How Technology Integration Helps Hotel Businesses?

In this competitive hospitality landscape, hoteliers face challenges in meeting the ever-evolving guests' preferences while simultaneously simplifying their routine operations.

As guests' demands grow steadily, hotels need to speed up various processes that save time and effort for both parties.

Gone are the times when traditional hotel systems worked like a miracle; now times have changed as guests demand faster and top-notch services.

So, hoteliers need to understand the importance of integrating technology that makes guests feel personalized from check-in to check-out, using analytics to make data-driven decisions, and shifting towards a contactless payment system.

In this blog, we'll cover what hotel technology integration is, the types of technology integration you can use, and the challenges hoteliers face in adopting it.

What is hotel technology integration?

Technology integration in hotels involves incorporating tools and technologies to smoothen your hotel operations, enhance your guest experience, and improve operational efficiency.

In other words, technology integration means when new technologies are integrated with the existing tech stack through data, applications, APIs, and devices to create a unified system.

The underlying objective behind this is to simplify complex hotel processes and maximize guest satisfaction.

Moreover, hoteliers do technology integration not just for connecting 2 different systems or devices, rather it reduces manual human errors and makes your hotel staff 2x more productive. 

Benefits of technology Integration for hospitality businesses

We all know that technology is a major driver that shapes the hospitality industry. 

From enhancing guest experiences to automating hotel operations, it’s a game changer for hoteliers as it makes their lives easy.

Let’s talk about the positive changes of integrating technology in hotels-

1. Enhance guest experience

A prime advantage of integrating hotel technology is to serve your customers in a better fashion. It should be done in a way that the existing tech stack should interact seamlessly with new technologies/ tools.

The best way to think about this is when you talk to your guests in the way they expect. 

How do you make your guests' journey more personalized or make them feel special? By sending personalized messages, isn’t it?

That depends on how well you have integrated your tech stack.

For example – A seamless hotel technology integration speeds the check-in/check-out process for hotel guests. They don’t have to wait at the front desk for check-in formalities. Having a smartphone is enough for them to do contactless room check-in. 

Using mobile devices as room keys is one of the technology trends that’s gaining prominence in the hospitality industry.

Many hotels including Hilton are leveraging digital key systems to provide room access to guests using mobile devices.

They don’t have to scratch their head to keep track of key cards or frustrate the front desk staff again. That’s how the check-in and check-out process becomes easier. 

2. Makes your hotel more efficient

An integrated tech stack in hotels automates repetitive tasks such as assigning tasks to housekeeping staff, generating invoices, or managing guest reservations. 

A centralized system ensures that everything is available at your fingertips such as guest details and inventory related information.

You can change how hotels operate by having a PMS to automate reservations and administrative tasks.  

For instance – The integration of PMS with existing hotel software facilitates back-and-forth data transmission between these systems.  

By integrating a room access solution with PMS, you can simplify the check-in and check-out process for guests. 

Managing keycards becomes easy and at the same time front desk staff can save valuable time as they don’t need to input room numbers manually. 

3. Attain a competitive edge in the market

An integrated hotel technology tech stack keeps you ahead of your competitors as it provides you with data insights, and helps you make informed decisions in the future regarding room prices, upgrades, or managing inventory.

These technology solutions help you spot the data trends say, you found out that these are the most popular times when the demand for a room is high. Then, you would increase the room prices accordingly.

Observing such data patterns enables hoteliers to predict how guests interact with the property, their likes/preferences, and their booking patterns.

4. Drive more customer engagement

Technology integration enables hoteliers to expand their reach and go online by marketing it across various channels.

Hospitality businesses can draw in more guests by integrating online booking software or using the right social media platforms to connect with their guests. 

Upon the guest's arrival, the integrated technology can be used for sending personalized e-mails to customize guests' experiences such as spa appointments or any other booking request.

Different Types of Technology Integration in the Hotel Sector

Here are the various types of technology integration to help the hotel’s staff simplify their complex operations with ease.

1. Financial accounting system

Traditional accounting process in hotels looks like creating chunks of manual spreadsheets that are prone to human errors.  

Hospitality businesses record financial transactions (between guests and hotels, hotels and suppliers, etc.) to evaluate the overall health of hotels. 

Integrated accounting software saves valuable time and effort for hoteliers as they don’t need to apply math and logic and engross themselves in complex calculations.

