The great news is here. Our hospitality management solution – CiHMS just came out with the new feature, which uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to speed up the check-in process for hotel guests. Quickly scan, quickly stored in our VinBigdata and the amazing technology would make all guests go from A to Z in seconds. In today’s blog, we’ll be sharing with you this great cool OCR technology and how it works with CiHMS.

What is OCR then?

OCR is short for Optical Character Recognition or also known as Optical Character Reader first invented in 1914. Since then, the technology has been developed to improve its accuracy. To this date, OCR technology has come somewhat near its perfection. The technology is used to convert text, handwritten text, typed prints in images, photos, paper documents into machine-readable text data. Early on, OCR technology was to serve purposes to the blinds, the visually impaired populations. Thanks to its conveniences and usefulness today, OCR technology is now widely used in various industries.

For the hotel sectors, OCR has been applied to shorten the guests’ check-in process. Together with the cashless payment trend, which we have discussed in our previous blog, OCR technology shall take us a step closer to making a contactless hotel experience possible. Traditionally, once your guest arrives at the hotel front desk, the employee has to scan their guests’ personal identification papers and manually enter each customer’s data from those scanned files onto the system. How can things be different with the OCR technology?

How does it work with our hospitality management solution – CiHMS?

Thanks to OCR technology integrated with our hospitality management solution, the employee can quickly “scan” guest personal identification through a tablet or mobile device’s camera from the CiHMS staff app. The system then automatically recognizes all the fields to input them into the system.

To dive a bit deeper into the technical aspect of it, this merely is the “transporting” information process between CiHMS and VinBigdata. As soon as CiHMS Staff app has received the information (in this case, are photos taken by employee’s tablet, mobile devices, or via an ID card reader), it would immediately send the images to VinBigdata where the OCR technology would analyze, process and come back with results to CiHMS. This allows the CiHMS to create the profile with this given information respectively. Automation might be intimidating to many hoteliers, but it minimizes the risk of human errors and keeps data stored efficiently. Check-in can now be done without an actual front-desk staff, customers can come in and scan their personal identification documents through a scanner and get check-in automatically if their information matches with their bookings on the system.

What are the types of personal identification that CiHMS supports?

There are 9 different kinds of personal identification CiHMS system currently supports:

• Vietnam national identification (old version)
• Vietnam citizen identity card
• Vietnam new chip-based citizen identity card
• Vietnam birth certification
• Passports of all countries
• Class A1 driver license
• Class A2 driver license
• Class B1 driver license
• Class B2 driver license

If your hotel needs assistance in other types of personal identification, please contact us with your requests. We would be more than happy to receive your feedback and inquiries.

This latest feature has been updated and applied to at least 35 hotel properties of our clients. Using tablets to boost the check-in process has definitely given our customer’s guests a professional first impression of the hotel operation process. This is one of the many amazing features we have been planning to release since April as we mentioned back in our series blog “A new approach to hospitality management solution – CiHMS is ready for the world”. Meanwhile, look out for our upcoming webinar this month on “How can Hotels survive through the COVID-19 Pandemic”. Drop us your thoughts on this new feature, what feature would you like your hotel management solution to have, leave them down in the comment section down below.

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Ever since the Internet was first introduced, we have been gradually changing the way we communicate, perceive knowledge and process it; much differently than what we have done before “the Internet”. Rather looking up information through reference books, newspapers, or just ask your friend, we would “Google” it; which is now an official term in our dictionary. At the convenience of a click, people can easily search for the information they need and make products or services purchases over the Internet. This is defined as eCommerce, also known as electronic commerce, refers to the buying and selling process of either products or services online.

eCommerce has rapidly affected not only the customer buying behavior alone but also the sellers. It gives businesses this incredibly powerful platform to expand and present their businesses to customers. In fact, it has encouraged and motivated businesses to revolutionize and better themselves in providing customer-centric services/products while catching up with the technological era. The hospitality industry is no exception. People no longer have to directly visit the travel agency offices to plan their holiday or book plane tickets. Sales are often successfully made through websites, emails or social channels. The traditional travel agency selling methodology would no longer be applied in this digital age. What impacts have eCommerce brought into the hospitality industry to make such a breakthrough?

Customer-focused services maximize customers satisfaction

Everyone has their own preferences that they look out for in a product or service. As the technology is constantly getting advanced, the competition becomes extremely intense and painful. Hoteliers provide a wide-range of services to meet demanding customers’ requests, making sure they not only enjoy their current stays but to come back for their next holiday. That means hoteliers have to record each and every guest’s personalized information, monitor and engage customers to establish a sense of individuality.

eCommerce has enabled hoteliers to generate customers data as soon as their online booking is completed. It might sound complicated, but easier to achieve with an efficient PMS – hotel management software. All customer’s data including housekeeping habits, their accommodation preferences, lifestyle, food choice and so on will be recorded into the system once they successfully book the room.

Next time your guests come to visit, they shall be surprised and feel appreciated to receive their own special treatment that offers just what they need. If you haven’t found the way to wrap your head around any hotel management software yet, try out our CiHMS – the all-in-one hospitality management solution integrated with 360 degree guest profiles management will give you a complete outlook on how to manage your customer database effectively. A happy returning customer is the loyal customer that will stay regardless of the slightly higher price tag. As a matter of fact, eCommerce has made the hospitality industry change the way they do business. Hoteliers have to adapt their services tailoring to their customers’ experience, keeping their focus on the guests which eventually brings greater and more sustainable revenue effortlessly.

Increasing Brand awareness domestically and internationally

As the number of online booking accelerates, hoteliers are busy maintaining their reputation and privilege online: through social media channels, prestige online hotel review websites, the search engines as well as their own hotel website.

