Hotel property management system: 6 property management software features

PMS hotel meaning

Before discovering the property management software features and its functionalities for managing hotels and vacation rentals, let’s clarify: what is a hotel PMS? Let’s see the PMS hotel meaning.

As we said before, Property Management System is a system that helps manage your properties.

What is property management system?

It is a software that enables hoteliers and owners of non-hotel accommodations, to manage and improve aspects such as invoices and accounting, reservations, check-in and check-out procedures, housekeeping activities such as cleaning and maintenance, and other administrative tasks.

The hotel PMS is thus a valuable tool for hoteliers and all the staff working in accommodation management.

How does a hotel PMS work?

The Property Management System can fulfil multiple functions. To maximise its potential, using a PMS integrated with other hotel management tools is the best choice. Here are some tools with which you can combine it:

• Channel Manager,
• Booking Engine,
• Payment Manager,
• Revenue Management System.

Let’s see what a hotel PMS does and how it can support hoteliers in hotel management.

Invoice and payment management

The Property Management System, together with an integrated payment management system with the best payment gateways on the market, allows you to receive and register payments securely and quickly and fulfil the management of electronic invoicing and collections.

The benefit of a Hotel Property Management System integrated with a payment management system is that the payment system accepts digital payments, and the PMS hotel integrates these payments into the operational and fiscal processes of the accommodation. In this way, it is possible to reduce check-out times.

Pricing strategy management

The integration between a Property Management System and a Revenue management system plays an essential function in the rate strategy of a hotel (read more about the hotel rates types and learn how to maximize profits); in fact, the data extrapolated from the hotel PMS, such as availability, bookings, and occupancy rate, are fundamental variables for the elaboration of forecasts and analyses of Revenue management systems.

Not disposing of such integration data should be entered manually in the RMS software.

Given this, integration between a PMS and an RMS is a valuable tool for maximising profits through automatic and dynamic pricing strategy management.

Housekeeping management

The Property Management System software also optimises hotel housekeeping and maintenance activities. How?

Thanks to this tool, it is possible to schedule housekeeping and maintenance tasks and assign them to staff (for example, assigning a staff member to change the bed linen), add notes on tasks and check the status of assigned tasks so that you always know in real-time when they are completed, such as whether a room is ready to receive guests.

Hotel Check-in management

The Property Management System also helps with check-ins, automatically communicating guest IDs to local authorities.

These functionalities are helpful in the simplest check-ins. Still, they become even more effective in particularly time-consuming check-ins, such as the reception of groups, which involves preliminary activities such as rooming list management.

Channel manager connection

Using a Property Management System integrated with a Channel Manager is essential (if you don’t know yet what a Channel Manager is, read our article). A Channel Manager is fundamental for those working in the hotel industry.

Combining these two tools enables managing availability, reservations, cancellations and prices on the OTAs together. For example, the combination of the Channel Manager with the PMS automatically updates bookings received on Booking, Expedia or other OTAs . Helpful, especially if your accommodation is present on several online sales channels and you want to avoid any unpleasant overbooking. To learn more about how these engines work, check out what are metasearch engines.

Booking Engine connection

With the Booking Engine you can receive and manage direct bookings right on your hotel or vacation rentals website, with the advantage of obtaining bookings free of OTA commissions and having greater access to user data.

Integrating a Booking Engine with a Property Management System makes it possible to have total control over the flow of bookings.

What are the two popular property management system used by hotels?

The most popular Property Management Systems available today can be divided into two categories:

• On-premise PMS
• Cloud PMS

On-premise PMS

The on-premise PMS is installed on a computer (or more than one) to manage the accommodation.

The on-premises PMS is an outdated type of hotel management system; being the first PMS, it required installing the software locally.

Cloud PMS

The cloud PMS is the best property management system available because you can entirely manage it online, accessible from any device (computer, smartphone, tablet) anywhere.

What are the advantages of cloud PMS?

The advantages of a Cloud PMS are manifold. First, this type of Property Management System makes investing in high-performance and expensive hardware unnecessary, and all you need is an Internet connection to use it.

This feature makes the cloud PMS respond to the needs of an increasingly digitalised hospitality world, allowing hoteliers to access it anytime and from multiple devices.

Finally, it optimises staff deployment because several people can manage it.

As we have seen, PMS functionalities are strategically crucial for maximising a hotel’s performance or other types of accommodation.

The Octorate PMS is a complete software that can help you optimise many operational and management processes of your accommodation.  

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