Almost every country in the world is affected by corona virus pandemic forcing most of the countries to declare emergency lockdown and have urged their people to follow WHO guidelines and take safety precautions such as
Because the COVID-19 virus is highly transmittable, people follow strict social distancing and they try to highly avoid physical contact and interactions. Restaurant owners understand this trend is going to stay for long even if the restrictions are lifted, so they are trying to come up minimal contact ideas. Even though QR based digital menus have been here for a while, restaurants were hesitant to use them. Since hygiene and safety concerns arise because of pandemic digital menus are gaining more popularity and it is the better time to take advantage of them. By replacing physical touch menu to a QR menu, restaurants will be able to combat current safety and sanitation concern caused by COVID-19. QR digital menus are cost-effective, easy to use and flexible and is a perfect option for your restaurants future success. A Quick Response code menu is a digital version of a restaurants printed menu which can be seen in a visually attractive way on a smart device with a camera scan. Here are few top benefits of using a QR code digital menu. Easy ordering – Customers can use their own smart phone and scan a QR code placed in the table and can directly place the order without waiting for a waiter. Product Recommendations – Restaurants can show recommendations to customer, show preparation time, calorie information, Ingredients, modifiers and show portion-wise prices. It Saves Time – There is no need to reprint and order new printed menus in case of a menu or price change. Using digital menu, hotels can frequently change menu items, price and update special promotions which gets changed in real time and it save lots of time. Flexibility – Contactless QR digital menus are incredibly flexible. You can design and run vibrant multiple promotions, show different products and prices for different days and times, use attractive pictures for promotions. Save cost – You will need initial investment to build a contactless dining menu, but once you have built it is easy to change and update the menu which will save a substantially in printing cost and redesigning costs. Unify your brand – When you have multiple outlet in multiple location QR code digital menus provides a brand consistency. You can update every outlet and promote special items in real time. Conclusion Right now no one knows when this coronavirus pandemic will be over and as we move forward maybe this global crisis may become our new normal. Because many governments are lifting restrictions and restaurant reopening need to take utmost care for safety and hygiene of your customers and employees. By using technological advance like QR code menu you are creating a safe contactless interaction in a cost effective, simple and optimum flexibility. Want to see how a QR code restaurant menus work? Schedule a 30 minutes free demo with our experts and make restaurant operations life easier.
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For hoteliers of this generation, technology comes easy and they know how important it is to use the latest and new technologies to stay in the game and keep business flowing. Technology has been a huge milestone in the development of ways to make daily living easier for man. Many industries have owned this paradigm shifting aspect of technological implementation and this has led to a lot of success stories in the respective sectors it has been implanted in. The hotel industry has been no different with many advancements having been put in place to assist with the daily running of hotels by use of hotel management software for the managerial staff. For small hotels, there are a number of the many ways in which technology could help boost their businesses to new and higher levels without using up a lot of capital. Generally, hoteliers are first to adopt any guest-facing technology but surprisingly, when it comes to their own back of the house operations, they still run with old systems which are capital heavy and redundant technologies. In a nutshell, incorporation of technology is the only way to forge forward and keep up with current markets.
