No matter what size your hotel property is, managing any kind of real estate requires time, effort, and resources. Hotel owners must diligently track all operations, from accounting, reservation, onboarding, and managing guest data to administration, marketing, and sales.
Since your goal is to make your hotel business as effective as possible while keeping an ever-watchful eye on competitors, you should tap into the power of modern technology to digitize and automate daily operations and hotel property management.
Fortunately, the solution to all your problems is to use multi-property hotel management software (PMS). Today, we’ll delve deeper into this software and explain its essential features, cost, and how it can benefit your hotel business.
What is multi-property management software?
Multi-property management software for hotel chains is a system of applications for managing the operations of hotel businesses. Hotel owners use multi-property hotel management systems to manage daily operations, administration, and revenue forecasts.
The PMS software solutions allow you to schedule and organize your accommodation capacity according to your needs and guest demand. PMS acts as a central solution, allowing users across operations, administration, sales, and management branches to access critical business and revenue data spread across multiple hotels and departments.
A multi-property management software for hotel groups caters exclusively to hotel managers and owners, including resorts, hostels, motels, and the like. In the past, a hotel PMS was nothing more than a software solution that enabled hotel owners to eliminate mundane, spreadsheet-heavy, and time-intensive tasks and optimize front-office services.
However, the new era of SaaS and cloud platforms took things to a whole new level. Today, multi-property hotel management software brings advanced features for managing every aspect of your hotel business operations. That includes sales, revenue management, forecasts, room rate management, room assignment, check-in/check-out, reservations, accounting, onboarding, room service, and more.
Although hotel management systems used to require heavy investments in on-premise hardware, that’s not the case anymore. You now have a mind-bending selection of user-friendly, affordable hotel PMS solutions at your fingertips.
The role of PMS in the hospitality industry
Solutions like PMS systems are vital to the hospitality industry and hotel management. They enable hotel managers, owners, and business organizations to automate management, administrative, and front-office tasks.
Thanks to the power of automation, hotels can save up to 70% and shift those savings elsewhere to launch their operations sky-high. All PMS solutions include core features for housekeeping, front-desk operations, reservation, etc.
In addition, they also include an array of functionalities that promote specialized services and personalized guest experiences.
What are the key features of a multi-property management system?
The latest, most advanced multi-property management software for hotel chains allows you to combine multiple work environments in a unique hotel management solution that can cater to your every need.
Depending on your business objectives, such a solution can offer all-encompassing functionalities for handling every business-relevant operation. Let’s delve deeper into the essential features a PMS system should have.
Front-desk operations and reservations
A PMS solution should allow for various integrations across multiple distribution channels. It should be easily integrable with your website booking engine and reservation service to help you organize your booking dates and inventory data accordingly.
A user-friendly and convenient user interface with easy-to-navigate dashboards helps you manage upcoming and current hotel reservations by checking room status and availability, tracking guests, monitoring reservations, and serving guests according to their demands.
These features perform a wide variety of tasks, such as:
● Automating the process of checking in and out;
● Central sales;
● Managing inquiries and rates;
● Tracking inventory and revenue per room and optimizing ARR;
● Issuing key cards;
● Tracking room allocation;
● Managing room-related demands;
● Processing payments;
● Issuing receipts to guests;
● Conducting night and shift audits.
The tasks mentioned here are just the tip of the iceberg compared to what the PMS system can do.
Distribution channel management
Hotel businesses should promote their services across multiple online distribution channels to ensure they reach wider audiences. That’s where the PMS system comes in.
It allows you to accumulate booking and reservation arrangements across multiple sources, such as travel agents, airlines, corporate clients, mobile applications, travel websites, and your official website.
The multi-property hotel management software ensures your hotel business gets all the online visibility it needs to thrive and grow. You can use it to expand your reach across the web and manage your business across multiple communication channels, social media networks, websites, etc.
In addition, top-grade PMS solutions are compatible with integrations for global distribution systems (GDSs) and online travel agencies (OTAs). These integrations allow you to get your hotel services and arrangements to third-party booking partners, hospitality platforms and forums, etc.
You can also use the PMS system to organize your workforce according to your property needs. For example, an online channel manager controls the distribution channels, while a centralized booking software manages direct sales and associated transactions.
Instead of wasting time on manual management, you can let the software do all the hard work regarding booking transactions while you handle essential tasks. Aside from that, the PMS software connects all your services and systems to a single, centralized interface.
Whether you need to manage your inventory, handle reservations, or synchronize bookings, the PMS software will tackle all these tasks in real time. It also provides regular updates on the number of guests, upcoming reservations, current bookings, room availability, trending promotions, current hotel rates, discounts, and so on.
Point-of-Sale (POS) services
Most hotel businesses offer additional services for guests, such as in-house dining, beverages, in-room services, mini-bar items, spas, gyms, etc. Since these additional amenities require multiple payment terminals, you need a user-friendly, efficient point-of-sale (POS) system to collect and manage financial transactions from various sources.
