Category: Technology

OCR technology in CiHMS proceeds check-in process within seconds

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.

We have just released the new feature with OCR technology for the CiHMS hospitality management solution

OCR technology is now integrated with our hospitality management solution – CiHMS allows you to get your guest check-in at a much faster pace

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.

The OCR technology helps hotels to achieve contactless hotel experience in a near future

OCR technology was invented at the beginning of the 1910s, but only gained its popularity in recent decades, especially in the travel and hotel 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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eCommerce impacts in the hospitality industry

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.

The eCommerce has started to accelerate in all industries, including hospitality

The eCommerce revolutionary is here without you acknowledging it. Not only hospitality industry experiencing it, other sectors are also enjoying the productivity it brings along

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.

Without an effective PMS - hotel management system, hoteliers will not be able to capture all the possible leads and maximize the potential leads

Guest information has been logged in hotel’s PMS hospitality management solution as soon as their booking goes through

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.

Building a brand and position it right in your customer mindset is extremely difficult and time consuming. However, it is vital to business in all industry, not limited to hospitality industry

Not in the hospitality industry only, building brand is crucial to businesses. It’s represent business’s value, culture, mission and vision to the customer

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 hospitality industry is traditional, to set yourself apart from other in the field, have an open mind and be persistent in updating technology and practicing it in your daily operation. You shall become a trendsetter without recognizing it

Are you a follower or a trendsetter? In hospitality industry, keep tab with the technology and practice it in your business operation to stay on top of it

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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Digital transformation in the hospitality industry

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.

The hospitality industry has recently changed and adapted the digital transformation process

Digital transformation has been slowly carried out in the hospitality industry for the last two decades

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.

The digital transformation in hotels has been widely acknowledged in the past few years

The hospitality industry embraces digital transformation as a crucial part of development

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.

Booking hotels can be easily done via personal digital gadgets. Digital transformation lets organization to approach latest technology and set themself apart in the competitions

The increase in digital devices ownership has affected customer purchase behavior in hospitality industry. The need to digital transformation is to stay relevant

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

The digital transformation can be tricky to some, as it might requiret a culture and structure change

Digital transformation consists of six stages

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.

Your digital transformation has moved on to the 4th stage where roles are defined and tasks are assigned after your strategic roadmap has been defined

The change agents are giving licenses by the seniors, the digital transformation approach has shown its effectiveness, all in for the new strategic roadmap

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.

You probably have achieved culture and structure change in this stage of digital transformation, from here you are well on your way to succeed

At the sixth stage of digital transformation, the highest level of your hierarchy in your hospitality business starts to agree that only change is constant and the digital transformation is the right strategic roadmap.

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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A new approach to hospitality management solution – CiHMS is ready for the world

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.

Our hotel management system is versatile, innovative, scalable and extremely functional to any hospitality business models

The team determines to bring the hospitality management solution CiHMS to the world

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.

CiHMS is an all-in-one hotel management system with build-in hospitality software to manage your hotels from front to back

We offer a complete hospitality management solution for your hotel with our cloud-based computing CiHMS

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.

The hotel management system is built with flat and minimalistic design at mind, giving the user an easy to use interface

CiHMS interface is inspired by flat and minimalistic design. The hospitality management system is also designed based on customers’ approach. Please note the beta features may not available for all customers. If you need assistance, do not hesitate to contact our team for support

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.

The hotel management system is fully integrated with 3rd party hospitality software and hundreds of distribution channels

Fully integrated with other distribution channels and 3rd party software let you automate business process without maing human mistakes

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

The hotel management system allows hotel properties to manage workload from Front office to Housekeeping department easily and transparently

Our hospiltality management solution provides transparancy in streamline workloads from Front Office to Housekeeping Department

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 strictly follow security standards for our hotel management system to make sure no security breaches happen to our customers

Following security standards to make sure our hospitality management system secured your hotel data and privacy

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:

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CiHMS – Hospitality management solution from Zero to Hero

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.

We deployed our hotel management software CiHMS on 35 locations in less than 99 days. What a record!

Deployment of the hospitality management solutions on 35 locations in 99 days was an impossible mission, but we did it!

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.

