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A Property Management System (PMS) is a software application that is designed and can be implemented to meet the varied requirements of any size hotel or hotel group. A PMS should provide all of the tools that hotel staff need to do their day-to-day jobs – such as managing room inventory, handling reservations, checking guests in, assigning rooms, accommodating in-house guest needs, checking guest out, handling all billing and accounting requirements, reporting and marketing. The application should be configurable to each property’s specific requirement and can be configured to operate either as a single-property or in a multi-property configuration, whereby all properties within a group share a single database.

Multi-Property functionality can help hotel chains dramatically reduce hardware and software investments, and labour expenses, by running multiple properties off of a single database / hardware platform. Centralised hardware and software can also make system support and upgrades easier as all hardware and software is contained to one central location. Hotels may also reduce labour costs by sharing common functions between properties such as reservations, accounting, sales and PBX.

Key Features

In a well developed PMS, reservation features are integrated with other system functionality, offering a complete set of features for the making and updating of individual, group, and business block reservations, including integrated deposit handling, cancellations, confirmations, wait-listing, room blocking, and sharing.

An extensive set of integrated features for the setting, automatic controlling and yielding of rates should be an important factor when selecting a PMS for your hotel as you will need this for rate quotation, rate yielding and for revenue forecasting and analysis.

Another important function you should focus on is ‘Profile’ handling – complete demographic records for guests, business accounts, contacts, groups, agents, and sources should be available. Profiles should including addresses, phone numbers, membership enrolments, stay and revenue details, guest preferences, and any additional data that make reservations handling and other activities faster and more accurate.

Arrivals and in-house guests should be served with easy to use ‘Front Desk’ features such as Dash Boards. These should be able to handle individual guests, groups, and walk-ins, and include features for room blocking, managing guest messages and wake-up calls, guest locaters and creating and following up on inter-department advisories, or traces. ‘Rooms Management’ should be available to handle all facets of room supervision including availability, housekeeping, maintenance, and facility management.

Posting guest charges, making posting adjustments, managing advance deposits, settlements, folio printing and checkout are just a few of the many activities that should be handled by the cashiering module. Cashiering should accommodate multiple payment methods per folio and credit card settlements including integration with Chip and Pin devices. In multi-property environments, it should be possible to cross – post guest charges from any property to any other property in the hotel complex.

An ‘Accounts Receivable’ feature should be fully integrated with the PMS and include direct billing, invoicing, account aging, bill payments, reminders, statement generation, and account research.

Revenue transfers, market statistics transfers, daily statistics transfers, and city ledger transfers can be easily made from PMS to a back office system via an interface if you choose a comprehensive solution.

PMS should offer you integrated features for the calculating, processing, and following up on travel agent and other types of commission payments.

A more sophisticated PMS will support multi-currency and multi-language features to meet the requirements of global operations. Rates and revenues should be dynamically converted from the local currency to any other currency. The appropriate language for guest correspondence should be automatically determined by the guest’s profile language; and a country-specific address formats should be supported. The user interface should also change to the language of the user based on their sign on password.

A good PMS solution will always offer standard reporting. Reports should also be able to be customised for each hotel and new reports created as needed using built-in report writers or advanced but easy to use reporting tools.

An important factor when evaluating a solution which will work with your currently deployed systems is whether the PMS solution provider includes interfaces to third-party hospitality systems including yield management, telephone and wake up call systems, TV and video entertainment, door locking, EPOS, internet, activities scheduling and mini-bar.

For the smaller properties or independent hoteliers offering limited services, scaled down Xpress versions of the full PMS should be available. Based on the core PMS product, properties should be able to choose the relevant features they want from a menu of product options.

Installation

If you’re purchasing a PMS for your hotel, you should ensure that there will be no unnecessary disruption or downtime to running your business. A good installation should not have an impact on your operation or your guests. However, detailed planning and working closely with your chosen supplier and following their guidelines and listening to their advice is essential.