POS is one of the essential PMS features for hotel businesses because it allows your hotel staff to include discounts or additional charges on the final bill for individual guests.
More importantly, a comprehensive POS system can do many things to improve your financial management, including:
● Automate payment processing;
● Gather financial data in one place;
● Generate sales reports;
● Collect guest data about spending habits.
Maintenance and housekeeping
Hotels need regular maintenance and housekeeping to ensure their guests have the best experience possible. Thankfully, you can handle these tasks easily with the PMS software. The housekeeping functionality allows you to track housekeepers’ tasks, schedule assignments for room cleaning, and manage room statuses.
The PMS software automates maintenance tasks and connects the front office to the housekeeping department. The software will send notifications when it identifies rooms that need maintenance and housekeeping services before accommodating the next guests to arrive.
It creates a maintenance schedule and assigns tasks to the responsible employees automatically. Front office staff will receive regular updates on the status of each room to organize maintenance reports and enable the housekeeping staff to update the status of each task upon completion.
If any problems arise, your staff will be able to act as quickly as possible and mitigate the situation on time. Thanks to the maintenance and housekeeping, you can:
● Track maintenance requests and create reports with status updates;
● Manage maintenance reports;
● Record hotel disruptions;
● Schedule repairs;
● Organize and plan maintenance operations.
Revenue management
The hotel PMS software should include a hotel revenue management feature for easily and safely analyzing, managing and tracking your payments and hotel revenues. You can develop a revenue management system to manage outstanding charges, track transactions, instantly validate non-payment and debit/credit card details, and accept online payments.
In addition, PMS empowers you to implement data-driven, flexible, and scalable revenue management strategies by tracking and analyzing revenue per average daily rate (ADR), room availability, occupancy, and other critical performance indicators.
Aside from helping you cut down costs and manage revenues, the PMS software also analyzes historical data to give you actionable insights on local events, current market demands, weather, and competitors’ pricing strategies for determining optimal rates.
Hoteliers use multi-property PMS solutions to manage revenues across multiple accommodation properties. They allow them to tap into dedicated pricing tools and automation to make timely adjustments to room prices across all distribution channels and create promotions, special packages, one-time offers, and discounts.
Customer relationship management (CRM)
It’s paramount to maintain healthy relationships with your customers. Thankfully, the PMS software keeps you connected with your guests and allows you to communicate with them before, during, and after their stay.
You can use the PMS software to communicate with your guests across preferred communication channels, gather feedback, answer their questions, and resolve inquiries. The CRM functionality is fully integrable with your PMS, reservation, and front-desk systems.
It allows you to gather guest data, organize data sources, and analyze guest contact information to drive actionable insights regarding the most effective loyalty programs, membership packages, and marketing strategies.
Loyalty rewards are essential for hotel resorts and chains as they generate additional revenue sources. Every hotel has loyal, returning, and highest-paying guests. Since CRM’s main functionality is to gather guest data on their spending patterns, you can use that data to create generous loyalty rewards for your guests and improve your cross-sell and upsell efforts.
A CRM loyalty program helps hoteliers maximize guest engagement and retention by offering rewards and incentives to both new and current customers, thus encouraging them to keep returning.
Reporting and analytics
Timely, accurate, agile, and comprehensive reporting helps you ensure steady hotel business prosperity and growth.
Depending on the PMS solution you opt for, your property management system can provide various types of analytics.
More importantly, it can automate the process of reporting, including:
● Housekeeping;
● Arrival and departure;
● Tax reports;
● Room reports;
● Shift audit and night audit reports.
The reporting PMS feature also helps you track your inventory, reservations, bookings, and revenue streams.
The insights you gather from these operations can help you create an all-encompassing perspective of your hotel performance daily, weekly, monthly, and annually.
Finally, this feature helps you ensure compliance with local and federal tax reporting regulations and requirements.
Back-office management
The back-office management feature allows hoteliers to optimize and streamline administration, back-office hotel, and accounting processes, such as reconciliation. Since PMS is a fully automated system, it offers auto-reconciliation features with dashboarding, reporting, and internal controls to help your hotel staff ensure your general accounts are complete, accurate, and consistent.
Since manual reconciliations are prone to human error, the PMS auto-reconciliation empowers your staff to handle accounting and financial data without the risk of errors, data format discrepancies, duplicated information, and other inaccuracies.
In addition to automation and auto-reconciliation, the back-office management covers a range of operations:
● Human resources management;
● Staff invoicing;
● Shift management;
● Catering and event management;
● Internal messaging;
● Assets management;
● Inventory analysis;
● Room management;
● Consumption costs;
● Hotel spending analysis;
● Sales management;
In addition, the back-office management includes basic accounting services that help hoteliers ensure financial compliance with the latest statutory, legal, and safety requirements. Bad accounting can lead to overpaid taxes, fines, and legal issues. By using top-grade PMS software, you can track your income and expenses and ensure your business stays compliant.
