5 Ways to Know You Should Start Using a Cloud-Based Hotel-Management System

Featured article by Susan Melony, Independent Technology Author

Hotel management is by no means an easy thing. It’s a remarkably competitive industry, and a few bad months can sink a hotel in some instances. You must do all you can to make sure your hotel is running smoothly, including using whatever new technology comes out.

A cloud-based hotel management system is something you might have considered before, but maybe you felt like it wasn’t worth it or you could live without it. There might come a time, though, when making this move makes all the sense in the world.

Let’s talk about five particular ways you’ll know this is the right move to make if you want your hotel to stay ahead of the curve.

You’re Not Consistently Filling All Your Rooms

As a hotel owner or manager, nothing should make you happier than seeing all your rooms filled up, night after night. That’s not always possible, but if you find that it’s happening far too infrequently, you need to make a change in the way you do business.

Using a hotel management tool like a cloud-based software platform can help you solve this problem. Many of them have features that allow you to set up quick and easy targeted ad campaigns.

If someone uses a particular keyword or keyword phrase when utilizing a search engine, your hotel ad will pop up. Those keywords or phrases might include hotels in the city or part of the country where your property is located.

These ad campaigns are intuitive because they use AI. You’d be surprised how big of a change using just this one tactic can make.

It Takes Too Long to Onboard Your New Workers

You might also find that you need to hire new employees frequently. The hotel business sometimes sees a lot of turnover, and you may need to bring new workers on board nearly every week. If you have bigger hotels or more than one of them, new worker onboarding might seem like a constant hassle.

There’s really no reason why you can’t make things easier on yourself with a cloud-based hotel software management suite. You can set your new worker up with the system and have them enter all their vital information.

At that point, you have it in the cloud, and you’ll need it for IRS purposes at the end of the fiscal year. You can also use the same software to show your new workers around the property digitally before you have management train them in person.

You Need an Easier Way to Communicate with Your Staff Members

If you have multiple hotels and other business interests, you might have to run around town or even fly from city to city almost every day. You’re checking up on your hotels, but you may also have to secure business loans and look at new properties you might wish to purchase.

You need to communicate with your staff, though, especially with the property managers who you have left in charge of each hotel. You might need to remind them about various things they need to do on a day-to-day basis.

Your hotel management software suite is a way for you to do that which is easier than anything which existed before. You can leave them messages there and receive them as well, and you know you’re communicating with them securely.

You Keep Having Data Breaches

Speaking of security, you might also decide to go with this model if you were using a non-cloud-based system, but now, you’re seeing hackers break into it all the time. Using the cloud instead of physical servers inherently makes it harder for hackers to access your system. You might have hackers going after you for various reasons, but their motives don’t matter very much.

The most critical thing is for you to be able to check your finances and exchange messages with your employees, knowing that no prying eyes are looking at what you’re saying. You might decide to go with a cloud-based model for this reason alone.

You Want to See What’s Happening with Your Hotels at All Times

One final time that you might want to go with this model is if you feel like you want a single location where you can see everything that’s happening with your hotels at any moment.

These software platforms give you a reliable, real-time snapshot of whether your hotels are fully booked and whether any problems need your immediate attention.