“What are the most important IT systems for a hotel and how can you make them really work?”

In several White Papers, I have explained the need to re-adjust the IT stack in the hotel business to take advantage of digitalization and provide a truly personalized guest experience at every stage of the customer journey. Competition in the hospitality industry is tough post-Covid, and to survive, hotels must transform from being losers of Big Data to being winners. Our sector is lagging seriously behind in this respect, compared to other industries – including OTAs. However, there is much more to this process than many vendors or hotel managers might believe!

Taking a look at where we came from

The necessity to replace the Property Management System (PMS) as the central element of the IT stack is simple common sense when talking to industry experts. 40 years ago, the PMS was usually the first software solution installed in a hotel. Since then, a huge number of other applications have appeared on the scene: IBE, CRS, Channel Manager, WIFI, POS, housekeeping, CRM, Chatbots... The list is almost endless – and most of them have at least some kind of interaction with the PMS, which has traditionally sat at the heart of the IT stack.

Unfortunately, the rise of the internet and the increasing use of IBEs, OTAs and hotels’ own websites, the quality of data in the PMS has suffered disastrously. The various systems connected to the PMS are endlessly pushing new reservations and new guest profiles into it, 24/7. As a result of unconnected or poorly-integrated systems, hotels are ending up with multiple profiles for the same guest – up to 30 according to my own research! This puts them in a very poor position to derive any value from the fragmented data that is collected and held across different systems. In turn, this makes it difficult or impossible to provide individualized customer service to guests.

To read more details please refer to: https://www.dailypoint.com/download-white-paper-crm-cdm-pms-2/