CiHMS - our new hotel management software was ready to go live on our customers' properties, knowing difficulties and chaos were ahead of us.

Before going all-in deployment mode for our new hospitality management solution, we had to keep our reality check-in time.

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.

The in-house support team to coordinate in the deployment process of going live our new hospitality management solution for all 35 locations for our customers.

The in-house support team to coordinate in the deployment process of going live our new hospitality management solution for all 35 locations for our customers.

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.

The deployment date had finally come for our hospitality management solution - CiHMS ready to be live on 35 locations of our customers' properties

The deployment date had finally come for our hospitality management solution – CiHMS ready to be live on 35 locations of our customers’ properties

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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Building a hospitality management solution in progress – Fail fast, learn fast

Our hotel management software pilot testing calendar during 4 months progress

Counting down to our first MVP release

The first MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version for our own Property Management Software was completed after spending 4 relentless months building the whole system from scratch. Following was the pilot test in September 2019. The first Alpha version of the CiHMS – the hotel management software – was installed and ran pilot testing in our customers’ City Hotel facilities. During the pilot testing period, there were also Beta, Gamma and Delta versions released. The whole process officially ended around December 2019.

We thought we had every feature figured out, until going into the actual pilot testing phase, which was carefully assisted and consulted by the experts and professional advisors in the field. Everything cannot be applied with the theory-based approach, neither does our Hospitality Management Solution. Only the practical procedures, real human interactions can reveal our PMS’s incompetent capabilities. We were able to learn, improve and adapt the updated features and changes for a better performance into the PMS.

In today’s blog, we’ll share with you our personal experience, failure throughout the pilot testing phase, and how we tackle and grow from it.

What is pilot testing?

For software development, pilot testing is the act of testing your software under a real-time operating condition. This allows us to verify the feasibility, cost, time, risk, and performance of our PMS in a small-scale, short-term experiment before the full deployment in all our customers’ properties. It is like a rehearsal before a live performance of your Broadway show, in this case, it is for your software. Prior to the pilot testing time, we had to:

  • Build a pilot plan
  • Schedule for the pilot test
  • Deploy and test the pilot testing
  • Evaluate pilot testing
  • Rinse & Repeat
The pilot testing for our hotel management system - CiHMS was planned out in detailed before launching

Our hospitality management solution pilot testing was carefully planned out to guarantee smooth implementation

During the pilot testing time, it was important for us to choose one of the following strategies after gathering and evaluating test data:

  • Stagger Forward: adding more candidates into the pilot group
  • Rollback: Restore the pilot group to its previous state
  • Suspension: Stop the pilot testing
  • Patch and continue: Deploy patches to fix the solution and continue on with pilot testing

First Pilot Testing Milestone: The City Hotel

We set ourselves up for the plan and carried them out gradually. The first pilot testing took place at city hotels. We started offloading all the metadata, which technically meant all the information related to your hotel, it was the detail that described the property information, the number of rooms, room types, etc.., of the first hotel into our alpha version of the CiHMS. The system was run for one month, while the room rate and reservation management were successfully imported into the travel agents’ booking portal to sync with the system room rate in real-time.

Then it hit us with complaints and conflicts among our product functions and the client’s front desk team expectation. Constant comparison between the old system and the new one worn out the coding team. We not only have to pay extra attention to the user experience itself, but also to achieve additional requests from the FO team. The night audit process, evaluating and closing daily cash flow in and out of the hotel account, was somewhat different from what we perceived.

The Beta version was released during this period to mostly fix a number of occurring bugs and re-code the night audit features. Once the new version was deployed, the staff started to cool off. They recognized they spend less time and effort on the night audit workloads than before. Everything was automated with a click of a button and started to make sense. It did take two to tango, indeed.

Second Pilot Testing Milestone: Resort, Spa & Entertainment Complexes Hotel Chain

After evaluating data, we chose to “stagger forward”, adding more candidates – hotel properties into the pilot group. These new nominees were evidently complicated with numerous operations linked with multiple systems. It was dreadful, and accomplishing this milestone did feel rewarding.