The more people know about your brand, the quicker their decision-making process will be. If you haven’t done anything to put your hotel on the map, you are way behind. Here are a few basic criteria for your website to follow up with:

1. Is it mobile friendly? If not, go mobile now. People now live on their cell phone, it is a necessity, no longer a luxury.
2. Is it on the search engine? For what keywords? Do those keywords generate good sales? Do you like to target different keywords? If you have no idea what these questions are about, time to talk to find a SEO consultant as soon as possible.
3. Are you on social media? If not, why not? There isn’t any better way to approach your targeted customers segments than social websites. With the current AI technology, social websites shall automatically convert your customers productively based on their online surfing behavior. Apart from that, it is a great place to interact with your customers, getting to know them and initiate campaigns to earn your customer loyalty to your brand.
4. Keep testing your website. Changing words, modules, and layouts to get your message across. Apply A/B testing to achieve the best performance website possible. Even if we are trying to improve ourselves everyday, there is no reason to stop doing the same to your website.
5. Think internationally, act internationally. If your hotel is certified and following international guidelines to welcome global guests, get your website ready for it as well, by supporting multiple languages, transaction methods, and international security standards.

eCommerce helps to expand your brand presence into the international market. Promising higher revenue while committing greater responsibilities to maintain brand reputation.

Predicting the trend and be the trend-setter

Even though the Virtual Reality technology has been around for the last 2 decades or so, it has only gained its popularity shortly after the first commercial consumer headset was sold on the market 7 years ago. The game industry jumped into the VR bandwagon and had made the technology remarkably affordable to develop and produce massively. Hotels had recently started to apply the VR technology to allow their guests “virtually” visit the hotel environment, check out the neighborhood, restaurants, shops, gyms, swimming pools, and even room tours at the comfort of their own home. It attracts customer curiosity and drives online sales effortlessly.

The VR technology was first adopted by the tech-savvy hotels, which has differentiated themselves from others in the customers mindset for being up-to-date and modernized. The question is how to catch up? Keep yourself alert with the latest technology, practicing it into your daily business operations, and treating technology as a part of your business culture. Soon you shall find yourself setting the trend instead of following it. The recent trend in hospitality arises amidst this pandemic situation and worth mentioning is contactless hotel experience with cashless payment (which we would have a detailed blog on this matter coming up in a few weeks. Watch out for it!). Being a trend-setter takes the same courage and patience as an entrepreneur. It does not always guarantee success, but the experience and knowledge you gathered along the way is priceless.

One year after the pandemic started, the world economy has been suffering with social distancing and the major change in lifestyle. Retailers have to close down thousands of physical stores, malls are disappearing. Online retails, on the other hand, has reached its peak during this period, increasing by 71.1% in Singapore, and 27.6% increase worldwide according to eMarketer reports. It has opened up new opportunities to businesses from various industries. Although the damage resulting from the pandemic is incomparable, the impacts eCommerce has delivered to the hospitality industry are truly overwhelming and won’t be able to list them all out. We, hoteliers, learn to accept and be flexible to change and adapt with this fast-paced evolution of technology. What are the impacts eCommerce has on your businesses in the last few years? Share us your thoughts in the comment section down below. We’d love to hear your side of the story.

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Looking for information? Searching for your next holiday ideal destination? Typically, we would go on to “Google” it. This has become the conventional habit that all the generations unintentionally established over the last decade. That is the result of how fast and convenient Google results come back with your initial keyword input. Undeniably, Google has gradually defined itself as a “free, easy and accessible” encyclopedia across the globe. 

Recently, Google Travel products have launched the Free Booking Links last March 9, 2021, to allow hotels to receive traffic and bookings via Google hotel search. This feature brings such huge opportunities to hoteliers approaching internationally and domestically. Understanding the importance and competitive advantages hoteliers may gain with Free Booking Links, the CiHMS Hospitality Management Solution – has partnered up with Google to provide a seamless connection with Google for our customers. How does this work actually and what are the benefits you – hoteliers get from this partnership? 

Google Free Booking Links

There are millions of travelers constantly searching for hotels and destinations on Google daily. To show up on Google search engine, hoteliers have to do SEO effectively, practicing, and monitoring it. Some even have to dedicate a large portion of their marketing budget to Google Ads, making sure to maintain their ranking and position on the Google search result pages. The broader your target audience is and depending on how high you want your search result position to be, the budget can fluctuate anywhere from 4 to 6 figures easily. 

Google is constantly observing and evaluating their user experience along with their interactions within Google’s travel products to best enhance it. Free Booking Links feature was first experimented with in September 2020 aiming to help hoteliers gain direct traffic and reservations through the Google search engine at a free cost. 6 months later, this new product feature was officially introduced globally and has contributed to the change in customer searching habits especially in hotel searches. You might have already experienced this feature without acknowledging it. Free Booking Links appear among the mixture of ads (which are marked with “Ads” to distinguish) whenever you search for hotels. 

Free Booking Links allows hoteliers to have their hotels listed with their best room rates available for travelers to choose from. There is no payment or user engagement from Google collected for those links. Free Booking Links may look like Ads but they are not. The placements are ranked based on a variety of signals, including but not limited to: best matched available room rate for a custom search query, up-to-date feed price, price accuracy score, and matching price between your feed price and the landing page. While you can bid to rank higher in the Ads section, better placement cannot be bought for free booking links. 

The following information would normally be shown in the Free Booking Links section:

1. Hotel’s properties: those are the hotel’s name, address, phone number, websites, and directions to the hotel. There would also be reviews, your hotel’s pictures, average customer rating score, hotel descriptions, and highlights. 
2. The “Book a room” button drops down all your hotel room listings.
3. The booking module with top-ranked booking links and customers can easily adjust check-in, check-out date, number of guests to find the best rate available. 
4. Filtering option to view by nightly rate, nightly total or stay total.
5. Booking link ads which have to be paid for and labeled with an “Ads” badge. These ads are from OTAs, travel agencies, or even your own hotel running Google Ads for the selected hotel shown in this Free Booking Links section.
6. Free booking links under “All Options” and can be configured by hoteliers.

The benefits of Free Booking Links

The advantages that come along with Free Booking Links are the followings but not limited to:

• Free traffic: Yup, to show up on Google Free Booking links means you are visible to the world. These are natural traffic sources and are potential leads that are 100% Free. 
• In control of your guest experience and data: Google doesn’t charge anything on clicked links and the engagement for Free Booking Links. You can control your guest experience from the Free Booking Links section to your landing pages. Google allows you to track and enable you to generate Reports for your Free Booking Links to further configure to take advantage of it to the max. 
• Maximize your revenue with real-time rates and room availability: This benefit is for our CiHMS customers who own our hospitality management solution. CiHMS will automatically update your rate and availability directly with Google without you doing any further work in real-time. While others have to regularly update their feed price and send it to Google, we would do all that work for you. Fast, easy, and effective.

