PMS (Property Management System) has been around for more than four decades and is known for its capabilities in managing hotel operations seamlessly. Some may call it the center nervous system of hotel operations, indeed it certainly is. It has continually evolved to accommodate hoteliers’ constantly growing demands over time. If on-premises were the only way out for hotel PMS in the past, cloud-based hospitality management software has recently taken over the number one spot. This leaves all the hospitality geeks wondering, what is next from here.

The current Hospitality Property Management System situation

Peeking behind the hotel IT system, no hoteliers relies on only one single software provider, but rather a few depending on the complexity of their hotel operations procedure. Out of the technology products stack, you can easily get Property Management Software (PMS), a Central Reservation System (CRS), Revenue Management System (RMS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), F&B, POS, and the list goes on. Imagine having all of those installed and getting each integrated. Sounds effortless, until you’re on it. Each software provider might need to implement a few custom modifications to successful integration, a bit tweak here and there to fit the hotel’s unique business model. Obviously, it is not done on a free term and clearly would cost you a heap of money in the process.

Over time, each of the software in the stack gradually gets heavier, more complex, and cumbersome to update, troublesome to further customize its features. At a certain point, the software providers would intentionally stop supporting your requests, and neglect your concerns as the fix would not apply to the majority in the industry. This scenario has happened across the hospitality industry. Many have thought an “all-in-one” system would resolve this issue, however, not all are. The system structure is limited or reluctant to remove restrictions when it comes to 3rd parties software integration capabilities other than theirs.

The future of Hospitality Property Management System

It leads the hospitality industry toward the concept of a cloud-based open platform PMS, where its lean core remains the backbone of the system. Other software/systems can seek integration via two-way open API connections (Application Programming Interface), which allows them to communicate with minimal efforts at greater stability. At this stage, your PMS acts as a hub, other hotel applications would just simply plug in and play accordingly.

Why has such a great PMS model not been done yet?

The future of PMS is already here, in the form of a cloud-based system with open API. Many PMS software providers’ mindsets have shifted monumentally. The adoption of cloud computing technology across the hospitality industry is impressive. However, it still remains a small portion of the market. How come? The building process is outrageously complicated, exhausted, and pricey. In order to walk this path, the PMS provider has to “plan” every single step ahead of time with a clearly defined vision, detailed roadmap, and practical product life cycle strategy.

While open API encourages outside developers other than your own to innovatively develop valuable applications for your core software, it can be a burden when it comes to standardizing open API. This leads to much broader issues and concerns that we might not be able to cover all in this blog. If you’re interested in such matters, leave us a comment down below, we shall get back to it in future blogs.

We have been there, done that! The CiHMS team has strived relentlessly to become who we are today. Building a cloud-based open platform hospitality management solution has always been the fundamental foundation of CiHMS original product’s vision. The snippet of our journey was shared in CiHMS previous blog at: Build or Buy your own PMS.

Not all hotels are the same. The modern PMS will allow hotels to select the appropriate features that suit them the best in order to create their unique version of the guest journey. We believe cloud-based PMS shall remain the heart of your hotel operations. Open API facilitates connectivities to endless 3rd party applications, solutions out there in the marketplace, which is established by the PMS providers. The world is opting to be very different 5 years down the road. If you are still on an on-premises PMS system, it is time to consider the switch. Read our blog post here for in-depth insights on the pros and cons of on-premises versus cloud-based hospitality management systems.

Hospitality is a customer-centric industry. As technology evolves, our guests’ expectations continue to change. Decision on whether or not to transition into the new platform, adopt the latest trend seems rather daunting and obscure. Focus on your hotel’s underlying principles, be flexible, stay relevant, and ultimately hoteliers will pursue the innovative software that represents your business value, image, and worth.

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Instead of anticipating when the COVID-19 pandemic subsides or waiting for the hospitality and travel industry to resume, business leaders have already been working on their post COVID-19 recovery plan through the revenue management approach, to ensure the cash-flow “in”. Putting themselves in an active position, together with the national vaccination campaign for the last few months to accelerate the domestic economic recovery.

Many often disregard the importance of revenue management in hospitality without the acknowledgement of its core value and financial benefits. It has always been the least understood part of the industry, and not always is appreciated by the management team nor the hotel owners. Having a proper revenue management strategy helps hotels to issue the best selling room rate, attract their ideal guests, allocate their manpower in high season, and over-crowded staff in low season. There are far more advantages that revenue management brings along and mentioning them all here might drag the blog too far from today’s blog. We would save it to a later blog, drop a comment down below to let us know if you are looking forward to it.

