Hospitality business software – you don’t have to lift the whole elephant

Maintaining a competitive edge forces hospitality organizations to take a serious look at their technology and environment. Hospitality business software systems such as a hotel property management, revenue management, sales and catering /events management might all be on the table and central to those discussions. Investing in a whole new hospitality software platform all at once is a heavy lift, especially during periods of budgetary austerity.

So, what are the most efficient and cost-effective ways to approach investing in new software? How do you meet current and future business needs without trying to lift the whole elephant? Here are 3 points that help you create a practical decision-making framework.

1. Define your immediate goals

When you’re overwhelmed by the prospect of a complete technology overhaul, determining your key priorities is always a good place to start. What are your top five objectives that you know hospitality business software can help you address? What does success look like after that? It helps to be very specific.

For instance, you may be looking to improve how competitive your pricing is in a certain region or market segment. Maybe you just need a better process to manage hotel outlets and facilities, to improve guest service and maximize revenue. Or you may be looking at ways to monetize your properties’ outdoor spaces for events. Instead of solving every problem your business faces, use your defined objectives and ideal outcomes as a horizon line when you’re looking for new solutions.

2 Seek collaborators who understand what you’re trying to do

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that you don’t have to do this all yourself. When looking to meet your immediate business goals, who are the best people who understand the ins and outs of what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization? What can they contribute to discussions around how new hospitality business software can help achieve your objectives? What positive and negative implications might you be missing that they can help you identify?

Forming teams, gathering intelligence, running scenarios, fleshing out roadmaps, and generally getting buy-in from your organization’s experts provides a vital sanity check. This can help you to determine resource allocation more intelligently, focus on development in a more considered way, lighten the lift, and perhaps help you save some money as well.

3 Think ‘modular’ and think ‘cloud’

Challenges are best approached in manageable and achievable stages. The best hospitality software solutions are modular enough to help you deploy according to your priorities. They integrate in the cloud and are easily implemented via SaaS. They’re compatible with each other as soon as you’re ready to add them to your stack as new business needs emerge.

Cloud hospitality technology is a solid foundation for building goal-specific functionality on a scalable platform as your plans require. When your team has outlined the business needs that really move the performance needle and you’ve prioritized the solutions, figuring out what square one looks like becomes much clearer to you.

Don’t break your back

You don’t have to solve every problem at once; lifting elephants will only give you a sore back. Instead, devise a multi-step plan that builds on successive successes that lead to your ultimate goal:

• Be specific and realistic about objectives, priorities and constraints
• Be collaborative to make sure your goals make sense to the organization
• Be focused on building your platform sequentially, using the cloud as a scalable platform

This method provides a solid framework to help you meet urgent challenges while gearing up to be ready for the ones yet to come

… and with no heavy lifting required.

Where are you right now in your journey?

What are your priorities right now to meet a specific set of business goals? We’re interested to hear your story. We invite you to talk to us.