How to be eligible for Free Booking Links

You have to have an active Hotel Center account. If you don’t, you can register for one here. However, the process may take longer and there is no confirmation regarding the detailed timeline for this process yet. 

The other fastest way is through a Google integration partner, which is us – your CiHMS hospitality management solution. We are proud and honored to get contacted and become an approved Google integration partner. Make sure you have already set up your Google My Business profile for the property you wish to be listed on Free Booking Links. Please keep in mind that your hotel information on Google My Business should match with the hotel properties you have registered with us, otherwise problems may occur. 

If you are a CiHMS family member and not sure whether or not your hotel appears on the Free Booking Links section, contact us for more details. Any changes and modifications may take up to several weeks to apply on Free Booking Links, please be patient. 

The Free Booking Links feature has definitely brought out numerous potential to hoteliers at no charge, although this pandemic has not ended. COVID 19 shall pass and this tough period soon ends, it is exciting looking forward to the resume of the travel industry. Take this time to improve your hotel portfolio, physically and virtually, including its infrastructure as well as its online presentation. Make your property “within reach”, searchable, and in its best practice. Free Booking Links is worth trying at zero cost and would allow you to accomplish all the above. Why haven’t you started it yet? Have you tried out this feature yet? If so, share your thoughts in the comment section down below.

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Digital transformation has been around for decades since the first entrance of the World Wide Web. However, in the hospitality and tourism industry, it was a game of the traditional agencies in the last two decades. Some still favor the old way of seeking out the information provided by the agency, which only gives out to their customers if they visit it in person. Oddly slow services, time-consuming and do not guarantee you walk out of the place with your ticket or room booked.

As the digital world has evolved, customer behavior started to change and had a profound impact on the hospitality and travel industry. People expect to have a customer-centric experience, from choosing their destination easily within a few clicks, extending information on the accommodations including customer services, available activities, room features, and the list goes on. Are your hotels catching up with the digital transformation evolution? How to follow the digitalization footprint? In today’s blog, we will keep you “up to date” with the digital transformation trends and you may find your own path to digitize your hotel slowly.

The Definition of Digital Transformation

You might have heard the term relentlessly over the past few years, but what is Digital Transformation exactly? It is a process of adapting digital technology to change the existing way of doing business processes, replacing manuals with digital procedures. This journey will affect your organization’s culture, your people, and your customers whether you like it or not.

Many have mistaken digital transformation can easily be done by applying and using the latest technology into their existing businesses. This is called digitalization instead. It is the act of moving your business to the digital world. While digital transformation is much broader. It is about the process of doing in a new and digital way. In 2018, Forbes did mention the high probability that businesses had failed along their digital transformation process and could not reach their initial goal as much as 70%. Every revolution needs a strategic plan, and the journey of digital transformation is no exception.

Why is digital transformation good for your hotels?

Mobile integration

Everyone owns at least one digital device for their own personal use. Technology has affected the way people perceive knowledge and slowly defined their habits. Booking hotel rooms can now be done quickly via the mobile app or your hotel website. If your hotel integrated mobile-first hospitality management software, your customer can do even more with mobile devices, from checking in to ordering room services, from selecting your room upon arrival to unlocking your hotel room’s door keyless, and checking out without actual interaction with your front desk.

A few hotels take it up a notch by offering virtual hotel tools and an augmented reality experience. The customers can explore the hotel facilities, restaurants, and more such as beaches, museums, shops, and cafes. These perks have been widely used for hotels to set themselves apart from their competitors and prove their fast adaptation to the latest technology.

Optimize daily operations with IoT

IoT is best described as a network of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines through the internet to enhance user experience. Through modern technology, the hospitality industry has welcomed IoT and applied it further by allowing their Property Management system (aka hotel management software) to integrate with their guests’ personal digital gadgets.

It boosts up the hotel operations significantly internally. No more paperwork for manual check-in and keeping housekeeping in sync with the front desk through your hotel management software. Hotels have also installed built-in sensors for room light, TVs, and answering guest queries with in-room voice recognition. These lift off a tremendous workload for the front desk operation ultimately cut down hotel costs and expenses.

Maximize customer experience

With the help of technology, your hotel receives constant data flow from your customers, their real experience, and satisfaction. Analyzing this information can utilize your hotel’s practices and improve your hotel operations effectively. It acts as a preference for customer future stays, assuring every customer experience personalized while enabling hotels to provide customizable packages that fit a similar customer demographic.

The benefits of the digital transformation journey are undeniable. Your business might already be in one of the six stages of digital transformation without noticing. Which stages are you at? Let’s go through these stages with us.

The six stages of Digital Transformation

Stage 1: Business as usual

As the title explained itself, you keep on doing whatever you are doing at the moment in your business.

Stage 2: Present and active

Moving on to stage 2 when you start recognizing the competition and the need to experiment with new ideas, playing around with technology unintentionally, applying them into business practices. Confronting challenges, hardships, chaos. Find your way to overcome, and slowly notice your organization transforming.

Stage 3: Formalized

Instead of getting comfortable with your status quo, you find your organization to be adventurous, start implementing new technology experiments intentionally. This is where your transformation begins. The experiment has brought in good results and your executives give out all the green light signals. Encouraging your organization to move forward with confidence. In this stage, you often find changes in your company’s culture. Without these changes, the transformation shall fall flat.

Stage 4: Strategic

During this stage, departments within your organization also recognize the power of digital collaboration. All weigh-in to create a new strategic roadmap. Your business seniors level gives change agents a seat at the table. A more dynamic approach and investment are made, roles are defined, tasks are assigned.

Stage 5: Converged

Getting the strategic roadmap done, it is time to form a dedicated team driven by your organization in achieving your strategic goals, making sure you stay on track of your digital transformation journey. Your organization’s culture and structure might have already changed at this stage. You are almost set and well on your way to success.

Stage 6: Innovative and adaptive

Businesses who have successfully come to this stage means the digital transformation is now a part of your organization. It is when your organization’s top hierarchy understands and sees the benefits of digital transformation. They accept constant change is essential to the business. Your organization identifies new tech, and innovations. Proactively approach to adapt to the changing business world at ease.

