One of the reasons that Open Hotel (http://openhotel.com/ ) is my PMS of choice is that I’ve found them to be pretty decent about working with third-party developers about exchanging APIs when there’s a reason to.
I got them talking with one third-party hotel CRM site.
And I even found one franchise organization that will let us use Open Hotel if they will accommodate a two-way API. Terrific - I’m not a big believer in hotel franchising anymore, and I’m developing my own brands, but occasionally I encounter an investor whose financing will restrict him to a national franchise. With that franchise, I can use the same property management system that I’d use in an independent hotel, or one operating under one of my own brands, and have a little more uniformity in the bookkeeping department.
There are a lot -- two or three dozen, anyway -- of new cloud-based PMX out there, competing for a very limited market of hotel business. And most of them drive me a little nuts, because there is so much that so many of them won't do.
And for a tech company that markets a hotel PMS, that's suicidal.
I'm actually looking forward to seeing a few among that sorry lot to go bankrupt, so I can buy one of the better ones cheaply. (Hopefully by that time, I'll be in a better position to so. The burn rate concerns me than the purchase price.) And then, it'll have the features that I want. All of them, not just the ones Open Hotel has. And any of its tech people, or (even worse) its sales people who tries to tell me that it can't will very shortly thereafter "leave the company to seek a more appropriate career opportunity", and I'll put someone in there who can.
I'm sure the folks at Open Hotel would like for Marriott to switch over to their cloud-based system, now that they have the Starwood merger coming up and Marriott's own system is something that needs replacing, anyway. They're good people, I think they could adequately serve a big-box Marriott or Sheraton hotel (or an entire chain of them), and I'd be rooting for them and would like to see them do it.
But there is very little likelihood that a hotel PMS will be sold to a major chain or franchise organization. Among hotels, the extent of their market is independent hotels: most chain and franchised hotels require the use of a particular system that’s made by someone else, and it would take some doing to get a large chain to switch. And most PMS developers are marketing their property management systems to altogether the wrong independent hotels.
Let me show you an example of how so: Richmond, Va. (The 10 Best Hotels in Richmond, VA (with Pictures) ) Notice how, of the top twenty hotels in that city, sorted by TripAdvisor ranking, three of those are independent, boutique, hotels?
Those are the market for your property management system, if you own a company that makes or supports one.
You can rank the hotels on that TripAdvisor page (or that of any other city) in the other direction and market your PMS to the much cheaper Royal Inn or the Speco, or the Hotel I-64, or the Diamond Inn, or the Airport Inn if you want. Your PMS could easily support any one of those properties. But so could the makers of a couple dozen or so PMX, any one of which could support those properties. Guess which one they’re going to buy, if they buy one at all? That’s right — the cheapest one.
- Your PMS needs to manage financial records and balance the books.
- It needs to manage room inventory, manage reservations, and note that the rooms are clean and available when the guests show up. It needs to link to online travel agencies and GDS (that's how those low-end properties are able to access those revenue channels -- and have their rates posted on TripAdvisor).
- It needs to manage rates, and apply your special rate programs (AAA, senior citizens, etc.) as appropriate: a good one will have some yield management capabilities (raise the rates automatically if the hotel is filling up fast, cut them automatically if you've got a slow night coming up).
- It needs to be linked to a booking engine that can be embedded to your website, so visitors to your website can book a reservation from it.
It doesn't take much of a PMS to do 'all that'.
The trouble with most property management systems is that 'all that' is all that they will do. Particularly infuriating are the salespeople for the companies that make them, who expect you to be so impressed, bedazzled, and besotted with them that they’ll even do that.
But take another look at those three independent, boutique hotels in the top 20, with the highest TripAdvisor bubble scores.
- They're there because they have high standards - as high as the chain hotels, higher than many of them.
- They have original ideas.
- They innovate.
Among the owners of those hotels, if any of them have something to offer that you'll want one of in your town, if any have the potential to expand, pick up a second hotel, buy or build maybe two or three more, grow into a small regional chain, it'll be them.
And if they content themselves with someone's off-the-shelf product for a property management system, that'll do no more than what hotels always/already do, only 'do it better', it's not because they want to be limited to that.
- They need better rate and price configuration capabilities.
- They need better customer relationship management capabilities.
