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In this “Discussion Document” we want to identify some of the key functionality you will want to consider when planning for your next or first reservation software.
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“Considerations When Choosing Your First or Next Reservations Software”
In this “Discussion Document” we want to identify some of the key functionality you will want to consider when planning for your next or first reservation software.
My background of over 15 years in hotel operations mixed with 25 years in hotel technologies and 8 years in park/campground technology helps me to compare the two and provide some in-sights into key elements of consideration when choosing your first or next system.
The first thing you want to say to yourself when starting your search for your system is: ”It Should Have…these features”because the last thing you want to do after you have completed your new purchase of a reservation and front desk system is to utter the words… “It Should Have… done this better!”
So let’s take a look at those Top Ten Considerations when making your selection.
“It Should …” Help you manage your entire operation and therefore provide as much integra-tion between your business units or business functions as possible.
The purpose of a reservation and front desk system should be to assist you in finding your customers, enhancing their stay and helping them plan their return… in other words, com-pleting the “life cycle of a hospitality customer”.
In order to best accomplish this task, you should be using a system designed to manage as much of your business as possible, not just your reservations. Therefore it should be a very integrated business solution with as many of the following functionalities required for your
business as it exists and more importantly, for it to grow!
a. Multiple property capability / Central Reservations / Central Reporting – we know that for many of you, your business exists as a single property. When you planned your technology solution did you anticipate that you may one day grow to be more than ONE?
If you have not had the opportunity to read our article called:
4 “Light Bulb” Mo-ments That Re-Shape Your View of Reser-vation Technology
please do so as it takes you through some important concepts as to why you should embrace technology in the Outdoor Hospi-tality market. It is the first in our ongoing series called TIM, Tech-nology In Motion.
By Jerome Staverosky
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b. Multiple business capability / Campground / RV Resort or Park / Inn / Lodge / B&B / Marina / Motel – Growth does not always mean you will stay within the same business model, diversity is not only good for investments, it is good to broaden your business’s asset value. Find a solution which best enables you to manage all of your business needs under one umbrella.
c. Customer Communications – this could stand as a topic all its own and does for on, but for now, know that this functionality is critical in the “Hospitality Industry”. It truly represents the foundation for what you are capable of with your defined service level. Frequently referred to as CRM or Customer Relationship Management this defines you!
d. Channel Management – the ability to manage your property’s numerous online booking chan-nels. This is another important topic because it is time for the “outdoor” market to start thinking like the “indoor hospitality” market when it comes to finding new and creative channels to offer your inven-tory… unless like Walt Disney World, you run a 90+ percent occupancy year round and feel you don’t need multiple booking channels. I’ll give you a something to consider though if that is where you are coming from: WDW achieves this level of occupancy because of the multiple channels they use to sell their inventory.
e. Utility Monitoring – whether you need to charge for electric, water or gas usage or you just want to have the ability to know where your usage is going, next to labor costs, this expense is going to continue to represent one of your largest expenses at your property. Isn’t it time you understand it true impact on your park? Is it time to start setting your rates based upon the type of vehicle occupying your site?
f. Owner Accounting – the ability to manage reservation revenue as well as the asset value of an owner’s site.
g. Point of Sale – the ability to manage your store’s sales and/or your restaurant’s menu manage-ment and related inventory management.
“It Should …” Give you information easily and in the format you need to help you make better management decisions.
a. Custom Reporting – Information the way you need it for your business to make effective decisions. There are two critical pieces to the successful formula of effective reporting. i. Storing data or information at a detailed enough level is critical to permit you to properly role up to a summary level. (It is much easier to sum up finely detailed data than
it is to break apart summary level data.)ii. Dynamic Reporting is the ability to customize your report for your needs at the time the report is required; with the ability to save the custom report in a global or personal library.
b. Digital Dashboard – This type of tool helps you to monitor your daily barometers of Budgeting, Forecasting, and Actuals. A digital dashboard, much like a dashboard in your
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car helps you to track and monitor various operational indicators at they relate to your budget, forecast and actuals. Did you know that there is a difference between a Planned Forecast and an Actual Fore-cast? A Planned Forecast is what you projected at the beginning of the month and a “True Forecast” is the combination of your Actuals to date mixed with your forecast to end of month. How closely you are able to make them match at month end is a reflection of your true forecasting skills.
c. Executive Decision Making - is possible with a “well designed” Executive Information System. Often referred to as EIS, this type of tool incorporates your three critical areas of operations:i. Marketing ii. Customer Satisfaction iii. Financialand helps you to make quicker decisions by integrating the information from these three areas. Al-though it can be a bit pricey to implement, it is the one true way to provide you with a strategic insight into your business operations.
