Common Business Tools in Hospitality Industry

Hotel tools and equipment in the hospitality industry have a lot of different business tools and technology terminologies in hospitality management. Check out below to find out more about the most useful hotel tools and equipment that help you improve your daily work in the hospitality industry. If you are in the hospitality industry, you know it’s important to stay on top of tech trends. With new tools constantly being released, it can be difficult to keep track of which ones are worth your time and which ones aren’t.

Here is an article about how new business tools can help improve your hospitality business and how you can use them to update your website. With the help of technology, some business tools have improved so much that they are now just as important in the hospitality industry as they are in any other. This article will analyze the benefits of using these tools and how to implement them in your own business.

If you are planning to setting up a hotel soon. We believe our article might be helpful for you. Here we will also discuss about the business tools and technology terminologies in hospitality industry that will help you to get the grasp on it easily.

eZee Front desk

Many hotels use this brainchild of eZee Technosys for hotel reservations, rate management, revenue maximization, and event management. In fact, EZee Frontdesk is rated among the fastest growing softwares in the property management realm. Plus, it makes linking of smart devices such as tablets and smartphones possible, which adds its versatility.

Hotelogix

Hotelogix is used in over 100 countries worldwide. It entails a single-point dashboard and a multi-device booking engine capability. Additionally, the software is available in nine languages and allows the integration of third-party software such as Jovago and TripAdvisor.

Maestro PMS

Maestro offers hotels and hospitality establishments a host of cloud-based solutions spanning front desk, hotel reservations, POS, and event management. It consolidates efficient property management into a single tool and gives you the option to install on Windows-based systems or run directly from the cloud.

Hoteliga

Hoteliga is a cloud-based hotel management software that makes invoicing, hotel reservation, revenue control and customer management as easy as possible. It also incorporates multi-currency support which is an important aspect often overlooked in competing companies.

FCS CosmoPMS

FCS Cosmo tools give hoteliers the power to create a seamless flow of data used for reservation confirmations, front desk operations, and real-time monitoring of resources. That’s why it’s a great choice to optimize room-assignment efficiency and simplify check-in. And you’ll love how it maintains company, guest, and travel-agent data to help you manage revenue, rate-setting, and customer discounts.

SkyTouch Hotel OS

This property management software from Skytouch Technology is designed for desktops, tablet devices, and smartphones. It’s optimized to help with real-time operations monitoring, hotel reservation services, front desk operations, inventory management, resource distribution, sales, housekeeping, and catering management.

Cloudbeds

Cloudbeds is a hotel management software designed to simplify hotel operations management via its integrated management suite. That suite includes reservation management, room assignment, accounting, and housekeeping tools. As an added bonus, the software works seamlessly with top travel sites such as TripAdvisor and Expedia. And it’s been rated among the top choices in its class.

Consider these tools and see how you can automate your operations and increase your hotel’s efficiency. Your guests (and your employees!) will thank you.

Smart Hotel Software

Smart Hotel Software contains a set of tools suitable for central reservations, guest relationship management, housekeeping, and more. It includes features like guest folios, check-in and check-out confirmations, advance deposit alerts, integrated POS, and information sharing capabilities across multiple platforms.

Tracktik

Tracktik is an intuitive piece of software that allows hoteliers to manage perhaps the single most important resource in any business: the workforce. It lets your management keep track of your teams and makes sure the business stays efficient. Not to mention that it streamlines operations via cloud management services, mobile-based solutions (both Android and iOS) and desktop platforms. It even offers powerful finance-management modules.

Hotel Management Software by Monkport Technologies

This Monkport software entails a host of features aimed at automating hotel management. It can be deployed from the cloud, or on Windows, Android, iOS devices, and SaaS platforms. Generally, it’s used to manage reservations, front desk operations, guest experience, and employee management.

Social Listening Tools

On social media in today’s world, everyone has a voice. So what are people saying about your brand on social media? Wouldn’t it be great to know when your audience mentions your hotel brand? Good news is, you can listen to those conversations with the help of social media listening tools. These tools allow you to monitor conversations through flagging certain keywords, hashtags, or brand mentions online.

What you do with these mentions are totally up to you. Ideally, if someone mentions your brand in a positive way (for example, through an Instagram post, commending your property on a fun stay), you could express your gratitude through a reply. Similarly, if someone had a negative experience and wrote a less than stellar review on their blog and tweeted the post to their followers, you can reach out via the comments or on social to offer to fix the issue. Social media listening tools will help you identify these conversations happening in the sea of content online. Some of our favorites tools are Mention, Hootsuite, and Tweetreach.