A lot of people have been asking this question. Every month 1.2 million people search Google with the term, what is CMS.

In its simplest terms a CMS is a lot like a word processor in that you can edit documents in a WYSIWYG format. WYSIWYG stands for ‘what you see is what you get’, this type of document creation allows you to see exactly what the document will look like as you are typing and adding different elements.

Content management systems are also pretty complex. A good content management system acts more like a database than a word processor. The database is where you can link content together and keep a record of changes made to any web page or web page element.

Electronic content management systems have been around since computers were invented. But content management has been a problem since the beginning of the printing press, and some historians say that the problem began with the first written word.

The scope of this article is beyond the history of the content management systems, instead I’m going to focus on the most used content management systems today and give a brief over view of each system. The most popular content management systems are:

Drupal Joomla WordPress

These are the top three systems in use today as they are all popular among people that don’t know how to create a website or haven’t learned any HTML.

Drupal

Drupal was launched in 2000 in a dorm room at the University of Antwerp by two students who wanted to be able to share information with other each other and other classmates. It was named “Drop” for the first year until the creator, Dries Buytaert, graduated and moved out of the dorm room.

The name Drupal, pronounced “droo-puhl,” comes from the English enunciation of the Dutch word “druppel,” which means “drop.” Drupal is free. It is open source software that is constantly being updated by IT professionals from all over the world. With Drupal you don’t have to know any HTML to create websites as everything is accomplished inside the interface that looks like a word processor. So you can create websites easily and manage all of the web pages from one location.

Joomla

Joomla is also free open source software that allows you to create websites and web pages easily once you get over the learning curve. You’ll have to install and learn all of the modules to begin creating web pages. The Joomla website has extensive documentation on how to use the software and a broad FAQ page to help new people learn the tips and tricks and how to get around the different features of the software.

WordPress

WordPress was released in 2003 and has become the benchmark for automated SEO optimization. WordPress plug-ins automates most of the tasks associated with making a website search engine friendly. This software also has to be installed unless you choose to let WordPress host your website on a subdomain such as “yourwebsite.wordpress.com”.

Having a website hosted by WordPress has its draw backs as you don’t have control over your website and WordPress can ban you if you violate the rules.

WordPress is the easiest to learn of the three content management systems. And in my opinion the best one to start with if you don’t have any experience in creating websites. It is powerful bu nimble and if used correctly any WordPress blog can be made to get high rankings on Google.

Now click on this What is CMS link to see introductory videos for the three content management systems listed in this article.

So why is a Content Management System so important? There are a number of systems to manage websites with and most web designers will offer the best CMS that suits your needs. Some offer unique tools to use on your site, others are designed to enable the website owner to easily make changes to the content of their site as and when they wish. This is aimed at those who may not have strong I.T skills or not feel confident making any changes. They are really simple to use and they can help you make your site professional, unique and ultimately a success. It’s important to choose a good reliable CMS as they important functions such as Security of website and also the Managing Servers, so you need a quick reliable server which will enable you site to run with no problems. The most popular CMS are probably the 3 shown below:

Drupal - this is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world. You can use Drupal to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications. Thousands of add-on modules and designs let you build any site you can imagine. Drupal is free, flexible, robust and constantly being improved by hundreds of thousands of passionate people from all over the world.
Joomla - Joomla is the world’s most popular open source CMS (content management system). With 2.7 per cent of the Web running on Joomla, the software is used by individuals, small & medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create & build a variety of websites & web-enabled applications.
WordPress - WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress and its popularity makes it the most popular CMS on the internet. Those who are not sure what CMS to use should use this statistic as WordPress is very easy to use as one feature is you can edit without having to use HTML code.

These are the main systems used but there are many others out there. But best to speak to your web designer to see which one they would recommend for your site and also which one they believe would be best for you. If you’re not very confident with I.T but still want to be able to have an active part in your websites design, layout and future changes then choosing a CMS that you feel comfortable with it important. But there are also so many support features that come with these CMS that you’re never far away from someone who can help.