Whether you’re an independent or a group, a campsite, residence or hotel, the PMS (Property Management System) is an essential tool for managing your business. Over the years, it has become the nerve centre for managing an establishment.
The major transformation of the PMS market, driven by the advent of the Cloud and APIs, is leading both small players to become highly competitive in terms of functionality and operations, and legacy PMSs to undergo a technological transformation towards the Cloud and the opening up of their marketplace. In the space of 10 years, the market has been revolutionised by this technological transformation. It has attracted new players with different offerings in terms of:
- Acquisition costs, by eliminating the need for heavy investment.
- Connectivity, by opening up systems.
- State of mind, by creating customer-centric environments
Today, whatever their starting point, many PMSs are converging towards these changes, which have become structural.
The digital transition in the hotel sector has seen the PMS evolve into a genuine management platform, centralising the various tasks and activities of an establishment or group of establishments using native functions or connected third-party applications.
In addition to E.R.P.-type management functionalities (planning, invoicing), the building blocks of all hotel management services have been added: customer satisfaction, CRM, digital marketing, revenue management, MICE, e-distribution, POS catering, spa, concierge services, etc.
Finding the right PMS for your portfolio of establishments can be a headache. Especially as the method chosen to find the right supplier can be crucial to the success of such a project.
Here are a few tips to help you prepare your search and choose the PMS best suited to your situation.
Creating a project team
The PMS is the nerve centre of hotel or group management, so it is essential to set up a project team, generally made up of all the departments in the group or establishment, to assess the risks, needs and opportunities. Ideally, this project team is led by an external consultant.
They will provide you with their expertise and a more neutral view of your needs. All this is achieved by involving all the stakeholders and all the group’s or hotel’s business lines: management, reception, sales & marketing, revenue management, F&B, accounting, etc.
Taking an overall view
An overall vision is essential because the choice of a PMS is a real medium/long-term investment. The average life of a PMS in France is 8 years. So, it’s important to look to the future, to think about the potential functionalities you may need.
Carry out an audit of the existing system to take an overall view of the tech ecosystem and not just the PMS.
Draft a funnel-shaped, tailor-made statement of requirements: maturity matrix for each module, prioritisation of modules, then scoring of functionalities. Be careful to take into account non-regression and medium/long-term strategy requirements.
Evaluate the overall budget over at least three years, and turn to cloud solutions, which are often less expensive and more scalable, if you have a small budget.
Don't focus solely on native functionalities
Often, when expressing a need, we tend to focus on one or more specific functionalities, but these may be the result of limiting beliefs. For optimal use and a real return on investment, you also need to take into account other variables such as:
Marketplace depth and connection cost structure. The deeper the Marketplace, the more applications and integrations you will have within your reach (RMS, CRM, Satisfaction):
- The level of deployment support,
- The quality of day-to-day support: technical and business
- Versioning (upgrades and deployment of new versions).
Scoring the different dimensions
Scoring and weighting is the best way to compare different aspects: native features, additional features, suitability to needs, budget.
Have you completed your audit and your statement of requirements? All that’s left is to make an initial selection. To do this, you can either contact the PMS or consult user reviews on platforms such as Hotel Tech Report or Capterra. This will enable you to identify three or four solutions and conduct more in-depth auditions. 2 sessions per PMS can be envisaged.
You now have all the keys you need to choose the best PMS for your establishment!