The efforts made into moving towards your digital transformation journey are huge, the struggles and pressures are put not only onto the leadership, but also the employees. Staying in your comfort zone often brings your organization closer to disruption. In this technology era, digital transformation becomes essential in business practices, especially in the hospitality industry where customer-centric is the norm.

If you are looking for the experts’ advice and opinions on digital transformation, watch our recent webinar video Webinar: Digital Transformation In The Hospitality Industry.

Don’t forget to tune in to the next blog where we share how you can find your own path of digital transformation, the challenges you might face along the way, and how to overcome them and achieve your journey. Take care!

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We wrapped everything up one day before the D-Day – our due date to get 35 hotel properties of our customer up and running on the new hospitality management solution – CiHMS. This might mark the end of the deployment project for our customer, but it was only the beginning for us. The development of our hotel management system has not ended here, instead, it is progressively adapting to the fast-changing technology world. The positive feedback we have received from our customers after a quarter migrating data to CiHMS has strengthened our belief to share this innovative, versatile, functional, and scalable hospitality management solution to the hospitality industry.

We want to help others who have been eyeing for “the one” HMS/PMS to find theirs, ensure automation in business operations to the max, and strive to assist the employees to work at their full capacities. How CiHMS can help you and your hotel to achieve all of the above safely and trouble-free? Here are a few outstanding features of the CiHMS that contributes to the how:

All-in-one hospitality management solution

Instead of worrying about integration with other 3rd party management systems that your hotel already has in place; with CiHMS, we have the all-in-one hospitality management solution ready for you. CiHMS helps to automate while managing all your business operations from the front desk to the back office. The hospitality management solution helps to provide a centralized reservations platform, keeping your room rates and plans syncing simultaneously throughout from your travel agents to your front desk. It is also equipped with a centralized report system that guarantees you can generate those reports at any given time and place for any hotel properties you have in your hotel chains without any manual work involved. Your hotel guest profiles would be created and updated as soon as the reservation is made ‘till the day they leave the hotel. If your front office is supported with a complex reservation system, the back office can count on our house keeping feature which keeps track of all housekeeping activities status and enables guests to send out requests as needed. The system will remind staff regularly to make sure no requests are left unresolved or maintenance is undone.

On top of these, CiHMS is a cloud-based hospitality management solution. This allows you to get access to all the mentioned perks above on the go at the convenience of your mobile devices. Plus, if you are using an On-Premises system, moving to CiHMS will free all the IT financial burden off your shoulders (to know how, read our blog on Cloud vs On-premise PMS for hotels one is better?).

Besides the main Property Management System (PMS), CiHMS also comes with 6 other components: Room Rate Management (RRM), Rate Shopper (RSS), Portal for Travel Agents (PTA), Distribution Channel Manager (DCM), Central Reservation System (CRS), POS – Food and Beverage (POS/FnB); each serves its own purpose:

• Distribution Channel Manager (DCM): The ultimate tool you need to manage allotments and rates across hundreds of global booking channels. Real-time synchronize room rates and allotment availability. Avoid overbooking and maximize your room occupancy.
• Central Reservation System (CRS): it centralizes all booking information from all distribution channels. It generates detailed reports and a quick overview of your business.
• Room Rate Management (RRM): as the name may describe its functionality, RRM aims to help setting room rates, rate plans, and room types. It allows hotels to set room rate restrictions based on hotel preferences, such as season, specific dates (holidays & weekends), minimum stays, etc. The room rate performance can be observed in graphical data or charts for quicker decision-making regarding room prices.
• Rate Shopper (RSS): helps crawl all room prices from your competitors as well as your hotel from different distribution channels based on locations, with pricing filtered by restrictions, promotions, and conditions. All data is real-time updated and can be exported into comprehensive reports. These data give you the insights to quickly identify your market potential and develop your strategic rate plans.
• Portal for Travel Agents (PTA): connects your hotel and travel agents. This component lets travel agents book and manage hotel reservations based on the plans set for them by hotels. Hotels can also set multi-level access and permission to manage the travel agents as needed while allowing them to search, check prices and availability, adjust booking reservations or cancel them.
• POS, Food and Beverage (POS – FnB): with a comprehensive table layout and floor plan for your restaurant, keep track of the table status in real-time. Easy to set up menu, table maps, product prices, taxes, promotions. Supported POS devices help to update real-time data across the system from ordering to your kitchen status.

All those components above are built in with the cloud-based hospitality management solution CiHMS. Every single activity and detail are recorded in real time across all the systems and hotel properties, putting you in control and in sync with your hotel operations. CiHMS is truly an all-in-one hospitality management solution that your hotel ever needs.

User-friendly Interface hospitality management solution

Better interface enhances people’s interactions and experiences with the software. Undoubtedly, it reduces the people’s learning curve and unintentionally increases their productivity. That cuts down your staff’s training time. A simple instance on a user-friendly interface that can help users quickly pick up without insight instructions is online shopping. Remember the times when you were surfing through the web browsing the product, without the filter? The website layout was all over the place, and you couldn’t find the way back to your homepage? Now, online shopping delivers websites in a much cleaner layout. People can easily search for their desired products, filtering products based on their preferences, “Add to cart” anytime they want, checking out with their cards in a single click. It’s now a struggle for shoppers to exit while shopping.

The same goes with the hotel management system interface, simple and on-point design encouraging the users to actively learn and understand the process. The interface is designed based on the customer behavior approach from the outside in. Once you’re logged into the CiHMS system, a dashboard with customization indicators that are considered important to your hotel will be displayed. Flat and minimalist design for easier navigation within the software, keep the focus on the statistics that you need in real-time. After all, it’s the customer experience that matters, not the coders, nor testers, or the designers.

Fully integrations

Although our hotel management system is fully equipped with numerous hotel operation management software, it can also easily integrate with a wide range of 3rd party software on demand depending on your hotel preferences, such as SAP (ERP software), Salesforce, face recognition, room cards, E-Invoice, VinID, and more. It can be accessed via a mobile application, enabling staff to update information and tasks through their mobile devices. With a built-in 360-degree guest profile, CiHMS lets you create, store and conveniently access a complete profile for your guest: from their booking history to special requests, giving your guest a personalized experience on every single stay.

