Bring together all aspects of your hotel on a single cloud-based PMS to increase productivity, decrease costs, and future-proof your business
If you own an iPhone, you are presumably familiar with mobile applications. Your phone might be swimming in them, with apps dedicated to work, banking, news, social media, and so much more. At any given moment, you can pull up the App Store and scan its ranks for best-of-breed applications that promise to make you more productive, connected, and informed or provide you with hours of entertainment. But within this model – a framework that was initially designed to promote convenience and accessibility – we come to face new challenges in the form of application/platform fatigue.
Platform fatigue, sometimes called digital fatigue, refers to the exhaustion experienced by end users whose attention is constantly split across multiple platforms and applications. Even if all of those platforms are designed to enhance user productivity, streamline workflows and increase team-wide collaboration, constantly toggling back and forth between them is, more often than not, a major time and energy constraint. A survey conducted by Harmon in 2020 found that 73% of employees experience platform fatigue, with an average of 10 apps and tools used daily, from Slack to email, Trello, Asana, Salesforce, and many more. Furthermore, according to a study by Workfront, employees spend an average of 60% of their workday on activities other than their core job responsibilities, such as searching for information and managing communications across multiple platforms.
Platform fatigue often leads to frustration, burnout, and decreased productivity across teams, an unfortunate outcome that hotels today cannot afford. As hotels look to slowly – if not begrudgingly – loosen their grip on legacy technology, many properties have adopted new technology in a fragmented, progressive manner. In many cases, they might hold on to a core legacy platform, such as the hotel PMS, while selectively adopting a variety of more modern applications that boast modern functionality.
Here are three of the numerous benefits hotels can expect when selecting an all-in-one platform:
1. Seamless integration
By far, the most significant advantage of utilizing a platform is the ability to incorporate easily and painlessly. An all-in-one platform comes with pre-integrated, built-in modules that allow data flow without any additional integration. As such, they have a unified interface across all modules. Even if there are five or six different modules within the platform itself, the overall look, feel, general navigation, and interfaces are similar across the board. This proves highly important when it comes to end-user training.
As technology becomes more burdensome, disparate systems can become overwhelming and cumbersome for the end user. At the same time, legacy platforms often lack collaborative infrastructure. They may not integrate seamlessly with outside applications, or if they do, it will result in additional upgrade and integration costs. In fact, continued reliance on legacy technology can eat away at a hotel’s bottom line over the long term; it is expensive to maintain and can hinder a company's ability to innovate and remain competitive in the market. And as you might have guessed, those hotels that fall victim to a ballooning network of disconnected systems will inevitably become encumbered by data silos which will, in turn, trickle downstream to impact the guest experience negatively.
2. Built to support change
In addition to advantages when it comes to integration across an enterprise, an all-in-one platform also offers the distinct benefit of being built and designed to support sustained change. In the long-term, this is important to businesses as it equates to less cost investment and effort with each new product release or iteration. Ultimately, the all-in-one hotel, cloud-based PMS promises to decrease costs, maximize revenue, eliminate data silos, and unlock new productivity levels across their teams. Perhaps more importantly, this technology allows hotels to pivot quickly, ensuring they are adept at navigating industry challenges which, as we learned over the pandemic, is key to survival and long-term success.
3. Easy management and reduction of costs
A final key difference between all-in-one platforms and legacy client server applications revolves around the inherent cost and resource allocations needed to manage them. An all-in-one platform offers the means of easy management and mainstreamed costs through consolidation of technologies. In this light,hoteliers can reduce overall costs through direct economies of scale within a platform—especially as the additional cost to implement a module is far less than implementing a brand new, best-of-breed system. Another benefit of an all-in-one platform is that hotels don’t always have the staff or resources required to manage a best-of-breed system.
The all-in-one PMS offers an exceptionally intuitive, agile, and unified solution, empowering hotels to simplify processes via a consolidated system. These systems boast the infrastructure required to truly streamline operations and offer hotels a level of customization and scalability that was previously impossible. With centralized data management, hotels can rest assured that data silos will not impede guests' experience while identifying opportunities to better personalize the guest experience.
A PMS Worth Going All-In One
Hotels exist to provide guests with a curated, memorable experience and a home away from home – but they would be unable to fulfill that promise, at scale, without the PMS. A hotel’s property management system is, in so many ways, the heartbeat of any hotel, acting as the central hub working hard behind the curtain to manage and track all aspects of a hotel’s operations. From automating backend processes to enhancing guest experiences, improving revenue management and inventory management, and offering up advanced reporting and analytics to identify gaps in business, the hotel PMS is undeniably essential to the success of any hotel and, with this in mind, hotels must be vigilant when vetting an all-on-one PMS. The right PMS, in many cases, can completely transform a hotel of any size.
At the same time, a cloud-based platform offers enhanced security when compared to on-premise systems, which is increasingly important today as guests and consumers around the world express heightened privacy and security concerns relating to data capture. Of course, as hotels grapple with post-pandemic staffing shortages, the value of an all-in-one PMS becomes even more omnipresent, as a unified platform will promote collaboration among team members while minimizing (or altogether eliminating) redundant, manual administrative tasks via built-in automation.
In the world of hospitality, more platforms do not equate to more possibilities; rather, one unified platform unlocks endless possibilities, scalability, and functionality. If you ask me, the all-in-one, cloud-based is the single most important ingredient to a truly innovative, future-proof IT infrastructure.
About Bob Palloni
As the chief operating officer of Skyware Hospitality Systems, Bob is responsible for leading the company in corporate strategy, business development, product innovation, and market profitability. An accomplished tech developer and visionary entrepreneur, he has decades of progressive experience in all phases of lifecycle software development. Bob’s strength as a strategic planner focuses on networking and application evolution, assuring continued knowledge of trends and vendor partnerships. Prior to forming Skyware, Bob was a senior developer for Visual One/Agilysys and assisted support engineers in troubleshooting customer issues for resolving database performance and networking problems. Previously, Bob also launched an IT development company, KASS Systems, providing integrated technologies to meet the business requirements for small- to medium-sized businesses.
About Skyware Hospitality Solutions
Skyware Hospitality Solutions is the industry’s most innovative all-in-one hospitality technology platform trusted by leading independent hotels, resorts, RV parks, and multi-property groups. The company has reimagined the fragmented, complex legacy landscape into a visionary universe of modern, integrated solutions with limitless possibilities. With more than 30 years of hospitality technology experience, Skyware’s solutions are carefully curated to fit the unique needs of each property and built to respond flexibly to the demanding requirements of a fast-changing industry.
Built from the ground up to centralize and simplify operations, the end-to-end cloud-based PMS suite includes Online Booking Engine, POS, Sales and Catering, and Activity/Spa Scheduling. The easy-to-use system is up and running quickly and seamlessly, delivering a scalable, cost-effective solution that can work with or replace existing hotel systems and technology investments.
With deep industry knowledge and top-rated North American-based support, Skyware’s patented technology accelerates its customers' ambitions, whether to grow and transform or simply become more efficient, productive, and profitable.
Currently, over 200 unique hotel customers in over 5 countries look to Skyware for tools, technology, and world-class expert support. Founded in 2009, the privately held company is headquartered in Crestview, Florida. For more information, please visit skywaresystems.com.