Hotel management is a many-layered and complicated set of procedures. It can be difficult to manage everything manually, but there are also many technological options available to help you better manage your hotel. Some of these can be used in isolation while others can be integrated with each other in order to streamline your processes. Here are five technological tools you can use to optimize hotel management.

1. Role-based Governance Tools

Many employees find practices and systems such as shadow IT useful, due to the increased speed they offer. When you use shadow IT, it means you're bypassing the process of getting approval from your security or IT operations team. While this increased efficiency has its benefits, it can be dangerous when you're working with sensitive data, such as guests' reservation and payment information. To circumvent this temptation, you can employ a role-based governance tool, which maintains your security while also allowing your employees the speed they want for their work.

2. Revenue Management Software

Most organizations utilize a Revenue Management Software (RMS) tool for their transactions and money management. An RMS may also be called a Revenue Optimization (RO) tool. RMS tools are useful because they can be used internally and to monitor external factors, such as market popularity and forecasting for prices and demand. These results are achieved by real-time monitoring of the market and your own booking updates, the ability to integrate with your other tools, such as business intelligence tools and Central Reservation Software and the ability to customize your automation settings.

3. Business Intelligence Tools for Hotels

It's incredibly useful for hotels to utilize tools that are capable of data collection, management and analysis. One of the best kinds of tools available for these needs is a business intelligence tool. These tools can assist you in developing insights into your hotel's performance and how it stacks up against the wider market. One of the most useful aspects of business intelligence tools is that they're highly versatile and customizable. You can choose what you need for reports exporting, dashboards and visualization, connections to other tools and reporting options. Business intelligence tools can be set up to run automatically.

4. Property Management Systems

Every industry has management tools unique to its processes and needs. One of the ones unique to hotels is a Property Management System, or PMS. A PMS is a system that enables you to connect and coordinate all your other technology so you can better manage your hotel and its components. A PMS can help you make all your processes more streamlined. For example, the PMS can manage all aspects of a guest's stay, from check-in to check-out.

5. Central Reservation Software

While you can integrate all of the management of your guests' stays, it can be useful to use a different, but connected, technological tool to manage your guests' payment processing. This is where a Central Reservation Software system, or CRS, comes in. This system allows you to centralize your booking and payment management and processing. Employing a CRS system can help keep your hotel's availability updated and mitigate double bookings. The best way to employ a CRS is to automate it. This is because of the risk associated with the manual use of CRS systems.

Conclusion

Use the technological tools that make sense for you. The tools you use may differ depending on your region, the size of your hotel and whether you're managing an independent business or a part of a hotel chain. You'll also need to check the levels of automatic and manual processing available to you and what amount of each you'll need for each tool.

Read more: Ultimate guide to hotel operations