Second pilot testing for our hotel management software had failure but we did not surrender

We also took risks in CiHMS Pilot testing period, had to roll back couple of times but never backed down

We had to roll back a couple of times due to integration failure with various existing software in the property. Fortunately, these did not discourage our team. We learned to pick up where we left off, patch, and continue to the next solution. At the end of November 2019, a Gamma version of CiHMS was released with full integration with SAP – our customers’ Financial Accounting System and other management systems.

Third Pilot Testing Milestone: Perfecting the system

It was our final stage of pilot testing after running the hospitality software solution CiHMS for 2 consecutive months. We got “perfect” data comparing with the existing On-Premises system at the time. That was a relief for our team. All features were based on practical procedures and protocols from actual hotel operations, no longer theoretical assumption. It helped to eliminate impractical and unnecessary functionalities that other Hotel Management Solution providers would suggest as extra perks in their software that ended up never getting used. We stuck to the cycle of Implementing, Validating, Adapting/Change, and repeating.

Our CiHMS Hospitality management solution had its first pilot testing in our customer's property in September 2019

Pilot testing our hospitality management solution was tackled on September 2019 and ended later on that December

Though CiHMS has recently entered the hospitality management solution market for over a year, 4 months of pilot testing did help CiHMS as the product as well as the company to mature and grow quickly.

Performance test in Nha Trang

Apart from the pilot testing phase, we also did an intense performance test that took place in Nha Trang at one of the customers’ hotel properties. The test involved roughly over 200 front-office staff in our customer hotel’s property. It was required for everyone to log on to the system and performed all their daily tasks such as booking, check-in, check-out, restaurant booking, etc. at the same time.

This proved our system can handle numerous concurrent users at the same time and made sure absolutely no overloading nor crashing due to system incapabilities when we fully deployed the CiHMS in all our customers’ properties. We were extremely lucky to borrow the needed human resources from our customers’ hotel property to carry out this test. Without their help and support, it would be much more difficult for us to gather a large number of people, train them to carry out hospitality procedures and put them in the test environment to run the test.

Agile Methodology

The optimal approach for software development is the agile methodology, which practices the collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams with customers. It allows the team to deliver in workable increments, provides flexibility and responsiveness to changing business needs and customer feedback.

Building our hotel management software based on agile approach had helped us to stay focus and achieve the tight timeframe

Agile methodology was applied in our hospitality management solution development

At CiHMS, we adopt the agile methodology from the start and this was a strategic move, looking back. Unlike the waterfall methodology, a Business Analyst (BA) had to come up with extremely long and time-consuming descriptive product information, and technical requirements which were likely expensive and impossible to change. The BA then controlled and knew how to implement the project thoroughly.

In agile software development, our Product Owner and Business Analyst did not need to have experience in the implementation process. They approached the customers to generate user stories. From there, the team prioritized the product backlog, split into each sprint with workload estimation given by the team members who were in charge. Regular stand-up, sprint planning, review, and retrospective pushed the building process and product delivery forward at a much faster pace.

The methodology was also applied during our pilot testing. We were able to reach out to the customers’ difficulties, create new user stories in the product backlog, improve and release them immediately in the next sprint. Agile methodology has changed our workplace culture to be transparent, value the people over process and tools, working software over documentation, respecting customer collaboration over terms and contracts, most of all, responding to change over following a plan.

The pilot testing ended, meaning we had to get ready for the full deployment on all of our customers’ properties. We had carried out the process in record time, exceeding experts’ expectations and our own. To know what we had achieved, be sure to check in next week with our next blog on: ”Go live with our Hospitality Management System: Zero to Hero”.

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Cloud vs On-premise PMS for hotels: which one is better?

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. 

Cloud based Property Management Software has been dominating the hospitality management software industry as its benefit has outperformed On-premises PMS

The cloud computing hospitality management software has been favored by hoteliers in the last few years, making a significant shift in the industry


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.  

The cloud-based Property Management System takes care of all the servers, maintenance, upgrades, updates and back-up for you

On-premise hotel management system puts hotel owners in complete control of the system, while be a heavy burden expenditure upfront


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.

Not all can handle the financial burden of purchasing a hospitality management system in a long term

The cost of purchasing a hospitality management system in a long term is not sustainable as your business model scales up


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. 