Some of the ways in which new and modern cloud-based technology could assure the stakeholders in small hotels of brighter futures have been highlighted in this article. 1. Use of Mobile Bookings Mobile bookings at this time and age are rapidly gaining immense popularity and as a result, a 25% increment in online bookings has been realized in the course of this year. The most interesting piece of information is the percentage of travelers for leisure purposes who are at 40% and that of business travelers is 36%. The percentage used is specific for the travelers that normally opt to use mobile phones in the booking of their accommodations in hotels on an overnight basis. With this data, says is nothing but prudent for small hotels to take advantage of the loophole of travelers. Given the remarkable rise of smartphone-dependent millennial travelers, a venture into the online reservation software via mobile booking services would do good for the growth of small hotels. Other than just booking, the mobile booking systems are essential in giving guests hotel information, pricing, packages, special promotions and special rates that may be only available on the hotel website. 2. Door Opening Technology This is a type of technology that would enable small hotels to level the playing field with the bigger and fancier hotels in terms of security and customer satisfaction. The use of door opening technology comes in handy by providing a means for guests to be the only ones having an access to their hotel doors through the use of mobile phones. After booking a room, the guests then get a code sent to an app on their mobile phones and by so doing, they are handed control over the door to their room. This technology will better the confidence of guests in the hotel management especially in their oversight of the hotel security system. In addition to that, the guest experience will skyrocket and even enhance customer loyalty considering that they will not have to make long queues at the reception when booking and receiving their room details. Also, the old key card technology is now redundant and many times guests have to keep re-coding the keys as the information on them gets wiped out if kept close to mobile phones. 3. Wi-Fi Infrastructure Overhauls Nowadays, most people who come as guests in hotels have the tendency of tagging along with devices such as laptops and tablets. With these gadgets at hand, it has become almost a necessity for Wi-Fi services to be installed in the hotels that they seek accommodation in. This is one of the areas that small hotels could shunt their attention to and will lead to their customer in-flow uninterrupted. In order to stand out and possess the edge over most of the other hotels, the Wi-Fi speeds and connection reliability need to be off the charts. It thus calls for the small hotels to think big and set the ball rolling for the acquisition of wireless connections that cover the entire hotel and install the necessary Wi-Fi equipment to make sure there is a good signal of the network in every corner of their premises. Hotels must offer Wi-Fi and ensure they have enough bandwidth as the internet today, especially social media, is driven more by videos and images and guests usually end up on social media post office hours.4. Cloud Services In order for hotels to have the ability to keep up with the trends in hotel management and dissipation of services, there is a coherent need of taking up cloud-based services. It is unwise for small hotels to have the need of improving their managerial systems and incur the additional costs of buying infrastructure for IT, coupled with the ideal personnel for handling the IT equipment. Instead, the best way is to invest in lower-capital-consuming-ventures that serve the same purpose and in a far much better manner.The cloud hotel property management systems have countless advantages that small hotels could take advantage of especially when it comes to the room that cloud-based systems give for expansion and upgrading without more costs for overhauling the current systems. Cloud is the latest technology and good systems now offer many options that help hoteliers engage more with their guests and get better insights into their business, cloud solutions help smaller hotels compete with larger properties by making use of advanced systems, distribution, statistics and forecasts that up to now were only available to bigger hotels as they were capital heavy and cloud has leveled the playing field as smaller properties too can subscribe to these advanced systems at a fraction of the cost. Conclusion Above are four of the best methods in which technological advancement could bring a new chapter in the books of small hotels in the market today. The types of technological implementation that have been talked about may have different characteristics that make them unique, but any of them, when used in a small hotel, are good enough to deliver outstanding results. A subject of frequent discussion has been the properties and functions of cloud PMS. This, however, is not complete without knowing how it can be of benefit to you and your business, especially for cutting costs. In addition to that, it can also be used in making processes and guest services more efficient which result in better revenue. We’ll discuss the ways in which sitting back and allowing your cloud based hotel software to do the heavy lifting for you will elevate your productivity and help you to save money.
