Authored Article by Aditya Sanghi, Co-Founder & CEO

Hotels of all sizes, irrespective of their offerings, have always relied on technology to streamline and automate operations across departments. Not only this, technology has become critical for them to drive growth via more sales and offer top-notch guest services.

When we talk about technology in hotels, we are no longer looking at archaic legacy/server-based solutions. Instead, hotels across the globe have moved to cloud-based solutions. The emergence of several cloud-based hospitality solutions have changed the way hotels have been investing in technology.

Let’s explore the role of cloud technology in the hospitality industry and how it is changing how hotels operate.

Significant cost saving

Hotels can save costs with cloud solutions. For example, let’s look at a cloud Hotel PMS that doesn’t require hotels to invest upfront in licensing fees and annual maintenance costs. Plus, they don’t have to invest in costly hardware. Cloud Solutions’ subscription-based model drastically reduces their software ownership costs.

Faster implementation

Cloud Hotel PMSs are easy to implement remotely. It also addresses hoteliers’ concerns regarding the go-live timeline with a quicker implementation process. The critical aspect here is – third-party integration. Today, every hospitality solution, including Hotel CRM, Channel Manager, Revenue Management System, etc., is on the cloud. Due to this, integrating your hotel PMS with other solutions is now effortless, with real-time and two-way data exchange for better clarity.

Ease of access

Cloud-based hospitality solutions allow mobile access to hotel data via smartphones, laptops, etc. It means hoteliers neither have to confine themselves within the four walls of their properties nor have to waste time calling respective

departments to know business-critical data. And, of course, cloud-based solutions are pretty easy to use. It, too, improves staff productivity.

More online sales

An increasing number of guests are booking their rooms via OTAs and metasearch sites. That’s why hotels need to work with those online sales channels. This is where a cloud hotel channel manager can help hotels with real-time distribution and rate parity across those online channels. Ultimately, for a hotel, it leads to improved online visibility and enhanced indirect sales. Similarly, a booking engine gets more direct bookings via the hotel’s website. More sales lead to increased occupancy and revenue.

Scalability

Cloud solutions like Hotel PMSs provide hoteliers with on-demand access to the required computing resources. It allows hotels to scale up and scale down as per their requirements. For example, say a hotel has 50 rooms. But they decided to take off five rooms from their inventory for a month-long renovation process. In this case, they have to pay for 45 rooms that month. The same is true when they increase their inventory by adding ten more rooms.

Let’s look at this scalability aspect from a hotel group’s perspective. Say one group has 20 properties and decided to add one more. A cloud-based Hotel PMS with multi-property management capabilities addresses this, too. The new property can be set up in a week and brought under the centralised control of the corporate office.

Deeper insights

As we advance further in the digital age, data around guest preferences, their spending patterns, and other critical business processes has become more valuable. In this context, hotels need to leverage the power of the cloud to identify those data to act upon. For example, a robust cloud Hotel PMS like Hotelogix offers 100+ reports to help hotels make data-driven decisions to drive growth. Hotels require deeper insights to improve guest experience, optimize pricing strategy, and enhance online reputation.

Guest service

This is the most crucial area. All cloud-based solutions, from Hotel PMS to others, all save staff time with comprehensive automation. And when a hotel’s staff are not wasting time doing mundane work, they can personally attend to guest needs,

exceeding their expectations. Also, thanks to the power of the cloud, hotels can roll out several guest-facing contactless solutions, including pre-check-in, door unlocking, raising service requests, making payments, and checking out.

Apart from the benefits mentioned above, with a flexible cloud-native tech stack, hotels can see many other benefits like zero service interruptions, improved data security, sustainability, etc. Most importantly, they become highly responsive to changes and can act accordingly to stay ahead of their competition.

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