Save bandwith, time in the cloud

PMS plusses

When it comes to cloud-based property-management systems that move servers off of a hotel property, new innovations will continue to increase flexibility and functionality deep into the new decade.

“We started this eight years ago, when it was primarily targeted at our economy-segment hotels because they needed reduced functionality and didn’t need to pay $300,000 for a PMS just to join the franchise network,” said Rain Fletcher, VP of enterprise infrastructure and architecture for Choice Hotels International. “We found it was incredibly successful and franchisees loved it, so we added additional functionality over the years in the mid-tier and upper segments to work for their needs. It’s become the required PMS for all of our hotels; we have about 4,600 properties on the system.”

As one of the original innovators in the cloud-based PMS space, Choice has been able to focus on expanding its services in order to appeal to a wide range of operators. Reducing on-property maintenance and installation costs has been a boon to Choice property owners.

“There is mutual benefit here, since a lot of hotels have servers that sit inside each hotel to run the PMS and phones home from time to time,” Fletcher said. “We found that was an incredible amount of capacity and figured out that spending $30,000 per hotel was something like $30 million total in hardware for us, which is far more capacity than we ever needed. It was overkill from a raw computer power standpoint, and operationally if we needed to update the system it would take weeks to deploy in addition to 28,000 person days just training staff.”

In an age where bandwidth requirements have been rising steeply, new PMS technology helps keep costs down.

“Another big advantage of going in this direction is that there are new technologies like AJAX that allow you to make calls back to the server without having to load a new webpage,” Fletcher said. “Five years ago, if you wanted to send data back to the server or receive data, you had to hit submit and go to another page. If you look at how we did it before, there was a lot of overhead loading a whole page.”

Cloud access helps employees concentrate on sales, inventory

For hoteliers with the responsibility of managing several different properties, a cloud-based property-management system is essential.

“We have nine different hotel properties all in the town of Banff, and what Northwind Maestro allows us to do is see our range of product and availability on one screen,” said Cathy Geisler, reservations manager for Banff Lodging, which is based in Alberta, Canada. “We have a centralized call center and all requests for reservations come into one place. What the PMS does is put all our product and inventory onto one screen so our reservation agents can effectively offer up different products, price ranges and accommodation styles.”

Since the hotel group switched to the Maestro PMS three years ago, bookings and group sales have increased due to the ability of the PMS to effectively manage packaged deals.

“We definitely have more efficiency, some things like our group management process or assigning group volume,” Geisler said. “Managing room lists is very efficient, as well as the way we sell add-ons. Our ability to cross-sell using the PMS has increased significantly. Being able to do inclusive packaging and present an inclusive price to the desk, and have all the accounting flow work itself out in the background, is huge from going over to Maestro.”

In the future, new innovations will decrease training costs and allow hoteliers to access property systems from a wide range of devices.

“PMS systems are nontrivial pieces of software but we’ve been in the training game for a good eight years figuring out what works,” said Rain Fletcher, VP of enterprise infrastructure and architecture for Choice Hotels International. “We’ve done things like interactive training on a test site, using more of a video experience.

“We’re very actively working on extending the interface beyond just an Internet Explorer-type browser,” he said. “We feel like in a post-desktop era, those interfaces are going to be very important to our property owners. They should be able to change a rate on an iPhone or via text message.”