The hospitality industry is ever growing, and it has becoming a bigger and bigger part of the business world as time goes on. Keeping your finger on the pulse of this industry requires you to stay up to date with new technology and different business tools that become available. Below we will discuss business tools and technology terminologies in hospitality industry.
What are the terminologies in hospitality industry? How to use them in your travel website? What are the tools in hospitality industry? Let’s check out together what has to do with business tools and technology terminologies below.
Business Tools
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
With a website comes essential analytical tools. If you want to keep checking how well your website is working to benefit the business, you can use analytical tools. It also shows you how customers are using and engaging themselves on your website. One of these tools is Google Analytics, which is offered for free. You can use the tool to check how much traffic the content on your business website is generating. It’s essential for tracking the progress and monitoring the quality of your website.
If customers can make direct bookings on your website, you can also use this analytical tool to check how visitors found your site and which other website directed them to it. It also shows how long they stayed on the website and their geographical location. You can use this information to target your paid advertising to the website that often directs traffic to yours, and also the geographical location where most of your visitors are from. With this information, you know where to improve and how to attract more customers to your services. Analytical tools make marketing and advertisement easier for any hospitality professional. It also makes it easy to use the business website. Another analytical tools to use is IBM Planning Analytics.
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 a hospitality business, or your duties as a professional can be tricky, especially when you have more tasks than you can remember. It’s essential to properly manage your workload by being organized so that you don’t forget critical appointments or duties. As a rescue, there are many task management tools present. Some prefer to use project management software instead. These tools make it easy to prioritize and organize your tasks every day, as well as track your progress of daily goals.Task management tools are not helpful only for you but can be used by your entire team for improved productivity. For example, when your team is taking on a new project, you can use a task management tool to distribute duties to all team members. You can also use it to set priorities, guidelines, and deadlines. Some tools allow you to add comments that others can see and attach essential files. Then, there is the tracking feature, which shows how much work you’ve done and what’s left. Task management tools are vital for any hospitality professional, as forgetting one important duty can upset customers and disrupt the business flow. Some great task management tools include Trello, Asana, and SmartTask.
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, Hostaway, 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.
Email Tracking Tools
If you work with a lot of emails, especially in areas of customer service and receiving bookings for hotels, travel agencies, vacation rentals, and other hospitality businesses, you will need an email tracking tool to make it easier. Hoteliers have to send hundreds of emails every week, and travel agencies receive bookings through emails. Customers hate it when they aren’t responded to early because their message was lost in hundreds of other mails. An email tracking tool will make you more competent and responsible for reading and replying to all emails.
Apart from checking incoming mails, your outgoing mails are also important. Whether you’re replying to customers, making orders, asking for investments, or more, you need to know that your email was successfully delivered and read. An email tracking tool will show you if your mail was sent to the spam or if it was left unopened. If you’re into marketing for your hospitality business, an email tracking tool will give you an idea of how many messages you sent were considered. With email tracking tools, you can be well organized with your messages and be more mindful of your recipients. Many email services come with their dedicated tracking tool. You can use tools like HubSpot CRM, Streak Email Tracking, and Yesware for email tracking.
Offers
The most important section on your website is, of course, the offer page. You want them to be clean and easy to navigate. You need your guests to know exactly what to do and which buttons to click in order to make a booking. And you also want to maximize your sales possibilities. There are a few useful tools you should think about using to improve the buying experience as well as possibly increase your revenue.
Firstly, you need the right system of the booking buttons. One you should consider as it is very popular in the industry, is Siteminder’s BookingButton. It makes your guests’ experience a lot easier, gives you many additional options you can choose from and works on mobile devices as well as desktops.
Secondly, you should think about adding special offer options to your web page. A good tool for this purpose is Picreel. It makes special offers you customize pop up on the screen when guests want to leave your website. You can tempt them with special offers, additional benefits or discounts to convince them to book a room in your hotel.
Online Payment Tools
Lastly, when guests decide to book at your hotel, they often expect to be able to pay online. Paying with cash is becoming less popular, and even credit card payments are losing their popularity. People want to do everything quickly – find a hotel, book it and pay for it, all in one sitting. It goes without saying that online payment tools are a must for any entrepreneur displaying business on the Internet.
The most popular of online payment tool is PayPal. It processes millions of transactions each day, operating in almost every country in the world and in nearly 30 different currencies. Few alternatives to PayPal include Google Wallet, Authorize.net or Square.
Content Management System
In today’s digital world, blog writing and content creation prove to be the most necessary ingredient to success for several companies including the hotel industry. Earlier days (in 2013-14), mostly all the blogs were only thought of as personal diaries published to the Internet.
However, today nearly 40% of companies use blogs for marketing purposes, and over 46% of people read blogs more than once a day (good job, content creators!) Regardless of the industry – whether you are running a bakeshop, law firm, a hotel or technology start-up – creating and managing content properly should be the top goal in order to increase more inbound traffic to your website and become a trusted advisor of your brand!
If you want to have your in-house team, identify a handful of employees who could provide quality blog content and then start out at 4-5 per month and utilize a CMS to manage your content properly so that you can easily reuse it when required.
Technology Terminologies
CMS
Content Management System keeps your hotel website upto date. Its main function is to keep track of contracts and agreements.
CRM
Customer Relationship Management is automated communications (pre and post stay) for guests along with loyalty programmes. It is the best way to make your services stand out by using information of guests to discover the best practices for retaining business.
GDS
Global Distribution System is a large computer network that passes inventory and rates for hotels to travel agents and travel sites (or what we know as OTAs).
GOP
It is a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) which refers to the hotel’s profits after subtracting all of their operating expenses. Gross Operating Profit illustrates the level of operational profitability of a hotel. In simple terms — gross revenue minus expenses.
GOPPAR
An abbreviation for Gross Operating Profit Per Available Room is another key performance indicator for the hotel which aids hoteliers in analyzing the results of cost-saving measures. It is calculated as the total revenue of the hotel minus the expenses incurred earning that revenue, divided by the available rooms.
IDS
The Internet Distribution System offers technology that lets travelers research, plan and book their travel needs from a wide selection of partners and agencies. It allows the travel suppliers to change offers quickly so customers may find great last minute deals to purchase.
Pax
In a hotel it refers to “No. of Guests”. You might come across terms such as 1000 Pax Wedding, 20 Pax Restaurant Reservation, 03 Pax per room pertaining to the number of people involved in each case.
PMS
PMS or Property Management System is essentially a software that manages the operating activities of the hotel and oversees and coordinates the relationship with the customer and services. To give you a head start, Hotelogix is one such great PMS which is fast, easy and simple.
Conclusion
The hospitality industry supports businesses that focus on serving travelers. Use business tools in hospitality industry to help you operate your business successfully, including tools for managing human resources, marketing, accounting, and technology. This set of tools can help you develop menu planning, budgeting, forecasting, product development, and purchasing plans for making optimal use of resources.