1. Enables You to Increase Results Without increasing Staff In previous years, it was a common thing to find property owners being forced to employ more people for more productivity. This concept of having the rate of productivity being commensurate to the number of workers was however cut off by improved technology. With the advent of more innovations, especially in the internet arena, many hoteliers prefer using technology rather to adding more workers. One of the leading and most popular Innovation was PMS. Over the times, technology has changed and today hoteliers can derive true benefits from PMS. One of the reasons behind this is that technology has become affordable and has thus leveled the playing fields for even a small hotel to compete with bigger players. The cloud benefits are countless, with improved customer satisfaction and better operations on a day-to-day basis being among them. It is a highly ranked piece of software mainly because of automating most of the manual work, especially in the hotel operations and guest services. Once you subscribe to such a system, you will find that the money you set aside for payments of salary will be spared. The main reason behind this is that you will comfortably operate at full throttle with less staff being involved. With such a system in place, you will find that your need for more staff at your property`s front desk will be brought down to an almost bare minimum. The online management systems also help in cutting down by the manner in which they ensure staff does not make mistakes and at same time systems are intuitive enough to ensure hotels sell rooms at best ARR. They do so by optimizing rates based on occupancy and market conditions. All of these aspects work out to save your money because you will have fewer people to owe salaries and better revenue collections at the end of every month. 2. Less Dependency On Online Traffic Agencies & Increase Direct Bookings There is no doubt of the dependency of hotels to Online Traffic Agencies (OTAs).It is crystal clear that for a hotel to excel, there must be a subscription to the best OTA. However, by so doing there is a price to pay which comes in the form of commission, loss of revenue to third parties and lower ARR. There are also other issues that arise from the OTAs like human errors when releasing inventories and updating rates. Untimely updates of rates and missing out on market conditions or the actual occupancy trends are also other downsides that cannot be overlooked. With PMS systems, there is some way out of this conundrum. The PMS systems of this age come with channel, rate and revenue managers. This plays a crucial pivotal role, in that the hotel can maximize on rates, revenues and also get rid of human errors. PMS also offer direct booking solutions in terms of booking engines which allow hotels to own guests and not lose out on revenues. When using the best cloud-based hotel PMS, you are better placed to have direct bookings to your property through web booking engines. They give you a way out from the ordinary marketing stunts that you have to make do with when you don`t have a working PMS. Due to this, people can now access your real-time rates and packages through your website, and make booking directly without having to pass through `middle men`. With the rate of direct bookings having increased, you are able to reduce acquisition cost and save more money by doing away with the third party options that you had incorporated to help in getting you some booking. 3. Enables You to Work from Anywhere The days of having to stand in front of your desk to assess the status of your property are now gone. This has been made possible by the software that’s been invented specifically for management purposes. With PMS being among them, you would do yourself a lot of good by having an installation for your property. They enable you to be kept in the loop of everything going on in your business regardless of the location that you are in. This could come with the urge to be always online but on the other hand, it takes your efficiency levels higher. Reason being that you can make important decisions much quicker because you are always aware of the current information regarding your business. With your arsenal having such kind of weaponry, you are better placed to tailor the rate yield of your business and also its distribution strategy. This helps you to save the money needed to consult more strategists and managers to help make decisions and implement plans for your business. Your costs of traveling to your business every time a decision needs to be made are also cut down hence saving you quite a lump sum in the long run. In addition to the above, hotels get better business intelligence in terms of real-time reports showing historical trends and data allowing hotels to make use of this data, PMS also offers tools which allow you to map and look at what competition is doing and how you fare against them on OTAS and social media. 4. The Latest Solutions Cloud-based PMS have an edge over other types of management systems in terms of receiving regular updates and enhancements based on the industry trends. System enables hoteliers to have a wide array of access to some of the best complementing solutions and information related to guest reviews, social media, marketing etc from multiple, reliable sources. With this aspect in your property`s pocket, you are able to come up with more efficient methods of solving problems whenever the need arises. 5. Zero Start Up Costs One of the most significant advantages of the Property Management Systems is the cost of the initial starting capital. To start with, there is no need to purchase latest and high configuration hardware when using cloud-based systems. The hi-tech networks, licensing costs for database and operating systems, extensive trainings and dedicated IT resources together with servers that are onsite which are essential in other types of systems are of no use in cloud PMS. This interprets to zero set-up costs for such equipment and also there is no need for maintenance costs of the same. 6. Low Capex With the use of cloud based PMS, you are entitled to alleviate the costs that are incurred when buying equipment, servicing them and also powering them. There are also no costs for upgrades that keep on recurring in other system types because of the total automation with the customers reaping the benefits. Your system thus needs no onsite visits and expensive in-house staff to oversee the system. This, in turn, creates avenues for you moving away from Capex and into Opex as you only need to subscribe to the system and pay a fee on monthly basis. In addition to that, there is also little room for the requirement of IT and the ownership costs are overall reduced. Conclusion In this day and age, it is imperative that hoteliers leverage on technology, such as online PMS, to boost their businesses. Technology lessens the burden of work, is evidently more efficient and in the long run, and it can prove to be cost effective and help improve guest services. The hospitality industry is one of the most lucrative business in the world. However, as a result, the competition is quite severe in the market, and sometimes it is impossible to get recognized or to maintain your success and reputation without investing a lot of your time and effort in your property.
