A modern hotel, whether it be a city hotel or a resort, is not only comfortable rooms and well-trained staff but also everything you need for rest and work. Depending on the specialization of the hotel, it may have a business center, SPA salon, swimming pool, and much more, not to mention restaurants and bars. To manage this entire economy, you cannot do without specialized software. Hotel management systems (HMS) belong to a class of special software called PMS (Property Management Systems). In addition to the HMS itself, these include programs for other objects of the hospitality industry (restaurants, bars, sports and entertainment complexes, etc.), as well as management systems for stores, warehouses, government agencies, etc.
Hotel systems allow automating all stages of guest service, from booking tickets, checking in, and ending with the final settlement, as well as basic business processes – from the work of maids to organizing reporting at the enterprise. In addition, they provide management of all hotel services and systems available in the room. Recently, interest in hotel systems has revived. All the advanced and contemporary HMS have a more or less similar structure, consisting of Front Office modules, Back Office modules, and interfaces to external systems. Each HMS has its own set of functional modules, but the typical set of services that is to be constantly evolved in an HMS is as follows.
Receptionist. This is the most important service that ensures the registration of the guest and his settlement in the room, as well as payment and check-out. As a rule, the reception and accommodation service work with an interactive graphical plan for loading the room stock, directly from which you can carry out all operations related to the guest’s settlement.
Reservation. The booking module provides auto-detection of availability or occupancy of rooms for the booking period, specifying order parameters, and creating and canceling a booking. Additional functions related to servicing group requests are placed in a separate module in some HMS.
Maid service. Here, the main task of the management system is to organize the schedule of duty and cleaning of rooms, to form a list of works (for example, to change towels, toiletries, etc.) with the issuance of written orders. Often, the system also keeps track of the points that staff receive for work performed. In addition, it provides a display of the status of minibars in the rooms and accounting of goods in them. Administration. This module provides setting up the system itself, changing tariffs, editing the exchange rate, and other parameters. The above set is to be evolved by the modern technological means of automatization, which will result in coherent HMS functioning, fast dealing with challenges, and satisfied customers.