On Premises PMS has been around for years with plenty of 3rd party integrations

The cloud-based PMS makes the integration faster and much easier with the open API

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. 

In-house hospitality management system needs strict security protocols to make sure up-time remains high

On-Premises Property Management system puts you in total control of your servers, hardware, upgrades, data and so on, however, security protocols can be chaotic


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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Buy or build your own PMS?

Hotel software management – also known as Property Management System (PMS) has imperceptibly become a necessity, the heart of the hospitality business ecosystem. Every hotel owner, from small to boutique, corporation to multinational hotel chain, will eventually come across this conundrum: “To buy or to Build our own PMS?” at least once in their career. Even though it is a simple yes/no question, to come up with an answer will take you countless debates, meetings, discussions, persuasions and sleepless nights. With either choice, the final decision ultimately determines the next stage of your business. It can possibly pave your very first step in the Digital Transformation evolution journey.

Property Management System is crucial to any hotel owner

To Buy or To Build your own Property Management System – the ultimate question to anyone in the hotel industry

Then which is better? In this blog, let us walk you through the whole process. You might be able to find yours ;).

Buying a Property Management System is quicker and easier

There are two types of hospitality management software out there that have been used popularly: On-Premise PMS software – everything is done internally from implementation to running the solution, maintenance to updates and setting up your servers; and the cloud-based PMS – cloud provider maintains servers, network and software for you, you can access all the information hosted by the vendors on a web browser-based, requiring no active management.

Both options are widely marketed from all the big brands in the hospitality industry software, such as Opera PMS by Oracle, Protel Air by Protel, Hotelogix PMS by Hotelogix, MSI CloudPM by MSI and so on.

Depending on your hotel model and operation needs, you can decide to stick with either On-Premise or Cloud. We shall have a detailed blog on The Cloud Property Management System and On-Premise Property Management System Showdown following up very soon, this might be able to help you figure this out.

 

A Ready made Hospitality Management System seems to be economically efficient and sustainable to small hotel owners

Have an off-the-rack hotel management system up and running can be faster and economically efficient for small scales hospitality business

 

Purchasing a ready-made PMS is convenient. Have all your requirements listed out and match it with the existing PMS that provides those features. Voilà! You can have the system in place within days! It definitely benefits if your hotel model is small to medium size. The value-added from the PMS can be shown in a short period of time right after the installation. This means you can achieve a higher ROI ratio pretty quickly. Plus the initial cost of purchasing an off-a-shelves PMS is rather a fraction of the cost of building one.

The odds of purchasing your own PMS

Although big brands are involved in the making, all the PMSs still have their own limitations. Here are the few (but not limited to) that hotel owners have experienced over the years. If you do experience the same, don’t forget to like our blog knowing you are not alone.

The intuitive user interface:

Many have underestimated this feature, but it plays a tremendous role in the purchase decision process. The better and more easy-to-use interface the Property Management Software has, the faster a user can learn and adapt to it. Result in much less training time obviously.

Customizable Reservation, Fees & Taxes

Reservation might seem easy and impossible to go wrong to some, but when you have multiple channel reservation systems within your hospitality software management, overbooking happens more often than you think. Having it tailored to your hotel preferences, can be tricky and require extreme help from the PMS support team. Especially when it comes to complicated fees and tax policy, it can take months (if you are lucky) or longer (if not never) when there are technical customizations involved to get it running.

Report System

Mostly the report system comes with generic reports that won’t meet up your hotel report’s requirement. You’ll find the report system to be either too specific or too broad. Sometimes it just does not have the type of report that you are looking for. Seeking support can be discouraging, as you would end up receiving the typical “out of our scope” response or “we will put it on our next release” to later know that request would never be granted. It’s unlikely for the PMS vendor to acknowledge your problem as a worthy addition.

Frustration and disappointment happen every time you export a report that does not meet your requirement from your hospitality Property Management System

Buying an existing PMS for your hotel can result in frustration with the lack of reports you actually need

Accessibility & Integration

Unable to access your Property Management System from your mobile? Take too long or it won’t sync in real-time? Difficult to integrate with your current Hospitality Point of Sales, OTAs and the Hospitality Channels Manager? Before purchasing, you might look forward to all the promises the PMS sales team has committed to. Your high expectations will only bring greater disappointments. Be sure to keep those expectations on your brief and actual contracts, otherwise be clear on the possible risk of failure.

