Future Trends: The Evolving Landscape of Hotel Reservation Systems and Point of Sale Systems

With increasing travel and vacation costs and inflation at an all-time high, an escape from reality comes at a high premium. As prices rise, so do guest expectations. The evolving hotel landscape requires a delicate dance from hoteliers and guests. On a scale where experience and cost should balance, ensuring an equilibrium for your property is more important than ever.

In this blog, we’ll explore some of the hottest trends in hospitality and what we think is coming next. We’ll cover contactless payment systems, automation, hotel AI in hospitality, and more! We’ll also dig into some of the best digital tools to help your property stay ahead of the curve, like a hotel reservation system and POS system.

This article will focus on RoomRaccoon’s hotel management software and Mr. Winston’s POS system.

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1) Guest Expectations Grow

What exactly is meant by guest expectations? It is the idea the guest has of staying at your hotel before they arrive. It is usually informed by your property or hotel’s marketing or even your guest reviews online. It is the romanticization of sitting by the pool, relaxing with a cocktail in hand, without a care in the world.

Guests expect an increasingly personalized experience in this era. This extends to the check-in staff being aware of where the guests come from and a personal recommendation from the waitstaff regarding the food. Hospitality establishments can facilitate success by integrating a POS (Point of Sale) and PMS (Property Management System) and working on guest profiles.

A hotel and reservation system with a POS affords guests the best possible experience. An HRS offers a personalized guest journey, from booking online with your hotel’s booking engine to checking out online! We highly recommend investing in one if you don’t have your own booking engine on your website. A fantastic website with a good booking engine results in more revenue.

Are you looking to improve your hotel website design? With your website being your hotel equivalent – it has to invite customers in and make some sales. RoomRaccoon offers a simple and visual website builder for hoteliers. With a web-based hotel reservation system, you can show guests what to expect – and deliver on it!

2) Contactless Payments Take Centre Stage

With the cost of travel rising, guests’ expectations are growing with it. While it’s not necessarily bad for business, hoteliers must be prepared. Mr. Winston is a point-of-sale system that helps hoteliers manage their guest experience. If there’s one thing that puts guests off, it is a poor payment experience. Consumers in any industry want to spend their money quickly, easily, and painlessly.

Mr. Winston’s POS is a reliable and convenient solution for hoteliers. The ease of use of the POS ensures that the guest experience is enhanced rather than undermined by payments. Mr. Winston boasts a simple and incredibly user-friendly system. And the best part about it? This POS solution offers seamless integrations with other software packages, like RoomRaccoon.

The best thing about integrated software is its holistic reporting or overview. Hotel reporting helps you to boost your property’s return on investment. And since RoomRaccoon is integrated with Mr. Winston, you’ll be able to see a comprehensive dashboard report on payments! The dashboards give you insights into the best tactics for your hotel strategy.

3) Manage Mundane Tasks with Automation

Hoteliers are always on the move, busy from dusk to dawn. If you could save precious hours with automation, why wouldn’t you? AI, or even Hotel AI, should be embraced, not feared! A hotel booking reservation system extends way past bookings. And automation helps you to do this. We’ll focus on two essential tasks that RoomRaccoon’s HMS automates to save you time.

Automated Upselling

Diversifying your revenue stream is one of the best ways to ensure that you earn more revenue. This can be achieved by upselling add-ons for your hotel. From airport shuttles to local wine, your hotel can boost its profits with ancillary revenue. With RoomRaccoon, you can activate automated upselling when you customize add-ons. Once set up, you can advertise the add-ons on your booking engine and even in pre-check-in emails.

Revenue Management & Dynamic Pricing

Revenue management is paramount to your hotel’s profitability. As a hotelier, you may change your room rates based on demand or seasonality. An imperative task that can be manually taxing and cost precious time. RoomRaccoon offers a straightforward solution – automated revenue management!

Simply add your rates, yield rules and watch dynamic pricing take shape. Worried you’re not in control? All automated revenue management is set up manually and can be overridden or edited at any point through the property management system.

4) Online Tools for Efficiency

There is a multitude of online tools that can help improve your workflow and efficiency as a property. Our personal favorite is a property management system. Whereby you can manage your entire property’s affairs in one consolidated place.

A good PMS will offer a variety of features that enhance your hotel’s efficiency. We’re going to name a few of our non-negotiable features for streamlining hotelier’s day-to-day work. If you’d like, you can even use this as a mini checklist when choosing your PMS.

The best online tools for hoteliers:

• Online check-in and online check-out
• Integrated channel manager
• POS system with inventory management
• Digital ID scanners
• Personalized guest communication
• Online payment processing
• Hotel restaurant POS systems
• Automated housekeeping
• Optional: hotel website builder

A PMS allows you to integrate mobile apps, chat-bots, and POS systems – just like Mr. Winston! These capabilities ensure that your hotel will have all the necessary software connections. Whether you need to replace existing software stacks with a PMS or existing integrations, you can it all connect to your PMS.

5) Virtual Property Tours

Virtual property tours are a trend to watch, relatively new to the game, and widely underrated in hospitality. With costs rising for travelers, the more they know – the better! Guests want to know the ins and outs (quite literally) of staying at your hotel. Since travelers can virtually explore your property, their expectations will align with your offerings.

This helps manage guest expectations and set your hotel apart in the best way possible! Think of your virtual tour as a marketing investment. Every single website visitor would be dazzled by this modern and interactive website asset.

If your hotel has the opportunity to invest in a virtual property tour, we highly recommend trying it out. Not only does it have the benefits mentioned above, but it could also be the pivotal asset that helps you beat out your competitors.

Invest In Your Hotel’s Future

With an ever-changing digital landscape, it’s crucial to invest in technology. This can improve your hotel’s financial performance, as well as its operations. A PMS and POS can help you manage your business goals with expertise and ease. If you’re interested, please can learn more about using RoomRaccoon with Mr. Winston.

As a hotelier, running your business efficiently and prioritizing guest experience is pertinent to success – a PMS helps makes this happen with minimal effort. Book a demo today to learn more about how a property management system can help you!

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