Speaking of revenue management, people would generally navigate toward demands and supply concepts. Through the unstable travel pattern of 2020 and 2021 pandemic, it has become extremely irrelevant to determine pricing strategy through historical events. If in the past, hotels were depending on system and software tools to generate an optimal room rate, this no longer works. Alternatively, let’s take in consideration the last few years as the new foundation paces to alter and examine as the pandemic implications go on. The goal of revenue management is selling the right product with the right price to the right customer at the right time. It comes down to: What is your optimal rate, Who is your customer and When.

Determine the Optimal Rate

COVID-19 has swept all the travel and hospitality industries off its feet by surprise. Many hoteliers found themselves lost as the pandemic progressed aggressively. The coronavirus outbreak disturbed the traditional algorithm to determine the best possible optimal rate, at which would maximize profit for the business. In lieu of such, putting the 2020 customer purchasing behavior into perspective would result in negative output down the line.

The one thing hoteliers had to learn throughout this global crisis was to be flexible at all cost. Stop counting on automating tools and systems, start doing your own critical analysis on the short-term demand obtained through recent market research reports, review and compare with your competitors’ room rates. Manually adjust your pricing strategy along the way, while submitting the learning process to your automation tool, which helps the system to update the current trend and generate a more accurate rate later on.

The right customers

Hoteliers frequently pay attention to attracting as many customers there are on the market as possible, making sure to obtain maximum room occupancy. Not all business is good business. Focusing on nurturing your existing customers, as it costs a lot more to acquire new ones than retaining them. Back to square one, identify who your customers are. Build your campaign, bundles and promotions targeting them specifically. Keep your message consistent on all channels, throughout all your customer purchasing journey, track their behaviors and conversion ratio associated with or without promotions. Hotels unintentionally established a correlated database for themselves that had eventually evolved from the traditional demographic segmentation to behavioral segmentation.

When to offer discount

Perhaps, it might get tricky when it comes to discounts. How do you know how much discount is enough? Leveraging the psychology of discounts to make more money, as it makes your customers feel a sense of urgency, stops them from shopping around. In the meantime, recurring discounts might backfire and become expected from your brand. We suggest looking at A/B testing on different types of promotions for the same customer segmentation. This helps to better analyze your product’s features, which in hospitality terminology can be equivalent to length of stays, advanced booking period, complimentary meals, etc.

Also take advantage of pre-arrival email to up-sell, offer either free or discount rate of complimentary upgrade package to your existing customers. The incentive only available after the initial purchase goes through, allows customers a time to reconsider whereas pricing has become less sensitive compared to during the time of booking. Discounts are arguably the essential component on the road of recovery. However, exercise this wisely and precisely and avoid undisciplined discounting if you must. Remember a full hotel does not guarantee profitable business.

Desperation is not a strategy. Neither is hope! In a nutshell, there is definitely no snap-back to the normal stage prior COVID-19. The post COVID-19 scenario is still ambiguous, unknown and uncertain. Stop panicking and overreact during a crisis; be flexible, be spontaneous, and make unemotional decisions instead. Have an agile revenue management strategy in place and get ready to rock it out when this turbulence of coronavirus is at halt. Reminding yourself to always measure, analyze,monitor and keep track of your strategy to adjust and modify accordingly. It is the only way to secure a successful recovery.

We also have an upcoming webinar Hospitality Revenue Management coming up shortly this month. Register to join us now. There is a limited offer for this webinar. More information can be found @Live webinar: Hospitality Revenue Management – Recovery Strategy post Covid-19. We see you then!

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In our previous blog, we have walked through the concept of a Smart Hotel model, in today’s one, we will continue to talk about the technologies behind it. Many hotels seek shortcuts and easy ways out by arguing every guests’ request can be solved just with a single phone call. Ideally, that would be right, however, with hundreds of requests per hour, prioritizing and assigning these manually seems like a nightmare to any front desk.

Before COVID-19, hotels focused on building brand loyalty, customer satisfaction through different branding and marketing strategies. Things change, hotels need to adjust their strategy and operations to survive and move forward. Sanitary standards, contactless, and definitely health-related elements are concerned. That is when the Internet of things (IoT) technology actually comes into play. Here are the few things hotels can start putting into consideration to transform your ordinary hotel into a smart one.