Supported languages & currencies

Double-check whether or not your Property Management System supports your local languages and currencies. If not, it sooner or later will impact your system and may cause a contradiction with the other existing software you already have. It’s best that your PMS supports all languages & currencies, or get ready to be back on the hot seat of whether to suffer from the accumulating frustration or starting over with a new PMS system.

In-time support and upgrades

Getting the support in-time can be a struggle! The software never runs smoothly as they promise. Without the support and upgrades, it means nothing. Some PMSs are well known for their prolonged queuing support time. Surprise? Unfortunately, this is the norm! Nobody would like to wait for 3 whole business days in order to get supported when your system is crashed and unable to function probably. The dependency on the support team along the way will scare you for good, especially to those who have enterprise-level PMS software.

Is Building the New Property Management Software for everyone?

Building the complete new software starting from scratch is not anyone’s cup of tea. It is almost impossible and out of the norm for small and medium-size hospitality businesses to walk this path.

Building a Hotel Management Software is not easy for small businesses, especially with the huge budget and lack of human resources

It can be difficult to start building your own Property Management System, especially if your business is a small scaled hotel

 

The opportunity cost

The project can accumulate technical debts along the road and later turn into a technical deficit, making the software quality suffer. It also does not justify the cost of operations. The math on the opportunity cost of allocating the additional resources in building the software or spending the same cost to focus on other smaller budget projects might bring greater revenue and assets for the hotel in the short-term period may put a halt on the project.

The timeline and human resources

Even if a hotel owner goes ahead in building software, it would not suffice to find a competent team of technology specialists building PMS software within the scheduled timelines. Many others took years to build and perfect their software, how can hotel owners be able to manage the team to deliver on the dot.

The opportunity cost will always be questioned whenever obstacles and unexpected circumstances occur during your hotel management system building stage

How many other projects and assets you have to give up in order to build your own hotel management system? Is it worth the trade-off?

The budget

Last but not least, what is the actual budget? Will there be sufficient resources to help see it through to completion? It can get overwhelming at times and may make the owner compromise for less. Though the hotel might have proposed a timeline and finances, while in the making, things can merely go sideways. Are hotel owners prepared to take a failure? Honestly speaking, not many are willing to accept the loss of building a PMS project. It leaves a heavy financial burden to carry on.

 

Then who would like to take this bumpy road in building a brand-new PMS themselves?

There are multinational and big corporation hotel chains willing to invest in building their own PMS system. Any company with a long-term vision in scaling up, dependency on PMS vendors is not ideal, as its pricing model won’t be sustainable for the hotel’s system.

In addition, waiting for the PMS vendors to solve the unique problem specific to a hotel is unrealistic. Especially if the problem is one of the kinds, the issue shall be pushed to the very end of their backlog that never gains enough interest or benefits for them to proceed.

Getting your PMS software developed in-house guarantees a fully customizable model that can touch base on all the problems, issues, and expectations that one hotel currently confronts with. It puts the owner in complete control over the software from collected data to even security risks, from operation compatibility to mobile-friendly, and so on.

If you have all it takes to build your own property management system, the process will be rewarding toward the end

Building your own hotel management software brings greater value and rewarding if you can go through with it

 

In short, if you have an in-depth knowledge of the hospitality industry, inside and out, coherently and thoroughly, from its process to operation, front to back; while owning a strong and committed technical team then we don’t see any reason to hold you back from building a PMS for yourself. All the cons shall cancel out once you meet those two criteria; the pros shall recapture your mission, vision and reassure the investment you make is well-spent. Remember patience and persistence are your friends.

This has been rather a long blog, and we hope you have got the answer you have been looking for. What do you choose to do: Build or Buy? Drop us a comment down below. We love to hear your side of the story.

Tune in with us on our next blogs, where we will dig deeper into the software insights that you don’t want to miss. See you here, this time next week!

