PMS: Consistency is key for both independent hotels & chains
Interview with Richard Kürzl, Amadeus

Consistency is the key to service – and delivering consistency is a challenge whether you operate a single property or a global chain. By consolidating information about guest preferences, hoteliers can better anticipate needs, easily cross sell properties and provide a great guest experience.

But consolidating guest information – particularly across a chain – is difficult. “It’s almost impossible, even with 50 or so properties. And that’s a real problem in the era of consolidation and brand building across the global hotels industry,” said Richard Kürzl, Managing Director of Amadeus Hospitality Business Group in Germany. “If a guest stays in your property in Hong Kong one week he will expect your hotel in New York to know all about his preferences for his next stay.”

The rise of loyalty programmes, which rely on an up to date picture on guest behaviour, provides another compelling reason for hoteliers to get to grips with guest data. “You need to be able to easily identify your high spending guests so that you can reward them for their loyalty.”

A lack of consolidated guest information will also limit opportunities for cross selling. “With a single view on guest data, it’s easy for reservations staff to offer bookers a range of options that match up with their requirements. We don’t like to see hoteliers miss out on opportunities to sell.”

A single global view on the guest

To enable control over guest information, Amadeus offers a unified global database solution – Amadeus Hotel Property Management System ( PMS) - which gives hoteliers a single view on the guest. Data is shared and consolidated seamlessly across the hotels. “The principle is very simple. We allow hoteliers to centralise information and deploy it to deliver better end to end experiences,” explained Richard Kürzl.

As he is quick to point out, today the guest experience does not begin and end with their stay. Amadeus PMS includes a marketing module which hoteliers can use to precision target guest follow-up communication. “The hotelier can decide the level of targeting. Say you want to talk to guests who go skiing in the first two weeks of January, but who have not booked this year. It’s easy to locate those people and invite them to come back. Perhaps you want to get more detailed, and only talk to guests who spent more than €250 a night or who booked suites. That’s easy too. By integrating business rules with guest data you can target the guests you want, when you want them.”

Make the right recommendations

Up to the minute information on guest preferences and room stock is invaluable for sales agents. With centralised data they have an overview on the available rooms across a chain and can accommodate the special requirements. Amadeus PMS scans through the options and allows the agent to offer matching choices. Pictures can also be attached to room data so sales agents can tell and show the booker what kind of room is on offer.

Make it manageable

As a centralised solution, at a stroke Amadeus PMS solves the problems associated with distributed guest data systems. The time and expense of local installation and maintenance is eliminated. For hoteliers that want to completely outsource the management of their IT, Amadeus offers hosting at its state of the art data centre in Munich. “Only Amadeus offers global hosting at one of the world’s biggest and most secure data centres,” said Richard Kürzl. “That’s the benefit of our heritage as a global player. But we also have a very strong in-country presence which matters a great deal to our customers.”

Currently, Amadeus Hotel PMS is installed and sold in over 70 countries. It fulfils the local tax requirements in each country and is available in 18 languages.

The roadmap for continual improvement

As guests become ever more demanding – and competition intensifies – Amadeus is evolving the PMS solution to keep hotels ahead.

Aimed at high end hotel properties and chains, of four stars and above, the next generation property and guest management solution will extend the scope of data to embrace areas like conference, spa and restaurant bookings. By factoring yield into the equation, the solution will enable hoteliers to create highly personalised packages for each guest. “It really will be a complete solution that covers all the elements that together make a great guest experience.”