A recent article featured on eHotelier asked ‘is now the right time to upgrade to a next generation Hotel PMS?’ The answer is yes! There has never been a better time – however uptake is slow, with hotels preferring to stick to their tried and trusted systems; only 22% of hotels earmarked migrating to the cloud as a top tech priority in 2015, and according to The 2016 Smart Decision Guide to Hotel Property Management Systems, only one-quarter (27%) of hoteliers who have not upgraded their PMS within the past 3 years indicate that they plan to do so in the next 12 months. The reality for some hoteliers is that they might actually hang on to their systems for as long as 10-15 years! – Which is a pretty long time in the world of technology!
There is no shortage of reasons for hoteliers to migrate from a legacy PMS to a state-of-the-art system designed to meet their current and future market needs. We even wrote a whole eBook entitled ‘A hoteliers guide to reducing cost and increasing profits! – Check it out!
PMS systems have and continue to evolve and the past decade has seen the rise of a new generation of PMS with the introduction of agile, flexible and cost effective cloud-based solutions. They help;
- Streamline operations across the organization and provide better management controls.
- Reduce overheads and minimize costs through increased efficiency (As an FYI the annual cost of managing (on-premise) software applications can be as much as four times the cost of the initial purchase! And companies can spend up to 75% of their total IT budget just to maintain and run existing systems and infrastructure).
- Enable new integrated experiences between the hotel and guest allowing for flawless customer service contributing to higher occupancy rates, RevPAR and overall profitability through better data accessibility and process efficiency.
In summary, a Cloud PMS does not only bring significant cost savings to the table but it can deliver real financial tangible results. Hotels who dismiss or put moving to a cloud-based PMS on the long finger are missing out on technology that can offer significant advantages. “For many hotels and resorts, now may be the perfect time to start taking advantage of the advances in features and functionality of next-generation systems.” Jeff Zabin eHotelier