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Manage booking from agencies efficiently with Booking Portal

Travel agencies (TAs) are an important channel, contributing a lot of sales for hotels, besides online travel agencies (OTAs) or direct booking. Depending on your business size, the number of travel agencies you have can vary from a handful to dozens. When it comes to booking management, this can be a hassle for both sides. Hoteliers could have a difficult time controlling the inventory between agencies and making sure room, and rate information are correct. On the other hand, travel agencies are struggling to get the best rooms at the best rates available. Phone call reservation with the hotel is time-consuming and not effective as information is quickly outdated.

A booking portal or a reservation system was created to bridge this gap and remove the difficulties for agencies and hotels from making reservations.

How it works

A Booking Portal plays the role of a middleman. It is a platform between agencies and hotels where agencies can place direct bookings.

• For travel agencies

With the Booking Portal, agencies can check real-time information of inventories, rate plans for them from the hotel. They can search, book easily and instantly. Also, there are options to view booking history, make adjustments, add or cancel reservations. All in one platform, no hassle, no delay.

• For hotels

The software makes life easier for hoteliers in managing travel agent profiles and their bookings. You can make sure the information is always in sync, and you can check the performance of any agency in no time.

Managing booking through agencies is easy with the Booking Portal

Benefits of the Booking Portal

  • Remove manual processes
    One platform for all activities: check, book, edit, and even cancel. Everything is quick after few clicks, no phone call, no waiting time, and no error. The process is now automated with real-time data and updates for both sides.
  • Reduce overbookings
    Agencies can only book rooms and rates available for them. Having a central pool of inventories helps hotels reduce the risk of overbookings.
  • Increase revenue for both
    As people said a satisfied customer is the best business strategy. Through a booking portal, hoteliers make it easy for travel agents to satisfy their guests’ demands, which returns in a win-win situation for both hotels and travel agencies.

Do I need one?

There is no correct answer to this question, but it all depends on your TA network. If you find it taking too much time and effort with your current way of doing things, probably it’s time to consider having a booking portal.

Contact us now for a free consultation about Booking Portal!

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What you need to know about the POS/FnB restaurant management systems

The Food and Beverage industry is one of the fastest-growing businesses in Vietnam. Whether you are running a coffee shop or a restaurant chain, you need a management system to help run and manage your business effectively. Why you need one, and what are the benefits a system can bring for your business? We will discuss these points in this article.

What an F&B management system can do

This software is built to support all restaurant operations and can apply to almost all business models. Here are some of the main features:

  • Manage all your restaurant information: floor plan, area map, table setup, menu, promotions, and so on
  • Connect and synchronize all POS devices
  • You can split – combine orders, view order history, apply for promotions, send orders to kitchen printers or kitchen display units
  • Manage employee & work shift

Besides, for hotels and hotel chains, an F&B system must have the ability to integrate with PMS to allow in-room charge.

What are the benefits?

  • Save operation time and costs: All operational activities, from creating orders, printing bills to sending invoices, can be done quickly right on a POS device or mobile application. Your staff can serve guests smoothly and deliver excellent hospitality.
  • Minimize errors: All the data is updated and synchronized between POS and kitchen printers. And this helps to remove the risk of wrong orders which could bring disappointment to your guests.
  • Better business management: knowing your business performance at the right time with the correct data is very important. What you can count on as an F&B software is its clear dashboard and comprehensive reports. Just a glare to know how the business is going.
  • Improve customer service: serve your guests better with a system that handles all your operation needs, so your staff can spend more time with the guests.

Select one for your restaurant

No matter what size or scale of your restaurant operations may be, the right management system is your most reliable source when it comes to both efficient operations and optimal growth. Here are points you should consider when selecting a system

  1. Data transparency
    You want to make sure that the system gives you real-time data; across businesses. A restaurant manager needs to know what’s going on all the time. It is critical to have real-time data as you may need timely action when problems arise.
  2. Easy to use
    No one wants a complicated system that takes months to master. Check the system interface before you decide to buy one. To make sure the interface is user-friendly, clean, and easy to understand.
  3. Scalability
    Choose a system that can support your growth and geographic expansion in the long-run. You don’t want to keep changing the software as your business expands, as it will cost you a lot.

If you still have questions regarding choosing the right F&B system for your restaurant, don’t hesitate to contact our consultant team for further advice.

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