We have partnered up with Traveloka, Agoda, Trip.com Booking.com, Tripadvisor, meituan.com, and connected our CiHMS with hundreds of global booking channels. You can update rates and allotments across all distribution channels. Instead of manually editing the pricing by logging in each individual booking platform like you would in the past, CiHMS allows you to adjust it in one single platform. It then adjusts these price changes automatically throughout all booking channels. This is applied to your hotel room availability as well, enabling it to be synchronized throughout your distribution network.

An adaptable and scalable hospitality management solution from hotel to apartment buildings

Apart from the interfaces, our hotel management system is extremely versatile. It works for hotels and applied to hotel chains, serviced apartments, and apartment buildings as well. The cloud-native hospitality management solution – CiHMS aids to manage multiple properties at once. You will be able to link these properties easily and generate centralized data from any mobile device. This helps to put you in control, keeping the operations seamlessly across your properties.
CiHMS streamlines workloads from the front office to the housekeeping department, keeping everyone in the know zone on the status of the room, staff service evaluation, and room plan syncing in real-time.2

Security is the key

Hotel and guests’ data privacy is the primary concern in the hospitality industry. These data include customers’ sensitive information, such as their credit card and personal contact information; hotels’ revenue, pricing strategy, etc. The consequences of leaking these data to the outsider might play a huge impact on your hotel reputation and leave an enormous financial burden instead. It’s the reason why our team has paid extra attention to the security standard while building CiHMS, making sure our customers do not confront security breaches in any circumstances.

The CiHMS hospitality management solution is certified with PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) – standard to protect cardholder information from major card schemes and HTNG (Hotel Technology Next Generation) – assuring hospitality technology products with the industry-standard interface. We are also in the process of getting our ISO 27001 – certified hotel’s system and data are sufficiently protected by effected security control policies and processes; and ISO 27018 – standard to protect personal data in the cloud; by the end of this quarter. By achieving these certified secured standards, we – CiHMS are striving for data transparency for our customers, making sure their data stay private and privileged.

We have developed the CiHMS to not be limited within the hotel scope of activities, but to serve the hospitality industry’s unpredicted probabilities. As the technology evolves, our software has to constantly adapt and update to be relevant, to meet our customers’ tech-savvy guests’ high expectations. We respect each customer equally from SMEs to big corporations, and we strongly believe CiHMS can be tailored to meet your business-specific requirements effortlessly. This blog is the last entry in the series of How we Build our own hospitality management solution – CiHMS. It is a milestone to celebrate and to appreciate the teamwork, the leadership, and the core values to get to where we are today. If you haven’t tried out CiHMS, contact us for a private consultation to know how it can help you figure out your own path in achieving your business’ target and goal, seize your opportunity to evolve and transform your hospitality business digitally.

Are you catching up with our other blogs in the series? Here are the quick shortcuts to those:

• Build or Buy your own PMS
• Cloud vs On-premise PMS for hotels: which one is better?
• Introducing the new Property Management System – CiHMS and its journey from the start
• Building a Hospitality Management Solution in progress – Fail fast and learn fast
• CiHMS – Hospitality Management Solution from Zero to Hero

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15 months in coding, 4 months to finish the pilot testing, and 1 extra month for a performance test. Then, it took us only 98 days to fully deploy the new hospitality management solution – CiHMS for all 35 hotel properties of our customer. Those hotels were not merely city hotels, but also included large luxury hotel chains and resorts consisting of 1000+ rooms, integrated with safaris, and entertainment complexes. Even the experts we sought for consultancy service at the time would suggest that 21 weeks were the minimum timeframe to have the system up and running for each hotel. What we achieved was hand-down an unbeatable record.

The reality check

Even though 5 months of pilot testing and performance tests weren’t smooth sailings, it did not seem somewhat impossible to us compared to the actual deployment phase. The thought of getting closer to the date still sent the shivers down our spines. Our team couldn’t manage to keep their eyes off the screen throughout the entire process. How? Here are why:

1. The existing on-premise system that our customers used at the time was ranked as one of the most detailed and complicated PMS in the world. The PMS was installed separately in each property of the customer with a decentralized database, giving the customers headaches and challenges in reports system and operations which we mentioned in the very first blog of this series (You can look this up at “Buy or Build your own Hospitality Management Solutions” blog). That also meant we had to migrate data, validate and “centralize” them ready to use for the customers. Tricky yet?

2. The total number of rooms was over 14,000 rooms at the time. We have more than 10 hotel properties with over 500+ rooms. There were a lot of rooms to be recorded!

3. Our customers owned a diversification of hotel models: city hotels, condotels, luxury hotels, resorts, destination resorts integrated with amusement parks & safari, etc… Each of them has various configurations and settings.

4. The customers were using various integrated solutions with the existing PMS: Housekeeping, Room Rate Management, Transportation Management, Laundry, Mobilities, Booking Portal, FnB, etc. Ensuring the flawless integration to keep our customer business operations ongoing was our top priority.

5. The hotel SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) and the software implementation procedure at each property were not consistent or standardized. This meant thorough training had to be done, otherwise, there would be a possibility of inconsistent data entry.

6. We committed to our own deadline for a complete migration to the new hospitality management solution – CiHMS before December 31, 2020. We started on July 31st, with approximately 5 months left to the finished date. The clock was ticking, and we didn’t have that much time to afford mistakes. The pressure was real!

The ultimate strategic plan

Challenges seemed to be our friend. Working with a deadline for this particular project felt like we were fighting an uphill battle. To meet the deadline and make sure we did not miss out on any of the “challenges”, a strategic plan to keep us up on our feet was a necessity. First, we had to develop a successive training and implementation plan based on hotel business models, revenue, and regions. This helped optimizing expenses and human resources at sites.

Second, we arranged and reallocated our human resources adequately to train the customers’ employees efficiently. Coordinating with back-at-the-office development teams and the on-site teams to solve unexpected technical occurrences through Jira, online checklist, etc. while the implementation process took place.