As an owner, you are expected to have an efficient team that can provide top quality services in order to attract new customers, keep them satisfied, as well as to earn good profits. Today every business is dependent on technology, hospitality is no less and today every traveler/guest uses technology to find a property, understand its service offering, discounts and services based on personalization. Therefore, in this article, I will be focusing on incredible benefits our own platform “”mycloud””, a comprehensive cloud based hotel solution can bring to your hospitality business, as well as the powerful features it offers. Benefits of “mycloud” There are various great benefits our software solution offers to your hotel: It is used worldwide — “mycloud” is one of the best-in-class solutions which is used around the world, and hoteliers businesses have blossomed thanks to SaaS and cloud. It is easy to use — Many hotel software systems require major complex installations or some help from the IT experts when it comes to installing, configuring or taking a system live or maintaining. However, “mycloud” is easy to implement and use, regardless of your experience, allowing you to save significant amounts of time and money. In the majority of cases, employees are hesitant when they need to start using new technology, but “mycloud” is very intuitive, and has been designed based on feedback from hundreds of hoteliers and actual users and is very comprehensive program so you can be sure that everyone will quickly embrace it. Accessibility — One of the greatest benefits of “mycloud” is that it can be easily accessed no matter where you are. Both you and your staff can access it remotely, on any device, platform as long as there is an internet and Browser on the system, it comes with additional IP based security to restrict certain users from accessing it outside the property. Safety — When using “mycloud” software for hotel, everything is stored on cloud which means that all of your sensitive data will be secure at all times. Even if something happens to your devices, everything will remain unharmed. Customization — “mycloud” offers great amount of parameterization and configuration, hence allowing businesses to map each of their function and operation on to the system and design workflows based on their service offerings. It allows you to customize it according to your unique business requirements. It can easily be configured to meet your needs, via a witty wizard without any training. It will save you a lot of time — Implementing such hotel management software to your business operations will help you and your staff save loads on time on time-consuming manual processes. You will now be able to dedicate more time to what really matters — delivering top quality customer experience, while the technology takes care of the rest. Numerous interfaces — “mycloud” PMS has credit card processor built in, designed to handle different payment gateways. In addition, it offers more than 175 hardware and software interfaces. Features“mycloud” hotel software offers numerous great features, and we will mention some of the most important ones: Multi Property Web Booking Engine — Accept reservations online on your website, guests can book single trip, multiple trips, multiple rooms, or trip comprising of multiple rooms across multiple hotels in one single itinerary. Inbuilt e-distribution — Connect to over 150 most popular channels like Expedia, Bookings.com, Agoda, Venere and many more. “mycloud” has inbuilt e-distribution which provides advanced rate management, pooled inventory, restrictive allocations and availability management. These features help to increase revenue, avoid over booking and rate parity issue. TripAdvisor Connect — Now you can easily manage your online feedback s from within PMS and send automated feedback emails to your guests. PCI & GDPR Compliance — “mycloud” is PCI compliant solution offering tokenization to securely store credit card information at bank servers and retrieve same only during a transaction. System is also GDPR compliant protecting guest data. Central Reservation System — Multi property hotel companies can use CRS to access inventory, reservations and rates on a single timeline. Front desk — The intuitive design of this resort software enables you to manage check-ins, check-outs, and reservations with no trouble at all. All the information about your rooms and your guests are stored in one central database, available for everyone in your business to see. Inbuilt credit card processor — It enables your guests to make their payments online in the safest way possible, without the need for any additional programs and interfaces. Repeat guests’ history — This feature provides you with all of the information related to records and history of your guests which are beneficial for providing your loyal guests with more personalized services based on their preferences. Multi Property hotel companies can use central guest history feature to consolidate guest statistics. Housekeeping — It allows you to check the current position of your hotel, the status of the rooms, as well as all of the expected arrivals and departures which are listed in a chronological order. Reporting and archives — All of the information about your hotel business is included in reports which can be printed, exported to different formats (.csv, .xls, .pdf), or viewed on your computer or a mobile