Since the start of the pandemic, hotels have been caught in a COVID Catch-22: They are expected to deliver enhanced service, cleanliness and personalization, with reduced resources and occupancy, and a limited staff. Fortunately, the way out of this Catch-22 is through technology: By automating key aspects of team management, staff communication, and check-in, as well as many other time-consuming administrative tasks, StaynTouch Cloud PMS can empower hotels to get the most out of a lean staff, increase revenues, and enhance the guest experience.
1. Streamline Housekeeping Management With Automated Room and Task Assignment
This dilemma can be felt most strongly in housekeeping: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, government agencies and industry associations have issued exacting health and cleanliness standards for hotel rooms, public areas and common touchpoints. Keeping up with these standards will be difficult enough for hotels grappling with staff shortages, and almost impossible for properties using clipboards and radios to manage housekeeping teams.
Fortunately, a true-cloud PMS with built-in automation can automatically assign rooms to housekeeping staff according to configured hotel sections and employee bandwidth 一 so that work can be distributed fairly among staff and efficiently by room proximity. Housekeeping managers can also develop highly granular task lists, to ensure that each room is cleaned to the exacting standards COVID-19 guidelines. Each task can be fully customized, and categorized by work-type, interval, and approximate work-time, so that managers can develop metrics on housekeeping performance. And of course like every function within StaynTouch Cloud PMS, managers can update their team on the go from their mobile device.
2. Enhance Staff Communications and Boost Efficiency with Automatic Room Status Updates
Traditionally, hotels used the old “clipboard and radio” technique to communicate room updates, leading to staff miscommunications, slower room turnover, and awkward early-morning interruptions for occupied rooms. StaynTouch Cloud PMS can avoid all of this, however, by providing instant automatic room status updates to every staff member on property, leading to more efficient room turnovers, and fewer risky physical interactions between staff and guests. Quicker turnover also means increased revenue from monetized early check-in and late check-outs: Now, guests who arrive early can enter their room as soon as it’s available, and guests who purchase a late-checkout won’t have to deal with unexpected 7AM knocks on their door.
3. Free Up Your Front Desk Staff With Automatic Room Assignment and Bulk Check-In
A front desk agent is often the first face your guests see when they arrive at a hotel, but with traditional PMS systems, front desk staff often remain buried in their computer screen, trying to manually complete administrative tasks through a cumbersome user interface. By automating tasks such as room-assignment and bulk check-in, a true-cloud PMS can let your staff focus on what’s important一actually serving their guests. Additionally, because a mobile PMS can run on a tablet, it allows hoteliers to handle guest requests from anywhere on the property, on a mobile device. This improvement in efficiency and the guest experience can be significant: StayNTouch found that hotel clients experienced a 75% reduction in check-in time when guests chose to check-in with a front desk agent aided by a mobile tablet.
4. Stay Ahead of the Compliance Curve with Automated Tax Code Updates
COVID-19 has changed the rules of the travel and hospitality industries, including their regulatory and tax exposure. Many jurisdictions are giving hotels temporary tax breaks in order to offset the economic impact of the pandemic and lockdowns. While this is certainly a financial benefit, the administrative task of manually updating each individual tax configuration一and then manually reverting them once the tax breaks expire一can be burdensome for many hotels. Additionally, many jurisdictions increase taxes on individual rooms based on their room-type or length of stay, which only adds to the complexity and administrative burden. Fortunately, StaynTouch Cloud PMS lets hoteliers easily make bulk changes to tax rates based on room-type and duration of stay, and can automatically update tax rates set for future date ranges. This allows hotels to stay up-to-date on compliance with the myriad of local and national tax laws, while saving their staff significant amounts of time and effort.
5. Drive Additional Revenue with Automated Upgrade and Upsell Offers With Guest Mobile Check-in/out
StaynTouch Cloud PMS paired with Guest Mobility and/or Guest Kiosk gives guests the option to choose a completely contactless self check-in, either through their mobile device, or through guest-facing self-service kiosks, strategically placed to encourage social distancing. While contactless check-in has been recommended by the CDC and multiple industry associations as an effective way to slow the spread of communicable disease, it also provides an excellent way to personalize the guest journey and increase ancillary revenue for your hotel. StayNTouch Cloud PMS and Guest Mobility solutions lets you send targeted, automated offers for room upgrades, amenities, loyalty benefits, and monetized early check-in/late check-out directly to your guests’ mobile devices. Targeted mobile offers puts the power to optimize their stay literally in the palm of your guests’ hands. This can lead to substantial increases in ancillary revenue: A study by Mashable.com found that a hotel with 150 rooms and an average of 60% occupancy could generate up to $65,000 of additional revenue each year through targeted upsell advertisements.
6. Quickly Harness a Complete View of Your Hotel’s Performance With Automated Reporting
At a time when hotels are experiencing a decrease in revenue and occupancy, hoteliers must harness the right data to optimize their decision-making across their brand. But often compiling, generating and exporting the right reports can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Fortunately, StayNTouch Cloud PMS allows hoteliers to automatically schedule reports based on weekly frequency and time of day, and easily export reporting data in a variety of formats including tables, graphs and pivot tables. This lets hoteliers access and communicate a comprehensive picture of their hotel’s real-time performance and operations, allowing them to make more informed decisions about their revenue strategies and business priorities.
7. Automatically Collect Payments with Auto-Charge Deposits
Collecting guest payments is another necessary but rote administrative function that can potentially distract hoteliers from their primary focus of enhancing the guest experience. StaynTouch Cloud PMS can easily automate this function, giving hotelieres the ability to schedule the collecting of deposits at the end of day. This can save time during the check-in process while mitigating issues with losing payment details or overcharging/over-authorizing your guests.
Learn more about how StayNTouch Cloud PMS can help drive operational efficiency for your hotel. With an intuitive UI and built-in automation, your staff can get up to speed on a new PMS in no time!