Last but not least, the training materials and practices were categorized depending on software modules and hotel processes’ purpose. This allowed the customer’s employees to actively be in charge of their training courses, choosing which courses would fit their department work’s scope. From those training materials, the employees could later re-train their new staff or run practice workshops on their own. We were exceptionally determined. The only thing on our minds at the time was our deadline.

The deployment mode: ON

We had a few on-site teams responsible for installing the PMS at the customer’s property, training the employee on how to use the software properly, and reporting back to the in-house team if any unexpected failure bugs, issues arose. During the deployment phase, we had noticed the general timeline of deployment at each property would be roughly around 17 days:

• 2 days for validating migrated data to ensure data quality after the migration. No data is left behind, misplaced, or corrupted.
• 12 days for training CiHMS and the integration process.
• 3 to 4 days for the system to go live after getting the approved User Acceptance Test (performed by the end-user to validate that all features are working as expected).

If we waited ‘till the team finished with deployment at a property then moved to the next, it would take us almost 2 years. We ended up doing both the on-site training for customer employees and cutting off the existing on-premise PMS software to go live with the new hospitality management solution – CiHMS simultaneously.

Our on-site teams had to travel a lot, especially on the weekend to cut down the travel and commuting time among hotel properties. Multiple on-site teams were working on different properties at the same time. This made the cutting-off from the existing on-premise PMS and going live with the new hospitality management solutions easier for multiple locations on the same day. Our in-house development teams were always in ready mode to provide 24/7 support. Kudos went to the amazing CiHMS developers and their capabilities in quickly detecting the issues, fixing, patching, and moving on to the next one restlessly. Mostly found was the excitement in figuring out the solutions, the overjoy while closing the issues, and the appreciation among team members at the end of any completed deployment at each property.

As CiHMS was successfully live at the last location, it was already December 30th, 2020. That was exactly one day before the deadline. Needless to say, we were over the moon! This success did not define us, instead, it has gained us the confidence to open new doors for our hospitality management solution to explore and challenge. The project for our customer might have ended here but was only the start for us.

We have learned so much throughout the process and we are proud of what we have done, what we are doing, and what we will become. CiHMS has the full potential that we have not unlocked yet with you here. In the upcoming blog, we will be revealing our hospitality management solution – CiHMS features as well as its future plan with you. Meanwhile, don’t forget to like our blog and spread the word with your friends on our journey of building the hospitality management solution – CiHMS.

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On April 9th, 2021, the Grand Official launch event for CiHMS – an All-in-one hospitality management solution was held at the Gem Center, Ho Chi Minh City. Thanks to all the guests that came to join us on this special milestone. We were extremely honored to welcome our dear customers, exciting investors, keen tech-savvy professionals, as well as enthusiastic experts in the field. Though the software has already been deployed for a number of customers since the beginning of this year, we believe CiHMS deserves the spotlight at the launch event itself. It is also a celebration and our appreciation party for the team, who have been striving harder every day in the last two years to get CiHMS to where it is today.

CiHMS is an all-in-one hospitality management solution that can transform your hotel operations from the inside out. It helps to automate daily operational activities from the front desk to the back office. Room rate, allotments, and availability now can easily update on one platform and synchronize in real-time with hundreds of booking channels, across multiple properties. CiHMS also provides a centralized reservation system that allows you to quickly get an overview of your business with detailed reports in just a single click.

On top of that, our hotel management system is cloud-based software, meaning you can get access to the software from anywhere at any time with your mobile devices or a computer connected to the Internet. Cloud-based computing technology also frees your financial burden on IT infrastructure investment with zero cost on building your own server or IT staff to monitor and maintain it. No longer worry about regular maintenance, software update, and system upgrade. Leave them all to us!

Fully integrated with other 3rd party components, expandable to your business size as it grows, CiHMS is truly a flexible and scalable hotel management system while staying strictly secured. We respect and put our customers as our first priority. Being certified for PCI-DSS, HTNG, and is going to get our ISO 27001, ISO 27018 in a few months’ time now, CiHMS is determined to achieve data transparency with our customers while protecting their data privacy. (To read more on CiHMS features, please dig in here)

Instead of paying in a full lump sum as you would for an on-premise hotel management system, CiHMS enables our customer to pay upon subscription services: Essential for small hotels, Plus for 3-4 stars hotels, Boutique & Premium targeting 5 stars hotels, resorts, and multi corporation hotel chains. During the launch event, Mr. Hoang Nguyen – the CEO of CiHMS also shared: “CiHMS has been developed with the latest technologies aiming to help hotels to operate effectively, minimize its operation cost, and provide customers experience at its best. Thanks to its capability to connect with hundreds of OTAs domestically as well as internationally, opening new doors and opportunities to hoteliers approaching themselves into a bigger market with greater revenue”. The launch event definitely closed on a high note. It has been a journey with CiHMS. Thank you all for your attendance. It meant the world to us!

If you haven’t read our CiHMS journey yet, don’t forget to check out the series at our very first entry: Buy or Build your own PMS.

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We – CiHMS – started just like any other hospitality management software company. Our first client came to us with a predicament. Contemplating among 100+ hospitality management software choices, taking trials, and evaluating the runners-up who seemed to have all the qualifications. Finally settled on one of the most expensive On-premises Property Management Systems in the industry, expecting its optimal effectiveness and unfailing support. Instead, our client was struggling, as time went on with on-going and unresolvable issues that we have mentioned in our previous blog “Buy or Build your own Property Management System”. If you have missed it, be sure to check it out. Hoteliers who have been using an off-a-shelf Property Management System probably would fathom the difficulties and challenges our client has gone through.

It became clear that there is a big opportunity here for us.

A brand-new Property Management System – Where to begin

Before we kick start the building project, we have set out a compelling roadmap to navigate the process:

1. Optimize hotel revenue as the top priority
2. Optimize operations cut down excessive procedures and time
3. Improve customer experience and satisfaction

These criteria had helped us to strategically concentrate on building the PMS that achieved our client’s benefits in their best interest.

A hotel Property Management System function consists of Front Desk Operations, Reservations, Channel Management, Rate & Occupancy management, and Payment processing. These often are linked to enable hotels to organize, schedule, and manage effortlessly their daily operations while serving their guests effectively. Where should we start first?