The cloud technology

You might have heard of it, not once, but multiple times, technically everywhere on the net. It’s beneficial not for the hospitality industry alone but applied for all sectors. Cloud computing allows customers and hotels to simultaneously connect and communicate through applications conveniently on mobile devices. It also reduces costs overall for hotels by relieving them from heavy IT investment on server infrastructure, database storage, and full-time IT staff to maintain, monitor and update. The advantages of cloud computing can go on, it’s why we have chosen to build our CiHMS Hospitality Management Solution on it, details on all the reasons, can be found in our previous blog post.

A robust hospitality management solution

A hotel management software serves as the heart and soul of a hotel, just as our human brain transmits orders for our body to act upon. It keeps the hotels’ operations running seamlessly and efficiently. Hotel management software helps to automate the manual work from the front desk to housekeeping, saves manpower, and offers scalability as your hotel grows. The system enables hotels to record guests’ profiles, centralizes room reservations management, executes hotel daily tasks effectively, and many more. There is various hotel management software out there for hotels to choose from, however, looking for an ultimate software is not an easy quest.

We, CiHMS are also a proud developer of an All-in-one solution cloud-computing hospitality management solution. Our CiHMS software offers hotels jump-start their own digital transformation journey to evolve as the technology is constantly revolutionizing. To discover the CiHMS journey, read them here.

Overall contactless experience

Automatic check-in / check-out with QR code

Guests post COVID-19 would likely expect a contactless experience as soon as they arrive. Self-service kiosks are questionable for sanitary standards. Check-in and check-out via their own mobile devices seem to be the way of doing it. Most hotels allow guests to automatically check in themselves by scanning a QR code, available at the reception counter. The guests would have to fill out the necessary information, take proper required personal identification photos to submit, and receive their electronic key rooms right on their phone.

Convenience yet? This mobile key grants access to hotel elevators, their hotel rooms, banquet, and other facilities included in their room package. Hotels can be able to monitor and know exactly where their guests are, what they are doing, and the activities they enjoy the most in real-time, again thanks to your cloud-based hotel management system. When your guests are ready for check-out, they can proceed with the similar procedure they went through while check-in, by scanning a specific QR code provided at the check-out counter. Cashless payments proceed on guests’ mobile phones for maximum security purposes, no physical contact is involved during the process.

Facial recognition technology

If your hotel wants to step up a bit further, facial recognition technology is another option to look at. The technology had been developed and used daily, especially for smartphone users. Undeniably, it is extremely convenient for guests, giving them extraordinary hotel experience throughout. Vinpearl has applied this technology to allow check-in/ check-out, entry to amusement parks, safari, and all of their restaurant facilities just with facial recognition devices.

Human-less concierge counter

The availability of human-less concierge to assist your guests 24/7 on just about everything they need the answers to. Powered by AI, installed voice recognition software, together with an extensive database constructed by past questions from guests, a robot can serve your customers just as your ordinary concierge counter: from book taxi, switch room, reserve room, make a restaurant reservation, request in-room services, and so on.

Robotics

Apart from the concierge, robotics can be used for front-desk activities: greet, meet, check-in, and check-out guests accordingly. They can also help with luggage delivery to guest rooms, operate the elevators, and take guests on hotel tours easily. For hotel restaurants, robots often are in charge of serving customers to their tables, chopping and dicing stations behind the kitchen, bartenders serving at hotel bars, and delivering foods & drinks to guests’ rooms upon requests.

In housekeeping, robots would do all the vacuuming in lobbies areas, lounges, and other public common areas. Transporting laundry items to or from guests’ rooms, deliver amenities such as towels, sanitary equipment for guests without having any unnecessary human interaction. Guests can enjoy maximum personal privacies and feel absolutely comfortable at the same time.

Smart rooms

With IoT technology, all room’s facilities, such as lighting, AC and heat, curtains, TV, can be controlled through your smartphone or via an AI built-in device similar to Alexa for hospitality. It lets the guests freely discover tourist information, getting to know the hotels within their personal space. During your guest’s stay, their preferred temperature for AC/heat, lighting levels, curtains habit, TV channels will be recorded on their profile to use for future visits. For all the perks the voice recognition technology has to offer, hotels are embracing it truly.

Big data

Hotels welcome thousands of guests per month. The database regarding their stays is huge and considered as big data, which hotel owners can base upon to make decisions on their marketings or hotel strategic plan. These data can also be used for revenue management, giving our personalized offers to targeted groups, and to have an impact on guest experiences. Data means nothing unless they are analyzed and interpreted.

