Hotels often survive and prosper by virtue of their reputation for looking after their guests and giving them a good experience whenever they come to stay, which is why it makes sense to move with the times and use some modern tools and tech to help you achieve that five-star service standard.
Here is a look at some of the challenges you will likely face managing a modern hotel and a few pointers on how to meet those specific challenges using some of the tools that are now at your disposal.
Making the most of your online presence
As so many potential customers start their search for a hotel online you simply can’t afford to not create the right first impression when someone comes across your website and wants to make a booking.
It’s all very well having a website that contains attractive photos of the rooms and the facilities available at the hotel but that won’t count for much if your website doesn’t make it easy or even possible to book directly through the website.
Your website should be able to liaise with your reservations system to check availability and confirm the dates requested are available, before letting the customer make a booking.
This is one example of how a hotel management system from someone like Mingus Software can help to bring everything together seamlessly. Take a look at your website design and navigation to see whether you are truly making the most of your online presence.
The key to guest satisfaction
If you want to build a lasting hotel legacy a good starting point to achieving the sort of long-term guest satisfaction ratings that allow you to achieve that aim would be to create an efficient hotel management system.
Guest satisfaction involves getting a number of different things right and making sure that everything aligns as perfectly as possible from the moment they make the booking through to checking out after an enjoyable stay at your hotel.
An excellent way to start and end the experience with your guests is to offer a valet service. Having a hotel valet service increases your chances of ending the experience with a smile and shows you want the guests’ stay to be as easy and relaxing as possible. Most hotel valet companies have upgraded technology that makes the process fast and reliable.
There are a lot of things that can potentially go wrong in between the beginning and the end of that process but with an efficient hotel management system, you have a better chance of bringing all of those different components together.
Technology plays a key role but it also involves hotel staff creating a positive impact whenever they interact with guests.
Using data to improve efficiency and performance
A common theme that seems to be found when you look at the reasons why an individual hotel or chain consistently perform well and enjoy good customer feedback is the ability to utilize all the data they have at their disposal to tighten up on weaknesses and identify what it is that makes them so popular with paying guests.
Data is too often an underrated tool when it comes to hotel management but if you can harness and interpret data carefully and successfully this can end up giving your hotel a valuable edge.
Knowing what it costs you to receive bookings from external sites, what your occupancy rates are running at and exactly how much profit you are making from each room each week and month, are just some of the useful data that a software system can be collecting and analyzing in order to let you see where changes can be made if needed.
The advantage of pricing automation
Another good example of how software has the ability to transform your hotel business would be when it comes to using pricing automation as a way of competing against rival hotels for bookings.
Competition is always fierce in many places to attract enough guests to fill the hotel without having to give away a room for a low price that will eat into your profits.
One way of using software to combat this problem would be to have the ability to automate room rates based on the occupancy level. This is a type of booking system successfully used by airlines who sell seats on their planes according to current levels of demand and how quickly their plane is filling up with bookings.
The obvious advantage of being able to automatically adjust your room rates according to demand is that you should be able to generate more revenue when the occupancy is high and help fill rooms by lowering prices when demand is lower.
There is probably no real substitute for giving an excellent and consistent guest experience but it also makes sense to make use of technology to help you do that.