“It Should …” Help your staff provide better service.
It is easy to take the path of least resistance or the path of least challenge. But as we mentioned in the beginning of this document, it is your challenge to start learning how to better use technology to help improve your service levels. This is your challenge… take it on!! Here are some ways to do just that…
a. Reduce Time To Perform Tasks – this is usually the first area of focus for using technology and if your system is not saving your staff time by reducing their amount of labor hours for many of their routine functions, then it should not be considered. Always strive to improve from where you are whether that is a manual system or an existing automated system.
b. Provide Timely Response to Guest – after the most common benefit of reducing the time it takes for your staff to complete tasks, which in theory frees them up to provide more quality one-on-one time with your guests; the next is reducing the amount of time needed to provide information or a service to your guest. The more time we can interact with our guest’s on a “per-sonal nature” instead of a “business nature”… the better!
c. Provide Additional Guest Services – this is the “holy grail” where you now find ways to provide addition-al services, even billable services through the use of the technology you use. This can be a lot of fun as your staff is asked to go outside the box … to travel where no clerk has gone before... to … well you get the idea. Your staff are creative and they have the experience of working with your customers… let them brainstorm how you can improve your guest services to the next level through the use of your new technology. For example… recently an owner (it’s not always the staff) decided he would use the “systems” text messaging capability to communicate with the guests due to check out the next day (Monday) by offering a two for one special to invite them to stay an additional two days.
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“It Should …” Help you Communi-cate Easily with your Guests.
When we speak of communicating with your guests we are referring to the communications required for the “Life Cycle of a Hospitality Custom-er”. It is important to understand that
there is a matching “Communication Cycle” which should follow the pre-arrival, stay, and post de-parture periods of the guest’s “Life Cycle” at your property. You want to also check to see if you can communicate by the following three methods… print, email, and text.
a. Guest Communication Cycle / Pre-Arrival – it is during this initial stage of communication where you establish your “eye to eye” contact with your customer. Remember they are excited to be coming to visit… make sure they are excited by the message you send to them. 1) Incorporate a map or a link on how to easily get to the park. 2) Offer information on attractions or local activities. 3) If possible prepare a list of events which match the time period the guest is arriving. Besides all of these possibilities, do like the high end resorts do and send a communication just a few days pri-or to remind them how excited you, the park are, to have them visit.b. Guest Communications Cycle / Stay – it is during “the stay” where most parks fail miserably to maintain the communication level. Updating your guest via email messages with the daily ac-tivities or changes that may occur to those ac-tivities is a valuable resource. One park owner decided it would be a good idea to use his text messaging system to communicate to his Mon-day morning departures the opportunity to stay until Wed with a 2 for 1 price special. c. Guest Communications Cycle / Departure – This is the time where most parks prepare a thank you and a subsequent survey to send to better understand how the guest enjoyed their stay. Def-initely a good idea. In addition, on the night be-fore departure, it would be helpful to provide your guests with the latest weather reports for the next day or two as this helps them to prepare for their departure procedures and their travel conditions.
Besides the Communication Cycle for your guest, there are two more areas where communications becomes extremely important.
• Guest Preferences - the anticipation of what is needed or wanted by the guest.• Guest Communication Tracking – record-ing of messages to or from the guest.
Guest Preferences is an area where you want to really look closely at the capabilities of your reser-vation system to store Guest History information, easily allow you to modify the information, and easily retrieve and populate the reservation with the pertinent information being stored. It is also important to make sure your software can accom-modate a free form field which stores information forever about the guest. This is a good area to store medical information such as allergies to bees or other important and valuable information. Also look for a system which permits you to sepa-rate the guest detail information from the reser-vation stay information. For example: “My guest profile might say that I like shaded areas but for this particular reservation, I am looking for a sun-ny location because I’m traveling with children.”
