Opening a hotel is super exciting. There’s so much to do, so much to take care of! That’s why it’s important to use your time – and the time of your employees wisely. After all, you want your guests to have the best possible experience! To be able to focus fully on your guests’ stay, it’s important to free up time in everyone’s schedule, which can be hard.
Luckily for you, we’re living in the digital age and there are tons of programs and special kinds of software on the market that can take care of repetitive tasks, without the error margin you usually have when doing things manually. In this article, we tell you everything you need to know about the best programs and software on the market.
Booking engine and payments system
Of course you can opt to only advertise your hotel through online travel agents. These OTA’s will show your hotel on their website and even take over advertising for you. Because they have a very impressive reach, they’ll attract many customers. The only big downside to this, is that you will pay a lot of commission. If you choose to add a hotel booking engine to your website, you can try and tempt some of these customers to book with you – so you skip the commission. Many customers will check out a hotel’s website when booking, so you want to make them convert. You can do that by adding a little something extra, like a free late check-out or a bottle of bubbles.
Of course, working with OTA’s is absolutely needed these days – they can attract so many customers to your hotel, it’s almost impossible to do it on your own. Sadly, that means you have to spend a lot of time manually charging virtual credit cards …. Unless you have a hotel payment system that does this automatically for you. Free up some time in your packed schedule and let yourself – or your employees – focus on making sure your guests have an amazing time, instead of manually typing numbers into a PMS.
In-room automations
There are also tons of in-room automations you can choose to add to your hotel. For instance, automations that make the stay of the customer easier; think of a tablet they can use to dim the lights, put the fan out, put the heating a little bit warmer… and maybe even order room service without having to call the front desk. Handy! Add Google Maps and some fun things to do in the area to the tablet and your guests will enjoy this handy tablet a lot and they might even ask you less questions, which is good if you have a lot on your plate.
Data AI software
And did you know there is software on the market that will use all your data, but also implements other data, such as the weather and holidays to tell you when to raise or lower your prices? For instance: if the weather is supposed to be great and all your competitors are changing their pricing, you can’t be the one who doesn’t… and doesn’t make a lot of profit! We recommend you check out the data AI tools on the market – they can do so much nowadays!
Good luck with opening your hotel!
