Regardless of department, hotel teams are often faced with a dilemma. Is it worth it to adopt new technologies, or should we continue with the processes we’re familiar with?
Embracing new tools can be daunting and often comes with fears that it will replace roles or complicate existing workflows. In reality, however, it brings teams closer together and helps empower individuals by reducing redundant tasks, enabling them to shift their focus towards more engaging and meaningful work.
In this article, we explore how technology can be adopted and integrated across hotels to empower teams and drive better business outcomes.
Departmental breakdown and the role of technology
Each department of a hotel has its own responsibilities that contribute to the overall success of the property. Here we’ll break down each and look at how technology can help streamline processes.
Revenue management
A revenue manager’s primary responsibility is to optimize pricing and inventory to maximize revenue. This involves analyzing historical data, market trends, competitor pricing, and demand patterns to ensure the hotel is selling the right rooms to the right guests at the right price.
Without technology, revenue management is extremely tedious and time-consuming, relying on manual calculations and guesswork. With a revenue management system (RMS), much of this process is automated, allowing revenue managers to make informed decisions in real time. This leads to better business outcomes as teams can react quickly to market shifts, optimize room rates, and push out new rates & availability to channels at once.
When integrated with your property management system (PMS), channel manager, and booking engine, your RMS receives constant communication regarding demand, rates, and availability, helping provide even more informed pricing decisions.
Marketing
Depending on your hotel’s resources, you may or may not have a dedicated marketing team. However, someone should be responsible for attracting guests, building brand awareness, and driving direct bookings via integrated marketing campaigns.
Technology, particularly customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and property management systems, enhance the effectiveness of marketing teams. A CRM helps collect and organize guest data, from preferences and past stays to engagement with campaigns. When integrated with the PMS, marketing teams gain deeper insights into guest behavior, enabling them to segment more effectively and tailor messaging. For example, if you regularly host a segment of guests for spring break, you can send a quick email six months ahead reminding them to book for the season.
Guest experience
Guest experience is the heart of hotel operations. While some teams have dedicated departments, others rely on multiple teams, including the front desk, housekeeping, and concierge staff, to ensure that guests feel welcome, comfortable, and cared for.
Guest experience includes everything from pre-stay communication, check-ins, service recovery, and surprise and delight moments that elevate each stay. To make this possible, hotels must leverage technology.
Guest engagement platforms empower guest experience teams by providing real-time communication channels that facilitate faster, more personalized guest experiences. When integrated with the PMS, front desk teams can conduct digital check-ins, reducing time spent checking credit cards and IDs and transferring that energy into property tours or welcome experiences.
Housekeeping
Housekeeping teams are often the unsung heroes of hotels. Clean rooms are the top priority for travelers and a must for a positive guest experience. Housekeepers must handle everything from cleaning rooms and public areas to managing laundry and addressing maintenance requests.
Unfortunately, many hotels are struggling to fill housekeeping roles. The AHLA reported that 76% of hotels are experiencing staffing shortages, and 50% noted housekeeping as their top hiring need. That’s where technology can help.
Housekeeping technology helps teams work more efficiently. Dedicated technology with PMS integrations allows housekeepers to receive real-time updates on room statuses and special requests right on their phone or tablet (that’s right, no crackling walkie-talkies). For example, housekeepers can be alerted when they’re cleaning a VIP room and need to take special care or if rooms have been reprioritized.
Technology also empowers housekeepers to track inventory levels, manage cleaning schedules, and monitor performance – helping them stay organized and on top of tasks that would otherwise require manual coordination.
How integrated technology brings teams together
Many hotels operate in silos, with limited communication and coordination across teams. This can lead to inefficiencies, misalignment on goals, and missed opportunities to enhance both operational performance and the guest experience. Integrated technology serves as a critical tool for breaking down these silos by fostering collaboration and enabling seamless communication across departments.
At the heart of that communication is the property management system. The PMS acts as the central source of truth for hotel operations, with data flowing in and out across the system to reduce duplication and errors.
When properly integrated, data can be shared in real-time across systems like the RMS, CRM, and housekeeping platform. For example, if the revenue manager updates rates, the marketing team can launch targeted promotions to fill available rooms. Similarly, if housekeeping marks a room as ready, the front desk can offer guests an early check-in to increase satisfaction.
For seamless communication across departments, management should consider investing in internal communication tools with features like team chat, tasks, and tickets. These tools provide a channel for departments to align and can support workflow automation.
For example, if housekeeping notices a leaky sink, they can trigger a workflow so that a task will be created for maintenance. Alternatively, if a guest requests extra towels at the front desk, reception can send a message to the housekeeper assigned to their floor for a quick delivery.
The role of data
Reliable and accurate shared data empowers hotel teams to align their strategies toward a common goal. Guest feedback, for instance, can be analyzed and shared across departments to identify areas for improvement. If guests frequently mention issues with cleanliness, housekeeping can adjust their operations.
This also becomes increasingly important when it comes to multi-property performance. Being able to compare performance across properties allows for deeper insights and alignment across the portfolio. Hotels can more easily implement standard operating procedures and ensure that a level of consistency is being maintained.
With hospitality-specific business intelligence tools, hotels can make all of this possible. Not only does it offer advanced reporting capabilities with custom reports, competitive intelligence, and forecasting, but it’s also built to support hospitality-specific data, meaning that it extracts, transforms, and loads data in a way that makes sense for hotels.
By centralizing information and making it easy to create reports and visualizations using departmental-wide data sets, department managers can make more collaborative decisions that impact the property.
Empowering teams with integrated technology
Integrated technology has the power to bring teams closer together and create more enriching roles for hotel staff. Regardless of role, teams can benefit from automation, real-time data, and streamlined communication to eliminate time-consuming, tedious tasks and refocus their efforts on strategic initiatives that can boost morale and overall hotel performance.
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Our guest author, Lana Cook, is a Content Manager at Cloudbeds where she is able to combine her love of writing and passion for travel. She has spent the last few years writing about all things technology and the ways in which it can be used to help lodging businesses grow revenue, streamline operations, and deliver more memorable guest experiences.
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Cloudbeds is the leading platform redefining the concept of PMS for the hospitality industry, serving tens of thousands of properties in more than 150 countries worldwide. Built from the ground up to be masterfully unified and scalable, the award-winning Cloudbeds Platform brings together built-in and integrated solutions that modernize hotel operations, distribution, guest experience, and data & analytics.