The possibilities of technologies are endless and not limited to the ones mentioned above. Guests are no longer coming to hotels just for sleep. They pursue comfort, foster personalized experience, adore the technology to satisfy their curiosity, or merely just to savor memories. The smart hotels model provides all the solutions to enhance your guest experience, making sure to meet your guest expectations, while being sustainable in the long run. Not all of these features mentioned in this blog are feasible or practical to your hotels at the moment, but rather depending on the current hotels’ infrastructure as well as its financial status.

Hoteliers who are capable of acting promptly in time to minimize their operational costs and rationalize the business processes efficiently are the ones who focus on building their scalable technology infrastructures and integrated with an open API earlier on. These all aim to achieve the best connectivity throughout the hotel property, ensure all high-tech applications and components are working properly, transmitting real-time data and performance. This depicts the future of the hospitality industry and how hotel owners should adapt gradually to staying relevant. If there is a quote that represents the smart hotels model, in short, we thought we should share, Shep Hyken’s quote is pretty close to it:

Whenever you see the opportunity to create a WOW! moment,

act on it.

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Hospitality is a customer-centric industry. Focusing on the guest experience has always been the top priority for hoteliers. The happier your customers are, the more they are willing to spend, and most likely return to come back. Innovation and the current emerging technologies offer hotels to seize the opportunity to leverage their existing strength and weakness to adapt and enhance their service delivery. Recently, a hotel model concept that has been actively discussed at hospitality networking events and seminars is Smart Hotel.

Not many hotels find themselves willing to transition into one, simply due to the budget and time-consuming. The acceptance phase can also be tricky, resulting from the major shift in culture change and employee etiquette. In return, smart hotel technology guarantees customers satisfaction, guest experience, setting your hotel value apart from the competitors and ultimately increasing profitability. Although the term “smart hotel” familiarizes itself with the hospitality industry, only the minority understand it inside and out. Are smart hotels really the future of hotels? How is the progress of transforming into a smart hotel model? Would the benefits be worth thinking about?

What is a Smart Hotel?

A hotel that utilizes technology into their organization operation, enables it to transform the customer journey from pre-stay to arrival, in-hotel, departure to their post-stay, then repeat. Collecting the customer data throughout the journey to analyze, improve, develop and perfect each journey segment mentioned above. There are hotels already successfully transitioned into smart hotels, making revolutions in their daily hotel operations, and still yearning for more. What is exactly the smart hotel experience in each segment?

Smart Hotel Experience

A normal customer journey generally would be divided into 4 basic the following segments: Pre-stay, Hotel stay, Departure, and Post-stay.

Pre-stay

The Search

First off, customers would start out the Search phase. They are looking for accommodation for their planned destination based on various factors including but not limited to location, pricing, referrals, and their past experiences. Smart Hotels advertising or posts would have appeared once customers start their search for the hotel destination inspiration. There would be promotion packages and deals personalized to the customers’ criteria, assure to capture the lead once you detect it.

Customers can contact your hotel through the chatbot available on your website, get instant assistance on questions and queries related to bookings or accommodation features. Any unanswered questions can be followed up through emails or direct phone calls, making sure customers do not need to go through multiple sites to get the answers they are looking for. In addition, your customers intentionally ask for your hotel room’s photos and details on the room’s layout. Nothing would explain better than a VR experience of the hotel tour from room to the common area, restaurant to fitness facilities, swimming pool to the spa and lounge. This would prompt your customers to quickly decide and close off on the best-suggested deal from your hotel offers.

The Purchase and before the arrival

Once the guests are ready to make their bookings/reservations, hotels can offer guests to choose the room’s attributes such as views, bed and pillow type, corner or connecting room, non-smoking/smoking room, etc. Guests can choose to log in by using their social accounts, which allows the system to load all their information and auto-fill as required without entering these fields by themselves. The smart hotel experience would enable guests to take their picture at the moment of booking and store this identification photo to use for check-in later on. Payment by cards is easily done by taking a snapshot of the credit/debit cards. The purchase stage is closed by your booking system automatically sending out a verification email once the payment is completed.

Before your guest arrives, a reminder email about the trip should be sent out a few days before the events. With the help of social media, hotels can customize personalized accommodation to fit guests’ stay and upsell packages as needed.

