How to choose the correct PMS for your boutique hotel

What are the characteristics a boutique hotel's PMS should have? 

Now that we know why a PMS is so important, let’s take a look at the key characteristics you should look out for. Being a boutique hotel, your strength lies in being unique, giving you a competitive advantage and setting you apart from the competition. The better your hotel runs – the more dynamic and efficient your operations are – the more you can focus on providing the best guest experience possible. 

1. Excellent customer support

As a hotelier for a boutique hotel, you need to be sure to be able to access the support you need when you need it. Look out for a tool that offers product training, and that helps you learn how to get the most out of your PMS. 24/7 support and help implementing the solution are also important. You need a hospitality cloud backed by industry professionals that will help you get the most out of your software.

2. Integration flexibility

As a small hotel, your tools are your power, so you need to make sure that your PMS can integrate with an array of software that will help drive efficiency. Proper connectivity effectively gives you a toolbox kit that will cover all your hospitality bases like upselling, customer experience, business intelligence, point of sale, reputation management, and much more. 

The flexibility of integration allows you to choose the tools that best work for you. Whether it’s integrating with an online booking engine or a channel manager, you want to be able to access the software and make the connections that will allow you to optimize your processes. 

3. The ability to manage revenue

Especially for boutique hotels where every dollar counts, you need to be able to optimize revenue in order to maximize profits. A tool like Mews' hotel rate management allows you to create custom rates, special deals and dependencies, as well as package rates. Rate management with Mews helps you to take pricing into your hands and grow your business.

Rate management is an important part of optimizing revenue for boutique hotels. With a smaller team, you need the support of good tools that will help you make educated decisions based on pricing to create attractive packages and rates that will ensure that the days when occupancy or demand is high, you are making the most bang for your buck.

4. Cloud-based

Long gone are the days when only one person accessed a program from their desktop computer. Modern hoteliers are on-the-go, and they need a PMS that can support their movements. This is why you should look for a PMS that’s cloud-based, meaning anyone can access it from anywhere and from any device, whether that be a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. Cloud technology provides the flexibility you need. 

Find out more reasons why cloud technology is a must.

5. Reports and insights

One of the secrets behind a successful hotel is understanding your numbers. Reports and insights will allow you to make data-driven decisions, while at the same time getting an understanding of your operational efficiency, revenue and performance. You want to be able to view historic data and target figures across operations so that you can optimize and refine. This means that the right tool should allow you to automate reporting.

6. Competitive pricing

Since boutique hotels are more price-sensitive, it’s important to find a PMS that has competitive pricing that allows you to choose the plan that works best for your hotel. Whether that be a per-room pricing model, a tailored plan that’s designed to suit your needs, or the ability to choose based on changing factors, affordability is key when choosing the right software. 

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• How loyalty programs can benefit independent hotels

7. Create marketing and upselling opportunities

Being able to use your PMS to integrate with solutions that allow you to create targeted marketing campaigns, along with the possibility for upselling, is a great characteristic to look out for. The more you can automate processes and provide opportunities for upselling during the booking process, the more revenue you can get per booking, which is key to profitability. 

8. Security

The more users that access a system from different places, the more vulnerable your hotel can be to cyberattacks. This is why it’s important to choose a PMS that has the highest standard of security features integrated into the platform so that your data and your customer’s data is protected no matter where they use the system or how they access it.

Learn more about data breaches and how to protect your hotel.

9. Adaptability

There’s nothing more important when choosing software than adaptability. Adaptability ensures that the software adapts to your needs and that you can choose from different solutions depending on what you need most at any given time. It could be new features or even new integrations – modern hoteliers need to be flexible and adaptable, and they need software that can be too.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve looked at how to choose the right PMS for your boutique hotel, and what characteristics you should look out for. The must-haves include integration capability, cloud-based, excellent customer support, revenue management, reporting, competitive pricing, adaptability and security, as well as the ability to create marketing and upselling opportunities. 

With the right PMS, you can be sure you are on your way to taking the reins of hotel management into your hands and unlock efficiency while driving revenue. The secret of choosing the right software for your boutique hotel is making sure that you select a solution that can be flexible to your needs so you can get the most out of the product, so you can be on the way to making the most revenue possible.