Top benefits of using a multi-property hotel management system
Here are the biggest advantages of using a modern PMS solution for your multi-property hotel business.
Streamline check-in/check-out
A mobile-enabled, cloud-based hotel management software allows your front-desk employees to expedite the process of checking in and out, offer guest services on the go, assign rooms remotely, etc.
Increased maintenance efficiency
Your PMS sends real-time alerts to responsible employees for room maintenance to notify them of the next arriving guest. The staff can rely on those alerts to prepare the rooms for newly arriving guests and provide reports when guests check out.
Gather guest data in one place
The hotel management software keeps all business-relevant data in one centralized location. All employees get 24/7 access to accurate and up-to-date guest data with options to track and make updates to all relevant databases across multiple property locations.
In addition, the PMS software connects all your properties and enables your staff to collaborate more effectively from any location.
Improved revenue management
PMS can help any revenue management solution get data that will help in revenue optimization based on historic and forecast data, which can be combined with regional data, and even based data to predict better revenue opportunities.
Since PMS software solutions come with pre-built integrations, leverage them to payment processors, POS systems, payment gateways, and accounts payable/receivable.
You can also use PMS to gather competitive intelligence and tap into advanced reporting and analytics to enhance your day-to-day hotel operations.
Better guest data management
Multi-property PMS amasses and keeps all guest data in a secure location. It makes all guest data always accessible and easily retrievable. You can use this advanced data management to ensure compliance with the latest data privacy regulations, protect guest data, create detailed guest profiles, and more.
The PMS software helps you understand your guests and their spending habits to develop better, more targeted hotel services. These services make your hotel business stand out from your competitors as they allow you to meet guest expectations with highly-targeted offers that cater to guest preferences and bring real value.
The PMS software gathers guest data to help you gain a 360-degree view of your guests, including their preferences, expectations, demands, requirements, needs, and more. Since modern-day hotel guests want to tap into various activities across your property, you can capture their actions, link them back to individual guests, and tailor your marketing and sales efforts to drive profits.
Instead of wasting time, effort, and resources on gathering data from disparate operating systems and customer profiles that could lead you to false guest behavioral insights, harness the power of PMS to create a 360-degree view of your guests and discover new opportunities to leverage advanced reports and analytics.
Enhanced guest experience
Your hotel business depends on the quality of your services. Multi-property PMS automates the administration and daily operations, allowing your hotel staff to provide consistent services to guests.
However, it can do more for your business by providing insights into guest preferences and gathering feedback for analysis to help you ensure more enjoyable guest experiences.
How much does a multi-property hotel management system cost?
Pricing for cloud-based multi-property hotel management system solutions typically depends on how many properties you want to manage. Most PMS solutions provide user-friendly web-based calculators to help users calculate costs and set their pricing expectations accordingly.
Top-rated PMS providers usually keep their pricing terms transparent with no hidden charges or additional fees. A budget-friendly PMS could cost you anywhere from $50 per month to $200, depending on the number of properties and rooms.
How can MyCloud’s all-in-one hotel solution help a hotel chain?
MyCloud PMS is the ultimate cloud-based solution for online hotel property management. The software provides secure and reliable features to help you manage every aspect of your hotel business.
With MyCloud, you get a single dashboard with all the functionalities for taking your hotel operations to the next level. No matter how many properties you manage, MyCloud will help you save time and make your property operations accessible anytime, anywhere.
The MyCloud PMS is also fully customizable and requires an easy learning curve. Since it’s web-based, you won’t have to invest in servers or any other piece of hardware to use MyCloud. Join the army of over 2000 hotels across 40 countries by scheduling a free online demo today.
Conclusion
In the modern-day hospitality industry, it’s become increasingly hard to cope with the competition and meet the ever-changing guests’ expectations and demands across multiple properties and locations.
However, you can make things a lot easier for you and your hotel staff by introducing the power of advanced technology to your daily operations. The multi-property management software for hotel chains is an all-in-one cloud-based solution for running hotel properties.
Forget about using multiple technology vendors to manage your business – that era is over. You should revolutionize your property management using fully automated, cloud-based PMS software. It provides all the missing features, integrations, and reporting and analytics capabilities you need to transcend your competitors and become the leading hotel chain in your market.
About The Author
Deepak Chauhan
Deepak Chauhan is responsible for marketing and positioning of “mycloud” platform and is a veteran in the hotel software industry with over 25 years’ experience giving him a strong understanding of the product requirements in the industry. He has very rare mix of working in operations of various hotels and chains for over 10 years and then co-founding a software product and service company, servicing 5 star hotels and chains for 14 years.
Deepak has led the development and marketing of cloud based hospitality systems to meet the specific, business objectives of small and mid-size properties across the globe and has worked closely with a diverse group of hoteliers and hotel technology vendors.