That was plainly from a business viewpoint. Looking through the technical aspect of it, there were much more criteria that come into the picture. Which programming languages should we use: Java? Node.js? Ruby? Python? PHP? .NET? Or in a combination of which? What should we build our database on? MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc? What should the network infrastructure be? How do we protect customer’s data, which includes confidential information, guests’ personal & payment data, and etc., during the building phases and while migrating to the PMS?

Taking all these into account, putting ourselves into the client’s shoes, we came into an agreement to build the Central Reservation System (CRS) before the rest of the PMS. CRS acts as a centralized booking platform for hotels to manage, distribute, and maintain rate and room availability from various channels. It is extremely vital for us; especially in high seasons when booking always has been chaos.

Our customer provides accommodations and a dining experience, but also integrated golf courses, and entertainment complexes. They have many destinations across the country and 1 location can welcome up to 3000 guests a day during the high season. In the past, the customer would have the On-Premises PMS installed and running separately at each destination. This has made unnecessary delays, excessive double booking, or unwanted overbooking during rush hour. That was the result of not having a centralized system, they didn’t have the room and rate availability data for all properties in real-time.

Our customer also worked with numerous Travel Agents and Agencies so it can be overwhelming for the Front desk operations handling the booking. The result was many bookings were created through direct confirmation with the front desk at each destination, to avoid overbooking as the existing On-Premises system was unable to centralize all the booking data in real-time. In many cases, Sales had to contact the hotel directly to check room availability at the time, requested to put those rooms temporarily on hold, confirmed with guests, check successful transactions, then officially booked the rooms in person.

The booking system brings in daily revenue and is the first encounter your customers have with your hotels. If everything goes right, it is smooth sailing from here. After 6 months of endless coding, our CRS has successfully integrated with the existing On-Premises PMS as well as the many online travel agents that are connected to the current PMS, cutting down reservation time span tremendously. There were no longer phone calls, or unnecessary room hold and overbooking never occurred. Customers can also get their reservations done online, maximizing room occupancy.

Then, we shifted our focus to building the rest of the Property Management System, which we later named CiHMS, to optimize and automate the client’s hotel operations, which took us another 9 months. The development did not stop there. We were also set out to improve the guests’ experience during the stays as well as future ones.

Challenges behind the PMS

The Human

Finding the right companion was the most impatient, disappointed, nerve-wracking, and irrational process. Considering the fact that we had to commit to a very aggressive timeline, you can imagine how stressful a scenario we were in. We had to constantly leverage both full-time employees and outsource partners. At times, we found ourselves working with 100+ developers from 30 different outsource partners. Apart from the technological partners, we are grateful for the help of many business consultants and vendors. Without strict guidelines, intended set goals, and dedicated team, and the enormous support we received, the project could be an impossibility to us.

The Timeline

The initial timeline was set for 24 months. Yes, you read it right. We were given an extremely tight time frame, as others would likely take up to 5 years to build. It might sound intimidating to others, but for us, we were absolutely thrilled and excited to take on this challenge and achieve the ultimate goal. We got the whole system up and running in less than 18 months, which took 6 months coding the CRS alone, and 9 months on the rest of the CiHMS. It still screamed impossible to us, but this accomplishment is achieved with willpower, consistency, collaboration, and harmony of the team as a whole.

The Digital Transformation Journey

You may have heard the term Digital Transformation over and over again. What is Digital Transformation exactly? It is the integration of digital technology into all areas of business, ultimately changing your operations and value delivering to your customers. This also makes a change in your workplace culture; it requires the organization to constantly challenge itself. It becomes imperative to any business that wants to remain competitive and relevant to the world in this constantly evolving technological era.

Building the CiHMS Hospitality Management Solution is the first step taking us into the next stage of our Digital Transformation journey, and definitely, it does not end here. The new PMS strives to create room for creativity in better procedures, modern tools, and consuming time effectively. It gives a new approach to the hospitality industry to explore new opportunities awaiting ahead once perfecting operations protocols, smooth workflows, guarantee meeting customer satisfaction, and maximize revenue.

The new Property Management System gives us the shot to train the hospitality employees in becoming professionals in what they do, making decisions, improving the hotel procedures, products, and services based on actual data and analysis exporting from the system. The CiHMS is aiming to help others in the hospitality industry to embark on their own path in the digital transformation journey.

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is a progress; working together is success.

-Henry Ford-

More on a digital transformation can be read at our “Hotels Digital Transformation” blog or discussed in our last webinar that you can re-watch here @Digital Transformation in the Hospitality Industry. After getting done with the CiHMS coding, it’s time for our Pilot Testing in real hotel operations in real-time. All will be shared in our next blog: “Building a Property Management Software in-progress: Fail fast and learn fast.” Be sure to watch out for the upcoming blog this time, next week, you would not want to miss it.

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Hotel owners have always been debating on whether to choose a hospitality management software on the cloud or just keep sticking with the good old On-premises system. The technology-savvy hoteliers would preferably lean on the modern cloud-based PMS, which has gradually caught up with all the features, conveniences, and benefits one seeks for earlier on the On-premises PMS.  

As its name describes, On Premises’ PMS and data are stored on a physical server at the site. The software shall then be installed on any workstation that needs access to it. The cloud-based PMS, on the other hand, typically features access through a web browser-based, making the software highly flexible and delivering real-time access to hoteliers. 

Switching over to a cloud-based Property Management System has been going on for a while now. What does the cloud have to offer making this paradigm shift? Is it a trend or it is a new movement? Both systems serve the same purpose, however, each can be tailored to its customer’s needs differently. Here are a few highlights on the pros and cons of the two systems that have stood out for us. 

Technical Differentiations 

On-premise Property Management System requires a significant number of “on property” hardware compared to the Cloud-based one. It gives the hoteliers total control: data and the system, system configurations, networks, updates, and changes are all yours to decide. Running the On-premises PMS means hoteliers must maintain a dedicated server room, which also needs an effective cooling system and an around-the-clock support team to keep everything up and running smoothly.  

Backup data and migration can become a headache. They get accumulated over time. To make sure you store data correctly, update in time and security in check shall drain out your human resources.   