Analytical Tools 

One tool in your marketing toolbox is your hotel website. To figure out how well this marketing tool is performing for you and your property, you can use Google Analytics. This free tool from our friends at Google empowers you with the digital analytics tools you need in order to figure out all the touchpoints your customers receives during their customer journey. Knowing how customers interact with your website can tell a qualitative story of how customers come and go into your ecosystem. If you’re creating content on your hotel website (for example, with a blog), Google Analytics also tells you how much traffic your posts are generating.

Google Analytics is an especially powerful tool when it comes to direct bookings. It tells you from which sites your visitors found your site, how long they stayed on your website, and even where they are located geographically. This is especially useful information to know if you’re using paid advertising. By knowing where your biggest audience is, you’ll know which geographic location you want to target your ads.

And since we’re on the topic of Google, a bonus tool to use (that is also free!) is Google Alerts. Set an alert for the frequency you’d like to be notified and on a keyword that you want (your hotel’s name is a great first step) and start getting notifications of when you’re mentioned on the web.

Survey Tools

Surveys are a great way to get honest and quick customer feedback and conduct market research. While you may not think of a survey tool as a hotel marketing tool, it can inform you as to what people want to see more of from your brand. What kind of hotel promotions do your customers want to see more of? What do they love about staying at your property? Figuring out these nuggets of information can inform what you show off more often in your hotel marketing.

Now that we’ve convinced you to give survey tools a test drive (hopefully!), we have some suggestions on tools to try. Companies such as Typeform, Google Forms, or Survey Monkey are great tools to test out and see which ones you like the best.

Task Management Tools

Managing your upcoming marketing campaigns and work load is an important aspect of running any business. Good thing there are task management tools can make this a whole easier. Being able to organize, track, and prioritize your day to day, for yourself and your team, can be made easier with a few these tools. It’s especially handy when you’re planning out a new marketing campaign (for example, a seasonal hotel email marketing campaign or a user-generated content campaign).You can track each project milestone, add comments, attach important files, and see what other work is still left to be done in the project.

There’s a whole host of hotel marketing tools out there to help you stay on task and focused when it comes to marketing your property. And with so little time and so many marketing projects to take on, these tools are here to help you be smarter about how you market your hotel and best of all, save time in the process. Trello, Asana, and Flow are just a few of the options out there to help organize your working day.

Channel Management Tools

It is relatively easy to manage your hotel’s own website, but it becomes increasingly difficult as the number of distribution channels start to grow. When hoteliers decide to use online booking platforms or metasearch engines to gain more visibility, bookings are then made and modified simultaneously on multiple websites – making it nearly impossible to track them all. This is when channel managers come in handy.

Channel managers oversee all distribution channels, continuously updating the number of available rooms on across all of them. That means you do not risk overbooking your property or misinforming your guests about the availability of certain rooms. Not only is it significantly safer, as you do not have to fear misleading your customers, but most importantly, it is much more efficient, as you can focus on other tasks, instead of keeping an eye on every website you cooperate with.

Some of the best channel management tools include Cloudbeds, Hostway, and Cubilis, but there are many more solutions you can choose from.

Online Travel Aggregators

Love them or hate them, today it is nearly impossible to run a successful hotel business without OTAs. Websites dedicated purely to bookings have taken over a large chunk of the industry. There are various types of OTAs dealing with different aspects of hotel and lodging, however, most of them are focused on hotels and flights, with car rentals and activity packages taking the next spots.

We spoke about distribution channels and how to manage them and OTAs are one of the main reasons why the channel managers were created in the first place! The idea is brilliant – showing all of the offers from each city in one, easily accessible place. It is much easier for customers, as they do not have to search the entire Internet for the right offer. It is also great for hoteliers, as before, only hoteliers with budgets for good online advertising were easily found online. Now, with a more level playing field, each hotel gets a chance.

Of course, the existence of such powerful companies that monopolize the market comes with some issues. The first of them is the commission charged by OTAs. Fees are tearing down many smaller hoteliers, who have to hand on up to 30% of what could have been their revenue to the booking platforms. Then there are also rate parity clauses which don’t allow hotels to show different pricing on any of their channels. This means that they can’t give discounts on their own websites.

There are a few ways hotels can fight back. One is making sure that the local governments make the mandate of rate parity illegal. Secondly, hotels can use online travel agents that do not charge a commission, such as Bidroom.com. Bidroom has found a way to work successfully without the need of imposing any fees on hoteliers and it also fights against the unfair practices of other OTAs.

Conclusion

Hotel tools and equipment is a new collection of business software and business tools in hotel industry. Hotel accounting programs, POS terminal, Reservations system, Guest management system, online booking engine & reservation scripts are the most important hotel business tools that every hotel need to run its businesses at top level. At here you can find more information about each of these hotel business softwares.