Cloud Hotel PMS – Clearing a Path for Guest Control

For guests at the modern hotel, a sense of authorship over their experiences is key at every stage. Their expectations about their journey are less about being strapped into a one-size-fits-all vehicle, and more about hospitality technology platforms that provide the flexibility needed to create their own path from beginning to end.

Just as consumers curate their own online experiences as they socialize, shop, and consume content, hospitality platforms with cloud-based hotel PMS at their center must help to enable those same dynamics across the whole brand in every location. Here’s how hotel software solutions should support that model.

Put the power in the guest’s hands

Mobile-friendly functionality and intuitive UI have been vital considerations in this current era of the hospitality industry. This rests on the idea that the guest should have the freedom to craft their experience wherever they are using their own devices. This means that throughout their journey, they’re enabled to be the authors of their stay end to end.

For hotels, this is about creating a framework for guests to do what they need to do at their own pace and according to their levels of comfort. In addition to checking in and getting room keys, this touches on a spectrum of revenue-generating activities, too – reviewing their options and making upgrades, managing reservations, and securing services from wherever they happen to be.

Offer options to enable customization – and gain a more precise guest profile

Each guest is different. Some are business travelers. Some are on romantic getaways. Some have brought their kids with them. Sometimes, it’s a combination of motivations and circumstances that have brought them to the hotel location. Hotel PMS platforms should allow them to select from a range of options to outline what their stay will look like for them.

As the system serves up options to the guest directly to their mobile devices – room size and type, restaurant reservations, amenities booking, and more – that creates opportunities to maximize revenues right from the start and during the length of the stay, too. The right hotel PMS helps to upsell services that provide the building blocks for the guest to craft their own experience at any point. What it also does is to give hotel organizations a picture of what kind of guests they’re serving. That helps them create more precise profiles to anticipate and serve up relevant offers and extras to keep them coming back.

Detach services from fixed locations and create fluidity

With the advent of a guest-centric, mobile-driven process, one important factor in a digitalization process for hotels is creating greater fluidity. This means enabling the guest to access services, communicate with staff, and to add services during their stay, wherever they happen to be in the hotel with no required fixed point of interaction. This means contactless processes too, giving the guest the option to gauge their own comfort levels around face-to-face interactions – an important factor right now.

This fluidity enabled by mobile technology also helps employees to do their jobs better, with greater access to real-time information as they go from task to task. This enhances their access to the latest information, increases their reach, and boosts their awareness of what guests need in the moment. In this, the system helps them to prioritize tasks to a greater degree of confidence and efficiency without being tied to the front desk or concierge.

Getting better all the time

Putting the guest in control when it comes to their hotel stay is the new dynamic toward which leading hospitality organizations are moving. As much as the concept of personalization is positioned as communicating to guests by name and crafting offers based on past stays (all very important!), it also extends to personal control of their stay in this context.

As the industry shifts to match modern expectations now and in the future, the goal remains the same – to get better all the time. The best way to continue to match the evolving expectations of the modern hotel guest is to think brand wide and unify all properties into a common environment. Right now, hospitality leaders are embarking on digitalization journeys with these principles firmly in mind, always with their guests as the primary benefactors.

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Infor strives to develop hospitality software products that are aligned to where the industry is, and where it’s headed. This includes cloud-based deployment, mobile technology functionality, automation, contactless processes, and more.

We’ve recently made our latest Infor Hospitality Management Solution (HMS) available that incorporates the features and functions you’ve read about in this post.

Learn more about that release right here.