Guest Communication Tracking is also a very valuable tool to have with your reservation and front desk system. The ability to store messages and to report on when they were delivered and if they were delivered is an important service to your guests. The ability to store electronic documents for a guest record such as insurance records or a pet’s health records is also a nice feature.
The more you can cater to the guest’s personal preferences, the more at home they will feel be-cause they recognize that you care enough to know what they need or want. I will warn you not to go overboard as there is a point where too much knowledge is invasive… so I would suggest not to ask for too personal of information like oh, let say… a Swiss bank account number!
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“It Should …” Help you Maximize your Revenue and Occupancy.
Oh this is the battle that never ends for both the Outdoor and Indoor Hospitality market. You can just hear the conversations in the marketing department and the accounting department, which in the case of Maand Pa owner is… Ma and Pa! Ma: Well Pa if we want to get more people in here this year we better not raise the rates. Pa: But Ma, if we raise the rates we can make more money. Ma: You know what happened last year when we raised our rates, not as many people visited. Pa: But if my math is correct we could
have made just as much money with less hassle based upon who came to visit. Ma: So what do we do Pa? Get more money and less people or more people with less money?
Whether it is Ma and Pa or the sales department and the accounting department, this argument has been going around and around in hotels and motels for centuries. Then about 20 years ago a strange thing occurred… the discovery of yield management tools and the abil-ity to set rates dynamically beyond just the changes in seasons. You see, although rates and occupancy are dynamic, we never looked at them in a dynamic way because we had to publish static rates.
The advent of the computer at the front desk changed that for hotels and it is now time for the Outdoor Hospi-tality market to catch up… a few steps at a time. See if the software you are considering offers one of several yield management tools.
1. Rate Chart Maximization – this is the ability for the software to match reservation requests to ex-act matches on the chart, thereby not leaving any open sites for a short period of time which you then may be unable to sell.
2. Dynamic Pricing – this is the ability to have the system monitor your rates being quoted based upon several variable, much like the airline industry does.a. Dynamic Pricing based upon Occupancy levels so that if you occupancy is going up then so too should your rates. Make sure this is configured by either specific site types or specific rate plans.b. Dynamic Pricing based upon the lead time to the reservation date or between a specified date range.
It is with these types of tools that you can start realizing that Ma and Pa just didn’t understand that you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to balancing out the dreaded raise rates or raise occupancy question. The advent of yield tools in hotels also produced the advent of a new formula for determining better tracking of these two see-saw variables. It is called REVPAR or Revenue Per Available Room which is calculated by multiplying your occupancy times your average rate. Another useful formula which has been developed is REVPOR or Revenue Per Occupied Room. It would be good to see if the software uses these indicators.
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“It Should …” Help you control your highest costs… Labor Costs
When it comes to operational costs, your labor cost is second to none. So this is why it becomes important to determine how productive your staff will become with your new soft-ware. There are two measuring points to consider when measuring Staff Productivity and they are Staff Efficiency and Staff Performance.
a. Staff Efficiency – this is the measurement of how effective the software makes your em-ployees. Does it help them to save time doing manual processes or free them from needless reporting to enable them to visit and interact with your guests? Does it safe them time and safe them frustration? These are important questions to ask current customers of the software you are researching.b. Staff Performance – does your new software help you to monitor performance when trying to determine conversion ratios for a clerk making a reservation with a guest. Can you run reports to deter-mine the amount of revenue your staff is generating and who is upselling and who is underperforming? Make sure you ask for these types of measurement reports in your new system.
“It Should …” Help you control your hidden costs… your Utilities!
Like a taboo word, the discussion of your utility costs almost seem forbidden at times be-cause it reflects on your ability to manage and predict what is going to happen in the area of energy and if that isn’t the most challenging task you face, I don’t know what is?!
Whether you are trying to determine the amount of loss or theft which is occurring, the cor-rect billing you should be charging, the amount of usage occurring by either a site type or
better yet, by rig type, you have an uphill battle when it comes to managing your amount of charge you should levy when it comes to your energy management strategies. Only one thing is for certain, energy costs are not going to go down.
