In the past decade, most businesses adopted digital tools and software solutions to manage operational aspects. Businesses in the hospitality industry have been top key players using technology to increase hotel revenue and manage their critical operations.
Is it really important? Can a hotel business sustain itself without technology? In this digital era, your hotel business cannot possibly sustain the competition without stepping into the newest technologies.
It is because hotel management technologies will help you speed up operational efficiency. It will help attract more bookings and generate more revenue in hotel business.
If you have just started a small hotel business, then this article is going to help you understand the importance of technology to increase hotel revenue. Following that, you will also get insight into some of the trending technologies that you should implement in your hotel business.
Smart Technologies That Can Increase Your Hotel Revenue
With every technology upgrade listed below, you will gain knowledge on why and how it is important for the growth of money in your hotel business:
1. Mobile Application for Your Hotel
Your website is one of the best direct booking channels for your business. But having a mobile application will make your business more accessible to potential customers. Hire a developer to do the job for you and specify instructions on adding all necessary features and information such as maps, directions, recommendations, room types, amenities, and others.
This basic technology upgrade for your hotel business will allow you to take a step further in marketing your rooms and services. You can set up offers and discounts for guests who book with you through the hotel application.
Once you get your potential guests to download your app, there is a high chance that they will have your brand name in mind whenever they have trip plans.
2.Integrate Channel Manager Software
You cannot solely depend on direct bookings to get high occupancy and revenue for your hotel business. You must expand your hotel’s visibility to a larger audience. And it is possible when you enroll with different distribution channels that are performing well and have a good user base.
Distribution channels, such as online travel agencies (OTAs) or retail travel agents, list your hotel in their database along with your competitors.
Listing your hotel on distribution channels comes with a commission cost. You will have to bear it to get more bookings from their channels. But, with rising and falling demand in the industry due to seasonal or other effects, there might be a need for you to change your prices and room availability across all of these channels.
Logging into the admin accounts of all these channels individually will cost you a lot of time. Hence, the technology upgrade with a channel manager will help save the day. Every time you feel like you have to update some information on pricing or inventory of your hotel across distribution channels, you just have to update it once on the channel manager dashboard.
The information will automatically update all integrated channels, saving you time and maintaining information consistency. Moreover, the inventory also gets updated automatically for any new booking or cancellation with the help of the channel manager. As a result, you can then upsell profitable services and add-ons to potential customers and get more bookings and higher revenue.
3. Implement Hotel Revenue Management Software
Technology is now enabling you to assess the performance metrics of your hotel business and predict the behavior of your customers. Moreover, hotel revenue management software will also help you assess the rise and fall of demand. Thus, you can regulate the pricing of your rooms and associated services to meet the customer’s behavior and demand prediction.
You can take the occupancy rate, seasonality, and booking window into consideration while assessing the metrics from your software. With the help of it, you will have a brief idea of when you have to sell your rooms at a higher price and when you have to sell them with offers and discounts.
Most revenue management software solutions are embedded with automatic optimizers to modify the rents based on collected statistics. It also consists of a pricing engine that helps you decide on what should be the price for your rooms and services based on demand, competition, and particular day of the week.
The most important aspects of your hotel business to attract clients and increase occupancy will be set on auto-pilot with this software. So, if you haven’t used this technology to increase hotel revenue yet, it is time to make some considerations.
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbots
Chatbot is now an important upgrade for any hotel business. The only reason is that the guests want immediate answers to some frequently asked questions. And whenever you connect them with one of your consultants, it demands your guests to invest time, which they possibly don’t want to.
Therefore, an AI chatbot can be programmed to answer common questions on the website or mobile application. If your guest needs more help than what the chatbot can handle, you can set up a human chat support team to connect with the customers and help them.
Using chatbots can eventually minimize the bounce rate on your website and keep potential guests engaged. The implementation of this technology might just help you increase your direct bookings. Thus, your profit percentage will also increase.
Suppose you have spent a good amount of money on marketing to attract high traffic to your website and increase downloads for your mobile application. In that case, having a chatbot can actually help you increase conversions.
5. Rate Shopper Tool
You don’t have to dig through different OTAs individually to determine the prices that your competitors are charging. With this tool, you can track the real-time rates of your competitors. It will help you adjust your rates accordingly and monitor your trends against your competitor’s trends.
It is very crucial data that is constantly helping hospitality businesses thrive with profits. You can integrate this tool with other associated management solutions. As a result, you can work unified with centralized management of your hotel operations.
Summing Up
As you have reached the end of this article, you must have now understood the value of technology to increase hotel revenue. Keeping up with the manual processes will trigger human errors, poor guest experience, and financial losses. To avoid such repercussions, it is better to slowly shift towards digitization.
Integrate necessary software to your property management system (PMS) and automate the most critical operations of your hotel business. Meanwhile, you can utilize your time and energy to implement creative marketing ideas to reach out to more customers.
Now, if you are wondering how to implement these technologies in your hotel business, then AxisRooms is the one-stop hub for you. It offers you most of these technologies and more to streamline your management practices.
Check the website and take a deeper look into what these software solutions have to offer.