With the cloud computing vendors, the PMS providers would be responsible for most of the IT operations expense. The hoteliers can also get the advantages from the cloud computing vendors’ highly available servers, at their optimal performance. The upgrades and backups will also be covered by your vendors, as all of these are included in your contract.  

The Cost 

The On-premises PMS licensed fee normally does not include the initial setup fees and already totals up a huge sum of capital. The hidden cost includes hardware server costs, additional IT staff expenses to manage the system infrastructure, maintenance fees (yes, more maintenance fees), and the expenses of other 3rd party software integrations. Depending on the size of your hospitality business, everything adds up and gets more expensive by the day. The capital expenditure spent on the On-premise PMS can be a burden for small and medium-size hotel businesses.

A cloud-based PMS has a much lower entry cost. They charge a fixed monthly subscription model, with a small initial setup fee. No server cost, maintenance fee, extra human resources cost, lower energy bills and is an extremely affordable budget for small and medium scaled hotel businesses.  

Mobility & Scalability  

If you value the ability to be accessible to your PMS anywhere in the world at any given time, the cloud-based Property Management System is the one. Your system is hosted on the internet and can be available to login using any devices supporting a web-based browser. Certain access restrictions can also be set up to enhance security if you have the need to do so. 

Although you can set up your On-premises PMS to be accessed from an off-site workstation or device, remote access can be affected by various factors. Getting real-time data can certainly be challenging, especially not at the speed that cloud-based PMS delivers.  

The cloud computing system provides greater flexibility in scaling up or down your hotel model and gives you the option to add or scale back licensing fees.  

Integrations 

The On-premise PMS has been around for years, way before the cloud-based system. It gets developed and integrated with countless integrations from accounting software to POS systems, from F&B to in-room management systems, and much more. However, the implementation of the process is complex and time-consuming. As cloud computing services are growing faster than ever, 3rd party software is constantly developing to adapt to the prevalence of cloud-based solutions. The integration process is getting easier and faster on the cloud thanks to the open API. Undoubtedly, On-premises PMS is still ahead of the Cloud-based system when it comes to the number of integration capabilities, the flexibility of built-in reports that got customized, added over the years. 

Security 

Many hoteliers are afraid of not being in control if they cannot physically neither see nor locate the system in their property. It is old-fashioned thinking and is a quite common mindset found in the hospitality industry, mostly in big corporations and international hotel chains. 

In reality, they fail to consider following the security standards protocols for the in-house system. The server has to function at all times, meaning your hotel should have an uninterrupted power supply 24/7 with backup power to keep your server operating in a power outage or unexpected occurrences. Data backup for any crucial business data on your system is also essential in case of unusual erasing data events. Otherwise, a security breach can happen, losing your internal data, your brand reputation, revenue loss is unavoidable. 

The cloud-based PMS vendors have the expertise to carry out security procedures in building and maintaining the highly robust cloud computing platform. They help to remove all those hassles and vulnerabilities associated with servers automatically. With all the security standards to comply, hoteliers can rest assured that their data are well protected, the system is running up-to-date. They also offer public and private cloud computing networks for hoteliers to choose from depending on their preferences. 

Which Property Management System is right for my business? 

There is certainly not a right or wrong answer. Every hotel has its own requirement, expectation, and deployment strategy. Undoubtedly, there are many benefits the cloud-based PMS has outperformed On-premises: 

• Lower upfront cost: servers, IT staff, hardware, etc. 
• Regular and predictable cost for license fees and maintenance. 
• Highly accessible to the system in real-time 
• Quick and easy integration 
• Highly secured and very high uptime 

It explains the widespread adoption of cloud-based systems. The only thing you have to hold responsible for is your Internet connectivity which is basic infrastructure any hotel should already have in place. In fact, the switch to cloud-based PMS is not impossible for the existing On-premises system. With all said and done, we believe the shift toward Cloud-based PMS is here and you should take it into consideration. What is your thought on those two systems? Which PMS platform system you would go with? Share with us in the comment section down below.  

We also have a previous blog on the controversy of “Buy or Build your own Property Management Software?”. Be sure to check it out and don’t forget to tune in to the next blog where we share our own journey in Building hotel management software right here next week.  

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What is Property Management System?

PMS or Property Management System is a software to manage all hotel operations. In other words, the PMS lies at the heart of hotels, collects information, and coordinates operations from booking, check-in and check-out, housekeeping, maintenance, billing, payments, and more. In today’s world, PMS is not just a tool to manage hotel operations but to deliver a better guest experience.

 

Currently, there are two popular types: On-premises PMS and Cloud PMS.

On-premises PMS:

On-premises or server-based PMS stores limited data in the local hotel. You will need an IT department to operate, maintain and upgrade the system. Besides, you will need to invest in workstations, data centers, and backup storage.

Cloud-based PMS:

A cloud-based PMS uses cloud computing. The software can be accessed anytime, from any device that is connecting to the Internet. Cloud-based PMS has lower capital costs, while it’s easier to run, upgrade, and backup.

 

The main functions of a PMS

In general, a PMS includes the following functions and features:

• Reservation management
• Night audit
• Housekeeping management
• Distribution channel management
• Revenue management
• Guest profile management
• Business reports and analyses
• Allotment management
• Maintenance management
• Point of sales

Why you need a PMS

Undoubtedly, emerging technologies impact everyone. Guests are now expecting more from hotels. Thus, a hotel must provide a smooth personal guest experience or even exceed their expectation to win their royalty. Traditional management will not get you far in this area, and having a PMS is the first step. A cloud hotel management system would bring you better benefits in the long run:

• Secured information and real-time updates
• Lower operation costs and easy to manage tasks
• Minimize human mistakes
• Know your guests better with a 360-degree guest profile feature
• Take no time to set up rate plans and distribute across channels
• Comprehensive business reports with real-time data

Before choosing your PMS

Picking a PMS vendor depends on your operational scope and needs. Note down what you are looking for and answer the following questions:

• What kind of features does the software cover? Do they resolve your problems?
• How much does it cost? Any hidden cost?
• Is the software easy to use and mobile-friendly?
• Does the system comply with security standards?
• Does the supplier provide comprehensive customer support service?

Choosing the right PMS is critical as it can make or break your hotel operations. If you are looking for one, contact us to get a free consultation.

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