device. In addition, this feature offers offline reporting which is designed to send the backup versions of your reports every few hours. Management statistics — This feature will provide you with information related to current statistics, future occupancy trends, and all of the payments. Travel agents & contracts — Helps you keep track and manage your online travel agents. Multi property hotel companies can manage travel agents centrally. Accounts receivable — Enables you to identify all of your aging accounts and who owes you how much money. Front office cashiering — You can find your guests’ total balance in a matter of seconds, print and rearrange documents, post, change or cancel your charges. Social sentiment — “mycloud” has inbuilt social sentiment tool which is very helpful for resort property to track its reputation on online. It has integration with multiple websites such as TripAdvisor, yelp and booking.com where reputation plays big role to rank the listing of your property in their searches. Restaurant management — Manage multiple F&B or other outlets like gift shops or travel desks. Events & Venues Management — that let’s you completely manage all operational and admin aspects of your Events & Catering business using a simple Computer or tablet connected to Internet. Complete Back Office — Our back-office a suite is designed to handle individual hotels or multi-unit and multi-location hospitality chains. Software for Purchase, Inventory, Stores, Costing, Debtors Consolidation, Centralized Financial Reporting, Purchase Consolidation, Consolidated Consumption Analysis and Chain vide Stocks Analysis. System is virtually paperless yet subject to all usual reviews and controls. Hotels can easily prepare periodic financial reports per unit, per group of units or consolidation of all units. It can also prepare comparative reports for groups of hotels within the chain that are considered to be a peer set. The benefits are faster reporting, standardization of report presentation, accurate consolidation and flexible views. Over 175 Interfaces — “mycloud” offers over 175 integrations with third party solutions and hardwares, like Epabx, Door locks, ISP, Marketing, Kot printers and many more. To sum up, choosing the right software solution for your business will greatly determine its future success. “mycloud” is guaranteed to bring necessary automation to your processes, better guest experience, and increased profits in the long run. Modern hoteliers are facing challenges on an everyday basis, as running an independent hotel or a hotel chain puts a lot of obstacles in their way.
Complexity in management due to large amounts of collected data, accessing multiple properties, providing personalized services, managing guest complains and feedbacks, monitoring revenues, organizing bookings, hotel and departmental P&L are just some of the challenges that hotels face every day. Fortunately, with the proper use of cloud-based hotel PMS, hotels can consolidate data and control information across brands to provide better customer services and user experience. In return, hotels get a chance to increase customer satisfaction and, of course, revenue. Integrated single hotel software platform definitely offers an array of capabilities and features that make business management easier and allows for better productivity at the same time. Guests expect memorable experiences and services and it’s up to hoteliers to provide the expected. The Inevitable Challenges Every hotel faces some of the inevitable obstacles such as:
The Benefits of Implementing a Comprehensive PMS Fortunately for chains and independent hotels, implementing the best hotel PMS can help overcome these challenges in many ways such as:
Every hotel chain needs a single ERP platform for numerous reasons. ERP helps integrate, streamline and standardize all hotel business processes across all hotel departments such as e-distribution, front desk, food & beverage, purchase, stores, human resources, and finance. Put simply, both independent and hotel chains can improve their effectiveness and efficiency by using a single ERP platform. These platforms are used for:
Data consolidation helps hotels by allowing them to remain relative and competitive in an overcrowded business landscape. Since OTAs or online travel agencies are changing this landscape quite often in unforeseeable ways, hotels depend on modern business techniques and methods to survive. One of these techniques is data consolidation which is especially important for large hotel chains that need all their business processes in one place to obtain maximum functionality and track their markets, business sources and at the same time keep an eye on the competition. This also allows them to know their business sources, guests’ needs, behavior, travel patterns, and so on in detail, which helps drive better quality and tailor-made business offerings or personalized guest service. In return, hotels get better feedback and increased interest from their guests and everybody wins. Data consolidation is also an excellent way to increase operational efficiency and achieve better cost savings. It helps hoteliers on cutting down on resources at properties and consolidates data at head office to improve on operations and centralize processes and SOP. It provides a better view of operations with a single view of data across the chain and helps to take a quick decision because of all