- They need better business intelligence capabilities.
- They'd want a reputation management capability to track guests' social media participation and watch for new online reviews.
- And those are just the things that I can imagine wanting a system to do. No one, and no property management system, can do, or even anticipate, it all.
And if a system can do all of those things for those independent boutique hotels -- and link up to others with more capabilities -- then supporting a local, independent Mom-and-Pop that doesn't need much more than reservations and booking management, financial reporting, GDS link, and rate management, would be child's play by comparison.
It's not like the PMX would have a big system that smaller hotels can't afford. Quite the contrary, it can only get so big. Most of its more advanced capabilities would come from linking to other providers via two-way APIs.
What I was looking for when I discovered Open Hotel was a system that could support a small, regional chain that we want to launch.
Specifically, we needed something that could support a loyalty card program.
Don’t mess with me about this. We’ve got to have it — we’re launching new hotel brands. Much of the value of any hotel brand is the number of people walking around with the loyalty card in their pocket. And it’s got to work our way: it can’t just manage a knockoff of ChoicePrivileges and Wyndham Rewards and HHonors on which no one can figure out the point system, and we’re certainly not going to have it be something that doesn’t even work as well as theirs and leave it at that.
Ours has to do things no other hotel’s loyalty program will do, like track your stays and get you discounted rooms, and get you an occasional free night (with your having a pretty good idea, in the meantime, how close you are to one) and prompt us to send you a card on your birthday and give you a free upgrade the next time you stay with us, and get you a couple thousand off the list price of a new car. (I spent fifteen years running movie theatres for Carmike Cinemas, so don’t tell me that that can’t be done — I’ve worked agreements with car dealerships to do it with the stubs of $5.00 movie tickets. Back in the day, if you attended a movie at the Gateway Twin in Elizabeth City, N. C., your ticket stub could get you $1500 off the price of a new Chevy or Toyota from the local auto mall . . .)
None of the other property management systems - except for one or two - could manage a hotel loyalty program. Those that could were limited to either a 'beanie card' point system (stay nine nights and get the tenth free), or one that relied upon someone's proprietary card system that was being marketed to as many independent hotels as they could get to sign on to it (a point system keyed to the dollar amount you spend) -- and when I asked about other capabilities (for example, our own loyalty card system instead of someone else’s), neither of those could do any further customization. The second one even characterized my requests as 'overkill': no other hotels wanted that.
Well, forget them. I like overkill. It opens up new possibilities in life. Like Nietzsche says, if you survive it, it makes you stronger.
Could Open Hotel support a loyalty card program? No . . . but they would have that capability in a year or so: right now there were other things they need to work on that were more in immediate demand by their existing customers. Meanwhile, I got into their sandbox and spent a lot of time playing with a working demo, and found quite a few other features that were on my wish list, that I didn’t know that any PMS, anywhere, had; and they were receptive to any suggestions and willing to answer any questions I had, so Open Hotel would be the one I anticipated eventually going with.
Also, meanwhile, I discovered something else: CendynOne, a specialized hotel data intelligence provider. Could they support a loyalty program for a small chain? Yes, of course: it's what they do. For quite a few hotels and even a few chains, already. (They could even make certain rates available only to my loyalty card holders without making them available to the general public: the other half of the reason I needed a loyalty card program.) Indeed, that's just a small part of it. But they don't have a property management system.
Well . . . we've just got to get these two together . . .
A few e-mails, a few calls, get the tech people talking to each other, and we're off on our way. I'm going to end up with the property management system of my dreams, and Open Hotel and CendynONE are going to do all the work.
It all turned out to be so easy that now, I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole any cloud based property management system that won't provide APIs to another supplier that would provide an essential element of your eventual system.
No hotel property management system alone is ever going to be able to provide all of these elements, or even anticipate the need for all of them. So, they need to have the capability to link up to other providers that can provide these elements.
So, check with the Open Hotel people. And check with any other cloud-based property management system providers that you can find.
Not all of them will be open to the idea, at first, of permitting two-way APIs. It’s only respectable that you’d have to convince them that it wouldn’t hurt their system to let you: they have technical workability and security considerations to think about. But as they begin discovering that they have to, if they want to market their system to hotels that will be the most stable, loyal customers for over the long run, they will.
Originally appeared on Quora
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