The modern-day hospitality industry is growing and changing in several ways. As a hotelier, you must realize that handing over your management duties to third-party companies will not maximize your revenue by any means. It will just eat up your profit and credit less to your pocket. So, it is time you utilize the potential of the hotel inventory management system and integrate it with your Property Management System (PMS).
If you are bad at managing your inventory, then it will affect a lot of your hotel operations. You must learn to integrate the right software solutions into your PMS and make this work from your strategic end. Do not let online travel agencies (OTAs) strategize how you sell your rooms.
This article will focus on a brief overview of how you can maximize your revenue by implementing proper hotel inventory management.
Why is Hotel Inventory Management Strategy Important?
With the right strategy, you can create demand for your hotel business and manage it in the long run. Some of the reasons that prove the importance of you having an integrated hotel inventory management system are:
- Better Distribution Strategies- You will be able to decide the times when you need to use OTAs and when you should shift solely to your website or mobile application for direct bookings.
- Forecasting the Demand Period- By assessing the monthly or yearly reports you collect through proper inventory management and a good scale of bookings, you will be able to determine the rise and fall of demands throughout a season or business year.
- Segmenting the Target Audiences- Different guests have varying preferences with the same hotel. If your hotel has options to cater to those varying needs, try a good inventory management strategy to create customer segmentations to match preferences and plan sales strategies accordingly.
Ways to Streamline Your Hotel Inventory Management System
There are many ways you can implement your hotel management strategy to maximize your potential to generate higher revenue. If you can understand the potential of utilizing these ways, then it will skyrocket your sales, and eventually, you will be earning a hefty amount of profit to keep with you:
1. Decode the Data You Obtain
You ought to market your business on OTAs, not to increase rooms solely by those channels, but to redirect them to book from your website or for future trips.
With this, the first step to mastering your hotel inventory management system is decoding all the possible data you can obtain. Use data to drive decisions on inventory management. Try and collect data metrics such as occupancy rate and revenue per available room and link them to the booking source.
Determine which channels are performing best for your business and take note of the price point that works well for your hotel’s occupancy. Depending on that, you can choose the channels you want to continue your distribution with and the ones you should omit.
You can continue assessing all the other data you receive based on seasonal bookings and trends to maximize hotel revenue and make distribution decisions.
2. Use Cloud-Based PMS
PMS is the heart of your hospitality business. Ensure you are operating with a cloud-based version to be sure that the managers and appointed staff members can access it anywhere and anytime to check the reports and make decisions on inventory and pricing to deal with the present market conditions for your hotel to thrive.
Better accessibility to critical data will help dedicated employees streamline inventory management. Faster decisions can be made to deliver the right services or rooms to potential guests during the demand surge. Hence, this will increase your opportunities to earn greater revenue.
3. Integrate Channel Manager
Now that you have assessed the data to determine which OTAs would be proficient for your business and profit growth, you can make them your agents and link them through your channel manager.
A channel manager is an automated software solution that plays a key role in updating and managing your inventory across different distribution channels. It saves you the hassle of manually logging in to individual platforms and updating the inventory.
With an integrated channel manager, the room and service availability information will be picked from the inventory database, and the updates will automatically be stated across all channels. While setting the prices for your inventory items, you can just submit the amounts on the central dashboard of your channel manager, and it will sync with all distribution channels.
Such a level of automated inventory management will eliminate human errors, unnecessary work efforts, money, overbooking, and low occupancy problems with your business. It will increase the flow of customers as you can spend time researching and expanding your reach on valuable OTAs. The more exposure, the higher your sales will be. Eventually, the revenue will maximize as well.
4. Use Booking Engine to Promote Direct Bookings
A booking engine is the automated management solution for your direct sales channels, such as your website and mobile applications. The inventory management that the channel manager does for the distribution channels is carried out by the booking engine for your direct booking channels.
With OTAs, you will have to pay them a commission for helping you make sales. But with a booking engine online, you can market your rooms and services to promote direct bookings without much management hassle. If you are here to learn how to maximize your revenue, then the best way is to stop being completely dependent on OTAs.
Online booking portals are important for a stable run of your business, but they are not the only way. A good booking engine solution will update the inventory in real-time and manage the bookings seamlessly. It can be synced with the channel manager to cooperatively update the inventory for your website as well as the OTAs.
After implementing the booking engine, you must drive your marketing approach to be visible online. Let people come through your website to learn more about you, rather than heading to OTAs to rely just on the pictures you share on that channel. Have some discounts, offers, and incentives on direct bookings, and you will have a good flow of guests.
Are You Looking for a Reputed Provider for Your Automated Inventory Management Solutions?
The modern hospitality industry needs timely upgrades. And what can be better than having automated hotel inventory software solutions taking care of the critical management aspects? If you agree, AxisRooms has a well-suited booking engine and channel manager, ready to be integrated into your hotel PMS.
The features are endless, and they have to do a lot more than just help you in managing the inventory. With our booking engine, you can create relevant taxes to add to your hotel bills. We allow you to integrate multiple payment options with our booking engine to provide ease of paying for the guests.
Not just that, but you will have access to graphical reports on sales throughout a specific calendar period. Your team will need it to assess what sales strategies need upgrades.
We can help you integrate our channel manager alongside the booking engine and PMS. It will make it easier for you to maintain transparency on room and service availability details across your website and distribution channels.
Check out the website to learn more about what we offer with our booking engine and channel manager for improving your hotel inventory system.