Hotel Stay

Smart Hotels enables customers to check-in via the mobile app. All the customers’ private information is processed on their mobile devices and highly secured. Guests can check in at the self-service kiosk station available at the hotel property. By scanning guests’ identification such as passport / national ID/driver licenses. Thanks to the OCR technology, the system will automatically check in the guests, and take their pictures at the kiosk station. Depending on the hotel’s, the physical room key card or the electronic key card would be sent to guests’ mobiles. Yes, contactless check-in is possible! Your hotels might not need a physical front desk.

Some hotels have upgraded their game by letting the guests check-in using facial recognition via their hotel camera. Once the guests walk in, facial recognition features are built-in with hotel camera matches with the guests’ identification picture given during their booking process, check-in the guests immediately, and send the check-in completion confirmation to their email. The elevator would give direct access to guests’ designated floor and let them into their room with facial recognition devices or programmed e-cards. All room features such as curtains, lighting, TV, phone, AC temperature can be adjusted via mobile/tablet app or the voiced demand.

Hotels are trying to make their guests feel comfortable and truly relaxing like they are entering their own space. Access to hotel apps to request room services, laundry, and housekeeping, everything is within their fingertips. Robots are in use delivering/collecting foods and collecting/returning to the guests’ room. All appointments regarding restaurants (including buffet status, restaurant busy status), fitness center (full or empty), and spa would be available on the hotel apps at the guest’s convenience. Hotels’ partners such as tour companies, nearby attractions suggest guests with promotional packages through the hotel apps. Everything is taken care of for your guests to enjoy their stays even if it’s in-hotel or outside-of-the-hotel.

Departure

It’s finally time for your guests to leave. Queuing in line to check-out is no longer a thing. Everything is done through the hotel apps. Even minibar assumptions can be billed with IoT technology enabling electronic bills sending to guests once they pick up items from the bar. All other services would be billed and added to the check-out invoice. Cashless payment, which we mentioned in our previous blog, can be processed with guests’ mobile devices. The guests walk out with their luggage and the check-out is completed.

Post-stay

Upon their departure, emails should already be sent to customers’ inboxes to share their feedback regarding the stays and ask for their review on our hotel website in return for rewarding points for them to save up in exchange for added value services or room features upgrade for their next stage. Following up emails in a few months offer promotional and value packages for their upcoming stays.

The above are merely the smart hotel experiences following along the customers’ journey. There are many other revolving smart hotels if we follow the hotel operation path: Front office, F&B, Housekeeping, Sales & Marketing, etc. To dive deep into these areas, it would take us another blog dedicated to these only. If you are interested, drop us a comment down below, we shall get that coming. The smart hotels model has been applied worldwide; surprisingly, it is quickly adopted in mainland China and attracts the young generations who come to visit on their weekend break pretty often.

What to start with transitioning into a Smart Hotel?

The most important factor for hotels in considering transitioning into smart hotel models is to find their ideal hotel management system which helps them to achieve their goal as they grow. We would not boast about our PMS if it is not what we believe is your first kick-start in this journey. Our hospitality management solution does not aim to be the ordinary PMS, we strive for digital transformation in everything we do.

Is it worth it?

Customers are your indicator. It’s the future we get you ready for, not just catching the current trend but also setting the industry. Transition into a smart hotel model is only worth it if you can follow through, and not doing it halfway. Otherwise, it only costs you more than the benefits it brings.

Looking for a private consultation on our PMS and discover what your hotel can become? Please do not hesitate to contact our support team! Or you can read all the details on our PMS at the blog section and our Facebook page for the latest news and events.

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Customer acceptance of cashless payment has outrageously increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Although there is little medical study and evidence to support the transfer of virus via cash transaction, the fear is there and encourages customers to go cashless. Getting out of the house cashless is no longer unrealistic in this current timeline.

Many would prefer to look for the “Card accepted here” sign before walking in the restaurants, supermarkets, or pharmacies. It brings the absolute convenience of quicker transactions, unnecessary human errors, irresistible discounts, and unexpecting loyalty points earned in exchange for mileage or gift cards. This payment trend has sneaked its way into the hospitality sector. Travelers, especially popular among international guests, are often keen on paying for their accommodations and dining through cards, e-wallet, or mobile apps. What does this mean to the hospitality industry? Any challenges and what will the upcoming payment trend be?

What cashless payment really is?

