The Independent Hotelier's Guide to Property Management System Selection

Housekeeping

Housekeeping is often one of the last departments that is consulted during the evaluation and purchase of a hotel property management system. The housekeeping department is often one of the larger departments in a hotel or resort, so providing them with the tools they need to be more efficient not only helps provide better guest service but may also contribute to human resources being used more efficiently and aid in cost reduction.

The primary concerns of the housekeeping department with regards to the property management system is to have access to easily read screens and reports so they know the the status of rooms at any given moment as well as having the ability to easily update room status in the property management system. 

Having a phone system interface offers the housekeepers the ability to update the the room status in the property management system by simply keying in a code on the guest room telephone to set the room status as clean. When the supervisors follow with their inspections, they may then punch in a code to designate the room as inspected.

It is also the responsibility of the housekeeping department to manage out of order guest rooms that need fixes or upgrades to keep them up to standard. Tracking and reporting of maintenance items is essential, as is having the ability to keep a history of these items to spot trends or for future reference.

The ability to track maintenance on common areas such as lobbies, meeting rooms, public washrooms and health club areas is key in keeping those areas up to acceptable standards as well. Keeping service standards high includes the efficient tracking and management of maintaining your hotel and keeping it looking good.

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Reservations

Reservations, evaluation process

The reservations module provides the following general functionality that is expected in a property management system.

• Create a guest reservation.
• Email/print guest registration card.
• Apply a deposit to the reservation.
• Cancel a reservation.
• Process no show reservations.
• Choose a source of business related to the reservation.
  
• Choose a market segment related to the reservation.
  
• Attach Travel Agent information for commission tracking.
• View and change guest address and contact information.
• View or changes arrival and departure dates, length of stay.
• Add, view or change guest notes or requests.
• Select from a variety of room rates and change room rates.
• Reservation Reports

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Front Desk

The front desk module provides the following general functionality that is expected in a property management system.

•  Check in a guest with a reservation.
• Check in a guest without a reservation.
• Print guest registration card.
• Add a charge to the guest account.
• Remove a charge from a guest account.
• Move charges from one guest account to another.
• Move guests from one room to another.
• View and change guest address and contact information.
• View or changes arrival and departure dates, length of stay.
• Add, view or change guest notes or requests.
• Select from a variety of room rates and change room rates.
• Occupancy Reports
• Checkout guests.
• Settle guest accounts.

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Internet Distribution Systems (IDS), what are they?

Internet Distribution Systems are made up of a group of on-line travel sites where individuals or travel companies may make travel related reservations such as hotel bookings.

There are approximately 1900 travel sites and growing, with a few examples of well known travel sites being Hotels.com and Travelocity.

A hotel would generally have a merchant contract setup with specific travel sites and have their inventory available through their GDS/IDS service.

There are travel services that offer a direct link between the property management system and the travel site providing the property management system vendor provides the interface to do so.

Otherwise hotel room inventory may be managed by one of the two following methods.

1. Manually by the hotel where they update their inventory using an extranet and typically login to the extranet via the Internet.
2. Automatically using an interface linking the property management system and the Global Distribution Provider. Not all property management systems provide this interface, however it is becoming more common. Full automation of the procedure is available with a 2 way interface.

Some Property Management Systems vendors provide a 2 way interface that will send up room inventory information to the IDS channels and receive reservations seamlessly from the IDS booking channels. These reservations will transfer directly into the Property Management System.

Other Property Management System vendors are only able to provide a 1 way interface that will only facilitate the transfer of the reservations from the IDS channels into the Property Management System, however the inventory information is not transferred, this would need to managed manually within an extranet.

Managing room inventory manually using an extranet is a very time consuming way to manage inventory. If your property management system vendor offers a GDS/IDS interface, the cost associated with setup and implementation will typically out weigh the labour resources used to update an extranet over time.

Please note that IDS channels are closely related to GDS services and typically (but not always) use the GDS interface as the conduit.

Please read the article relating to Global Distribution Services (GDS) for more information.

property management system evaluation