Q4 has rolled around again and budget season is upon us. For hoteliers, it’s a time to look at upcoming hospitality trends, benchmark your hotel’s annual performance and create strategies to maximize your next year’s profits. Accurately forecasting future demand, expenses and profitability can be difficult—but luckily, there are hospitality tools that can help streamline the process.
When budgeting, you want to build efficiency, accuracy and ambition into the process, but that requires much more than a positive outlook. For budget planning to be as effective as possible, it requires high-tech hospitality tools that leverage property data and help you to accurately forecast growth.
Revenue Intelligence: Duetto Scoreboard
The bottom line is just that—the foundation of your business. Effective revenue management is essential for understanding what you are doing well and where opportunities for improvement lie. Duetto’s Scoreboard helps make something as complex as revenue management easy, intuitive and integrated. By allowing you to make customizable reports, Duetto gives you a better view of your property’s overall success.
Sales and Marketing: Guestfolio
Driving bookings is both essential and expensive. A tool like Guestfolio empowers you to spend less time, effort and investment on sales and marketing while achieving the same or better results. Hoteliers are able to deliver a truly personalized guest experience once their outreach efforts are guided by sophisticated customer relationship management software (CRM). Rather than casting a broad net, each guest touchpoint is easily customized to their specific needs. Budgets can be reliably built around the promise of rising bookings.
Direct Connects: TripConnect Cost-Per-Clicks
The relationship between hoteliers and online travel agencies (OTAs) is complicated to put it mildly. A tool like TripConnect helps to bridge the gap between the two by allowing hoteliers to drive traffic to their official booking site using a popular platform like TripAdvisor. The hotel lowers its acquisition cost while simplifying the discovery and booking process for guests—turning what could be a competitive relationship between hoteliers and OTAs into a collaborative one.
Channel Management Tool: Travelclick
Hotels must learn how to best work with OTAs, and Travelclick can help. Travelclick’s Channel Management solution allows hoteliers to manage all OTA channels from a single screen, making it easier to adjust room rates, pricing and restrictions across the web. Plus, Travelclick integrates with your property management system (PMS) to ensure all reservations are logged within your central system. With Travelclick in place, you can budget around a higher Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) with confidence.
Point of Sale (POS): Squirrel
A strong POS system is a priority online, at the front desk, in the hotel restaurant and increasingly through mobile devices. Squirrel seamlessly integrates with your existing PMS, so that you can easily manage transactions from all areas of your hotel operations. Plus, unlike some alternatives, Squirrel is appropriate for properties of all sizes and can scale to keep pace with any growth. A quality POS system ensures that potential revenue translates into real revenue without fail.
Credit Card Solutions: Shift 4
Data breaches throughout 2017 have shaken consumer confidence in digital security. Shift 4 offers next-generation credit card solutions that put the priority on security. Both guests and hoteliers can feel confident that the most sensitive information is secure. Shift 4 also makes compliance with evolving regulations, like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), as effortless as possible. This company got its start in the hospitality industry, and they have gone on to develop solutions uniquely tailored to hotels.
Budgeting and forecasting can seem daunting, but these tools help to take the guesswork out of the process. Equipping your hotel with an innovative PMS system ensures that you can accurately budget and forecast using up-to-the-minute reports, while integrating with the right tools to adjust your pricing, drive occupancy and create a seamless booking experience.
RoomKeyPMS offers integrated solutions that interface with these tools and more, creating an end-to-end resource for hotel management. If you want this budget season to be as productive as possible, contact our team.
Photo: Shutterstock / YURALAITS ALBER