So the best approach when facing so many unknowns is a pro-active approach. • What if you could monitor usage at each site and track it by site and even by rig type? • Could you be more effective in setting appropriate usage rates within your rate plans?• Could you deter utility “re-allocation” to use a political correct term?• Could you stop the late night raider who comes in and leaves before the sun rises?
These are all questions you need to be asking yourself as you research your software. Make sure it has the ability to interface to the new electronic metering pedestals which can provide instant data back to your property’s software.
Like the airlines, the more you start focusing on all the little factors which impact your energy costs, the more you will be able to manage the upward spiraling costs associated with your energy budget, whether it is for electric, water, or gas.
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“It Should …” Help you connect with multiple channels for online reservations.
Although this is consideration #8, don’t consider this list to be one you must follow in a certain order with the need to understand and take advantage of
multiple booking channels as being not that im-portant because of its position at number 8. This could not be further from the truth! Just like Con-sideration #5, “Maximizing your Revenue”, the understanding and use of multiple channels for online bookings is very important to many parks. Revenue cures many woes!
When we discuss the idea of multiple booking channels for online reservations let’s start with your most obvious “first” channel… your park’s website. On your site you can start to learn the process of managing inventory and determining rate strategies for guests using your online res-ervation tool. Two ideas quickly summaries the benefits from online reservations:• Labor Cost Savings• 24/7 Customer Service
In our article called “4 Light Bulb Moments” we discuss a very important point technol-ogy today. It says:It’s no longer a matter of keep-ing up with the Jones’s when it comes to your park’s technolo-gy, now it’s a matter of keeping
up with your valued customers who are relying on their “smart phone” technology more and more every day.
We mention this because the “smart phone” tech-nology only increases the frequency by which a guest is going to use the internet to find your prop-
erty, make a decision about their travel plans, and book a reservation at your park or campground, but you must have the technology in place to al-low them to do so. If you are not aware of the growing trend of “evening” reservation bookings, it continues to be the fastest growing time period to receive an online reservation. So if you are a business that wants to increase revenue and you are a business that wants to reduce labor cost, then you must focus on online reservations!
Besides your website, there are other areas to consider when setting up online reservation links. Have you considered your local chamber of com-merce’s website? How about your state camp-ground owner’s association website? Are you getting the picture? There is no limit, the limit is only in your ability to identify and manage these different links. This is where a good system must give you the ability to manage multiple channels with a good inventory management tool. Think about it, more channels, more revenue opportuni-ties.
Ok! Every good discussion document needs a little secret to share, something that makes the document truly worthwhile. So I will share the fol-lowing:
There are a number of specific booking channels that can provide you with new revenue streams … a huge upside for new business… and with no direct cost to deploy. They are intranet sites.
Yes… this is probably the best piece of informa-tion to improve your revenue opportunities you will get from this document. To learn more about these specific booking channels your park is missing out on, please give me a call as this will take more discussion than we can allocate in this document. Besides… good secrets shouldn’t be broadcasted or they wouldn’t be secrets!!
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“It Should …” Help you connect your system to other technologies.
The key to implementing technology is to have it be as seamless as possible both for your guest and for your staff. Candidly this is getting more and more challenging for vendors every year. Why?
Well in the past the integration of technology meant connecting to another vendor’s ap-plication like a Point of Sale, a Gate Control System or an Energy Management System. Now it also involves the idea of integrating beyond other vendors to a guest’s technology like the “smart phone” applications and the multitude of computer devices now available like “tablets”. So for your vendor this challenge is increasing and one of the main reason’s many of them are moving to a Cloud environ-ment.
The Cloud offers an unprecedented amount of connectivity between you, your guest, and your ven-dors. What I’m referring to are Cloud based applications. So when you are considering different soft-ware applications, make sure you understand how they communicate with the technologies your guest has and the other technologies your park has.
Let’s highlight some of the obvious connections are:• Online Reservations and your PMS• Utility Monitoring to your PMS• Energy POS to your PMS• Gate Access System to your PMS• Owner Accounting to your PMS• Accounting System to your PMS
Let’s highlight some of the less obvious connections are:• Smart Phone Apps to your PMS• PM Guest History to your Contact Management System• Marina Reservations to your PMS• Function Room Reservations to your PMS• Attraction or Voucher System to your PMS
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“It Should …” Help you IM-PROVE your park’s value… its Asset Value.
