Ways to Re-imagine Hotel Properties and Spaces – and How Cloud Technology Can Help

As much as hotel technology to help organizations to efficiently serve guests in the way that they expect, software solutions have always been a means to an end. None of it would mean a thing without the physical locations – the setting, the surroundings – of that experience. It’s here that memories are made, and where hotels gain the most equity when it comes to building long-term relationships with guests.

What are some of the ways that hotel organizations have made the most of their spaces to generate revenue, beyond traditional guest room bookings and function space events? How does hospitality industry technology help organizations make the most out of their properties? How does it ignite creative ideas on how to reimagine how a space might be used, and help to create a way to monetize and maximize the value of those spaces? Here are a few examples for your consideration.

Shared platform to devise new revenue strategies

The cloud presents several strategic pillars to support better strategies for hospitality organizations. One of those is single environments to access, analyze and strategize new ways to plan competitive initiatives from any location or on any device. When it comes to re-imagining a hotel location, one of the key approaches is collaboration, which is much easier when everyone is looking at the same data.

From there, collaborative processes are more effective from a higher vantage point, and the ideas to leverage a property for new revenue streams is easier, too. Some ideas that may come out of those discussions and collaborative environments might include:

• Envisioning new ways to leverage previously under-utilized outdoor spaces for events, even your hotel grounds for use as photoshoot locations for weddings and other events
• Indoor spaces for business meetings, temporary offices, even intimate dining experiences
• Function spaces for events that create new ways to engage with local markets – movie nights and film festivals, concerts, art shows, and other events that go beyond the expected weddings and business conferences

Importantly, it’s the access to hotel reservations software reports and analysis that really activates the benefits of out of the box brainstorming and implementation. The same goes for sales & catering solutions that help staff manage events and provide vital insights as to which ones are worth promoting to build upon diverse sources of revenue that provide the best yield.

 

Hotel technology software to map physical spaces – including non-traditional ones

Speaking of those solutions, and in conjunction with hotel property management solutions tracking events and reservations in a single environment is key. From there, being able to map a location into individual revenue centers in sometimes non-traditional ways – zones in the lobby, outdoor spaces, dividing a larger space like a ballroom or restaurant, even hotel kitchen spaces for cooking classes – becomes more viable in an operations sense, and more visible to revenue management.

This process of zoning a property as a revenue center and using that to manage reservations and scheduling in a common, accessible, and highly visible environment can provide a chance for your organization to test results in one or a small selection of locations in applicable markets. The ones that work well in one location might then be applied to others, or all of them.

Unified environments to track results organization-wide

In the cloud, related solutions touching on events, reservations, hotel property management, and revenue management become parts of an inclusive platform. Teams across the organization who are looking at the data associated with those activities across the whole organization are better positioned to test and prove strategy against the data.

Once you establish that common environment in the cloud, it becomes easier to optimize revenue potential for every location. This is just because you have a more wholistic view of what works in which ones. Then, you can further invest in winning formulas for how to make the best use of square footage in other properties and perhaps even in all of them.

A stable basis for strategy

It’s clear that cloud technology is an integral part of gaining a higher vantage point and a more wholistic view of brand locations. A cloud platform allows you to:

• Create collaborative processes in a single environment to explore new revenue possibilities much faster across multiple locations
• Map locations in more creative ways and with greater precision to re-imagine those spaces as new revenue centers using integrated solutions – PMS, reservations, sales and catering, RMS, etc.
• Track results in that same common environment via web-based functionality on any device and implement strategy based on real data and winning approaches to new uses of spaces

To do all of this, it helps to partner with a provider who understands what you’re trying to accomplish. That chosen partner should also know what a technology platform must do to support your specific goals. How do you decide which partners will suit you best?

We’ve authored a resource that helps you to create a framework for answering that question.

You can get your copy of that resource right here.