Cashless simply means no cash involved. Payment is cashless if it is made by cards or electronic methods instead of cash, and known as digital payments. This payment methodology has been widely used in amusement parks, festivals, concerts, fairs, during flights, etc. According to the Vietnam Insider, Vietnam market transaction value had soared 177% in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. There are many different ways of cashless payment, these include:
1. Bank cards: Credit cards and debit cards are the most used payment forms globally.
2. Mobile wallet applications: There are numerous mobile wallet apps on the market for customers to choose from. This method of payment is quick and functional. Users can send, receive, and store money as they wish. MoMo, Viettel pay, Moca, Airpay, VNPT pay are the few e-wallet apps that have gained popularity in the Vietnam market. The government also has encouraged citizens to pay their utility bills, such as water, electricity, internet, and television cable bills through e-wallet apps.
3. QR code: it stands for Quick Response code, which is a pattern black square grid and can be read by smart devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and computers. After scanning the QR code into the devices would redirect customers to proceed with the payment on a certain payment gateway.

4. NFC technology: is short for Near Field Communication. The technology enables users to pay by tapping a chip card onto a POS/ reader device. It can be credit, debit, wrist band or simply a smart card with a built-in chip using NFC technology. There are phones with NFC-enabled technology which can be linked to your e-wallet or bank cards.
5. Gift cards & vouchers: physical gift cards and vouchers or non-physical gift cards and vouchers (also known as e-gift cards, e-vouchers) are used for customer rewards and birthday presents.

Hospitality industry with cashless payment trend

Transaction speed

Undeniably fast transaction in all cashless payment transactions. Hotels now allow customers to deposit money into their keycard. Incorporating the NFC technology, customers can enjoy their stay without the need to carry their wallets around the property. It results in less waiting time for customers and avoids over-waiting queues.

Security

Reducing the fraud of counterfeit money, human errors, robbery of cash internally and externally. It’s also easy to manage and control by the accounting system.

Brand image

Going cashless let hoteliers track customers’ behavior during their stays. Understand their favorite location within the hotel property, their most spending item, which dining restaurant they would prefer, and much more. From this information, hoteliers can easily record and serve their guests better, achieving customer satisfaction is no longer an “impossible mission”. Keeping up with technology would position your hotel brand above others in the industry. It builds customers’ trust and loyalty, keeps them coming back for their next trip.

Maximize sales and revenue

Due to the ease of payment, customers tend to enjoy and would be willing to spend more than they plan to on added-value products and services such as spas, private tours, brunch package, etc. To promote customers, a few hotels would offer generous discounts if their guest’s accumulated spending exceeds a certain amount at the time of checking out. It can later be exchanged for money and deducted right from their stay expenses, or later used for the next stay.

The challenges for the hotel industry

With endless advantages the cashless payment trend has brought into the hotel industry, the challenges are also there. Below are a few worth mentioned:

Security

While it is secured to go cashless for guests, it is challenging for the hoteliers to make sure their connection is not in breach and stable. Digital translation relies heavily on the Internet connection. To ensure your network is safe and always up and running means strict monitoring policy and IT staff to standby 24/7.

Higher cost with credit/debit charging fees

Depending on the card authorizer, the processing fee might be different. If you own a hotel chain or multinational hotel corporation, you would be treated with special low processing fees, somewhere between 0% – 1%. Otherwise, the normal rate would apply to your guests’ transactions.

Digital transaction knowledge update

At the current rate of technology development, digital transactions are constantly getting created and updated. Be in sync with the new releases and the latest tech to avoid any risk and fraud regarding digital transactions for guests as well as your hotel.

Customer denial to go cashless

The fear of overspending if you do not “see” and feel the money going out of your pocket is stopping customers from moving forward with the cashless payment trend.

The cashless payment trend has been more accepted by customers in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. People are willing to change without hesitation and their adaptation rate is surprisingly high. If it would take an average of 10 years for the old generations to get used to digital transactions, COVID-19 has cut the time by 5th. In 2 years, cashless payment has been casually used on a daily basis. Not only the hospitality industry experienced it, but it is applied in all industries worldwide.

Customers are now expecting us to move on and practice the new contactless experience trend. Front-desk staff can be replaced with self-check-in and check-out via phone or tablets, housekeeping request and room-services getting requests through hotel apps, self-service restaurant receiving orders through tablets integrated into guests table. This is not a fictional movie, it is the reality now. The time is here, and if you are not riding this cashless payment wave, you are missing out. Are you aware of this cashless payment trend? If yes, have you applied it to your hotel practices? How about a contactless experience? Any plan on it yet? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

We also have an upcoming regarding the Cashless payment trend coming up shortly this week. Register to join us now. There is a limited offer for this webinar. More information can be found @Live webinar: Payments trends in the hotel sector. We see you then!

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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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