analytics and reports availability at head office. Having a Central Operations Platform Reduces Costs and Improves Revenue A cloud-based property management system removes the need for hiring expensive IT experts and it’s a real time-saver, especially if it’s integrated with other similar value-added systems. Since there’s no need for physical hardware, it’s also a cost-saver. It also allows for automation and real-time monitoring os operations across business sources, properties, distribution network, which decreases human errors and reduces all operational costs. Such systems also allow direct bookings, meaning that a hotel avoids paying OTAs a commission for reaching their capacity. Cloud technologies date back to the 1950s and we only learned about them during the 90s when “cloud computing” was introduced. Ever since the start of the 2000s, cloud solutions have been adopted commercially with constant growth. When it comes to the hospitality industry, cloud-based hotel software solutions are the manifestation of the cloud. These systems come with many benefits such as cost-saving, greater customer satisfaction, and improved operations. However, there are still a lot of hoteliers that don’t use cloud-based hotel PMS tools even though their business would benefit a lot from them. At the same time, there is a new generation of all-in-one cloud PMSs that offer even greater benefits. Since we are all about “the cloud”, let’s discuss its benefits and how all-in-one solutions have taken them to a new level. Improved usability and flexibility With so many systems deployed and a large number of departments, modern hotels have become difficult to manage and they have complex processes. If the hotel PMS is to be the backbone of your daily operations, it needs to do a lot more than just help you manage billing and reservations, don’t you agree? Legacy PMSs are fixed systems, which means that the staff members are constantly stuck at their desks. No matter what information they need about their guests, they have to go back to their computer and this is a very outdated practice. This is especially important when you consider modern guests who want mobile options and want everything to be done quickly. With a cloud-based hotel PMS, the life of hoteliers is made easier. Operations are streamlined and simplified while reducing the need to do things manually. Furthermore, the system can be accessed through any device, anywhere. An all-in-one solution enhances all these capabilities even further, as it offers various integrations within the system and staff members don’t need to jump from one software to another and neither have to be constrained to desks. Better user experience Many web-based hotel PMS solutions come with a lot of functionalities and features. However, all these things come at a high cost – they are complicated to use. This requires extensive employee training that could delay the switch to a cloud hotel property management system and not to mention all the extra costs. It’s difficult on its own to make employees adopt new technologies and change the way they do their jobs and when the process requires extensive effort on their part, they will be even more against the idea. Even if the employees are able to learn how to use this kind of system, it could drastically decrease their productivity and make their jobs more difficult, which is the opposite of the final goal. With the new, cloud PMS solutions, the system can be customized to each user's needs, great importance is given to the UI/UX, maximum work with minimum clicks and achieve maximum via touch, as today everyone is so used to touch and click, meaning that employees can easily get used to the new system. At the same time, these kinds of systems automatically adapt to any device resolution, hence it becomes easy for staff to carry the work with them when on move within the property. Zero Capex, Installation and Maintenance One of the biggest reasons why so many hoteliers don’t make the switch from the Legacy PMS or their current web-based PMS is because they’ve already gone through the complex process of installing the system and integrating it, not to mention capex involved. This is why they are reluctant to do it again. Cloud solutions always come out on top of legacy PMS when it comes to capex, installation and maintenance costs. They don’t require any hardware equipment, no cooling equipment, backup devices, constant updates for OS, database, Virus, and trojans, or maintaining on-site servers, so not only does cloud PMS save money, but it also saves space. However, even though most cloud solutions are easy to install, companies usually need IT professionals to configure them and maintain them and today cloud solution providers provide this as a service. The new generation of web-based hotel PMS solutions addresses these issues. Their implementation requires no technical knowledge whatsoever and anyone with basic computer knowledge can handle them. The best features of cloud solutions, therefore, include:
All the updates, upgrades, and maintenance are done automatically by the provider and there is no need to have an in-house team of IT experts to babysit your system. Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/all-in-one-cloud-based-pms-solutions-future-hotel-deepak-chauhan/ |
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December 2021
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