focus on letting your sales team send and manage personalized offers for your hotel services. Another advantage of the software is that it’s free to use in its basic version.
Avail – best for rentals & leases
Avail is the software solution targeted mostly at individuals and businesses managing property rentals & leases. It provides extensive features when it comes to digital lease signing or rent price analytics, letting you dive deeply into the competitiveness of your pricing offer.
Tenant Cloud – best for accounting
Tenant Cloud is another cloud solution to help you in managing your property rental & leases. Even though it’s an all-around software, it provides a vast system to manage your property’s accounting & financials, letting you put the financial aspects of your property business on autopilot.
Tools and automations to help you in your property management
The above are only a few property management systems which can be helpful in your daily job as a hotelier. On the market you will find many more SaaS tools which can help you become more effective, communicate with your customers and internal team better and take your property’s marketing to the excellence level.
Some of the more interesting solutions you might consider using in your property business include:
- LiveChat – a software to chat with customers visiting your booking page
- Buffer – a software to manage and schedule your social media postings
- MailChimp – a software to automate your email marketing campaigns
- Pipedrive – a CRM to handle sales of your hospitality business
- Slack – an obvious-choice tool to help you communicate with teammates at your hotel
What are some of the examples of using software to handle connection and automation between different software solutions?
- Add new guest booking a reservation to your CRM system
(Cloudbeds <> Pipedrive integration) - Add new guest after they finish they stay to marketing mailing campaign
(Cloudbeds <> MailChimp integration) - Notify your team about new sales
(Pipedrive <> Slack integration)
Managing your property business with modern cloud technology
Running a successful property business is quite specific in its nature. It encompasses many different areas and is a lot about the direct contact with your customer. Using the best technology out there will never mean you will suddenly turn your business into a successful one.
However, as long as you take care of your customer’s experience, and have all the foundations in place, the technology can be extremely helpful in growing your hospitality business and saving more time on internal & external communication.
Use the right property management system to manage your bookings more effectively in one place, automate your communication & invoicing, and improve your online visibility. Grow your business and save time using modern cloud technology.