A seamless integration of an accounting system with a PMS facilitates seamless data transfer such as the number of rooms sold, cancelled reservations, etc.

2. Point of sale system (POS)

Another type of hotel technology integration is the Point-of-sale system (POS). When guests make payments at different points of sale, every transaction will be added and recorded at the front desk for final billing.

There are various benefits that POS provides -

• Sell your services to guests 
• No more hassle in managing POS inventory 
• Transfer all transactions to a single place 

3. Channel manager

A channel manager updates your room availability and prices across all online travel agencies (OTAs). You don’t need to update room inventory and its rates on multiple channels. 

When the 2 systems are in sync, you avoid the risk of overbooking as the room inventory and its rates are updated in real time.

Hence, seamless integration ensures you can manage your bookings on a single platform and inventory availability gets updated across other platforms in real-time. 

BOTSHOT provides the best channel manager software (ChannelSyncro) that you can integrate with PMS. As PMS is in sync with the channel manager, any reservations made can be updated in real-time on various channels.

Thus, you can increase your online visibility and attract more guests to make a reservation. 

4. Booking engine

A booking engine is a powerful tool for a hotelier to get direct and commission-free bookings. A seamless integration of a booking engine with a hotel website or social media pages reduces your dependency on OTAs.

Thus, you can get more revenue for each booking by saving 15-20% commission. 

No matter from which source you receive bookings, an integrated booking engine with a website automatically updates the inventory in real time. 

BOTSHOT provides innovative software solutions to grow your hospitality business. We offer a smart website builder to help you create SEO-friendly websites using simple drag-and-drop functionalities.

Moreover, we offer booking engine integration with an existing website, so you receive direct bookings.

5. Contactless solution

From keyless room entry to contactless payments, these innovative solutions make the guest journey more personalized.

For Instance – BOTSHOT provides hotels with a contactless check-in and check-out solution that automates the guest experience before they arrive at the hotel. They can avoid long queues at the front desk and make the payment online with no human intervention.

These days, modern contactless technology comes with OCR solutions that verify the guest's identity through facial recognition technology. Thus, they get access to guest details as every bite-sized information is stored in PMS.

Those guest details become a selling point for them to upsell and cross-sell their packages during future stays.

6. Payment gateway solution

Hotels need a perfect payment gateway integration for accepting online payments from guests. Select a payment gateway that can be integrated with existing tech stack such as PMS, POS and any other software you use.

Thus, you can avoid the tasks of manually processing card payments on the device. 

Choosing a payment gateway integration saves you time and money by saving your card details in encrypted form so that next time you can offer an auto payment option directly to guests. 

7. Revenue management system

A revenue management system (RMS) is software that uses historical data and other data-driven insights to set the optimal pricing strategy that brings more revenue for hoteliers.

An integration of RMS with PMS helps hotels make better forecasts and make the right pricing decisions.

BOTSHOT provides a revenue management system for hoteliers to maximize their revenue by setting the best price for each room. Its powerful machine-learning algorithms consider guest preferences, booking patterns, average stay length, etc.

Challenges in Technology Integration

Let’s discuss some of the top reasons why hoteliers face challenges in technology integration- 

1. Various hotel chains rely on traditional technology that does not facilitate smooth integration with the new tech stack.

2. Hotel staff are not trained to work on these systems. They don’t know how to integrate new technology with existing tech stacks.

3. Most hotel owners resist adopting new technology. They think the staff is not trained to handle work and feel overwhelmed by integrating technologies to smoothen hotel operations. 

4. Some hoteliers aren’t ready for technology integration as they have a preconceived notion that it increases their overall cost.  

Wrapping up

If you want to go long, you can’t resist integrating advanced technologies into your hotel operations.

When global hospitality chains such as Mariott, Hilton, etc. integrate technology into their hotel operations to make their guests' lives easier.

Then, why not you? 

When leveraging advanced technology, Hilton is on top of everything that makes the guests feel special.

They allow their guests to do contactless check-in/check-out using mobile phones. No more keycard entry is required anymore. 

A smartphone is enough for them to gain room access.

Similarly, the Mariott hotel chain takes care of their guests and came up with an AI-powered chatbot that’s available on Facebook Messenger.

Book a 14 Day Free Trial for Hotel Management Software.

No matter what your hotel size is, adopting technological integrations is a game changer for your business. That’s what makes you more competitive and what modern guests demand.