I guess by this point I should say Congratulations! You made it to #10. Thanks for your persistence and I hope you
find this section to be equally informative.
Now it’s time to discuss arguably one of the more complex and certainly unknown “Considerations” of the Top Ten; but without doubt one of the most valuable!
“Asset Value you say… what do you mean by that?” I don’t blame you for that thought process at all because this is an area that even our sister industry of Indoor Hospitality hasn’t completely embraced. This is a concept that is widely rec-ognized in the larger hotel and airline companies as well as other information based industries. Ask Google or Yahoo! The more content or data they manage the more value they possess or the better their business’s asset value.
In the Outdoor Hospitality segment we have al-ways considered our assets to be the land we are on, the buildings and equipment we use and our cash flow to represent our asset value. What you haven’t considered an asset… is the reserva-tion database you maintain and cultivate for your property.
A former colleague, the CIO (Chief Information Officer) of Marriott Corporation, looked me right in the eye when I challenged him with the idea of taking control of his guest history and reservation database with the comment: “I won’t let you do that. I’ll squash you!” (If you want to learn more about that story, stop by our booth sometime and we can talk.) He was dead serious and fortunate-ly as a friend, helped me to understand why he would take such drastic actions against my busi-ness idea. His comment: “Don’t get in the way of my guest history data… it is my most important asset.”
I mention this so you realize that you have the po-tential to be a miniature version of Marriott, but you just don’t realize it… yet. You too can cap-ture guest history data (name, contact info, res-ervation stay data, etc) and probably do, if you currently have a system, but you are not taking advantage of it like you should. Make sure your new system has the ability to capture important “Lifestyle” data about your guest. They are living with you!
The value of Guest History and Lifestyle data is like a rough diamond, valuable but twice its worth if you take the time to shape and cut it into the invaluable information it represents. Once shaped… it will create one of your park’s most valuable assets. The reason for its value is be-cause with each passing year, as you add more guest’s and more detailed information, it’s value keeps increasing.
For an example, in the years prior to hotel guest history systems we would write a sales contract on a hotel for the value of the land, the buildings, and the equipment but NOT the information. We had not good way to put a financial value on data because it was not well stored and managed. You could take a building and measure its value but information… it had no relevance at the time. Then… along came the central reservation sys-tems of Holiday Inn, Marriott, Sheraton and the like and all that changed.
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Because we were able to:
•Capture and store the information centrally.•Massage and analyze this centralized data.•Convert volumes of data into meaningful pieces of marketing and financial information.•Continually add each year’s data to the next to create growing value.•Ensure that the data would never be lost.
These were all reasons why these major hotel chains grew in size and strength. They under-stood the value and importance of keeping their data centralized, protected, and growing. Now you probably understand a little better why the CIO of Marriott made his comments to me.
Now for the great news! You too have the ability to turn your data into an valuable asset! Like the large hotel companies you can be storing your in-formation centrally on the cloud, in a central data-base, where you can pass that valuable asset on to the next owner.
You just have to start now! So I cannot stress enough that when you are looking for your first or next reservation system… make sure it is central-ized to help your property build its Asset Value.
I will share one last story to help you understand the value of starting now!
Around the late 1980’s there was a small start-up company who decided to start tracking three key pieces of data from hotels through a simple pro-cess of having the hotel fax information to their of-fice where they hand keyed in these three pieces of data into their central database.
During the 1990’s, technology helped them to continually modify and improve their process of gathering the information so it was easier for the hotel and easier for their company. What were they doing with this collection of data? Why they were selling it back to the hotels to help them de-termine their competitive market sets and com-petitive value. You see, although they were only gathering three key pieces of data from each ho-
tel; the number of rooms, the number of rooms sold, and the amount of room revenue by market segment; they were collecting it every week… ev-ery month… every year!
What was clever was how they used these three key pieces of information to determine an incred-ible amount of marketing data. The three key pieces were combined with other known data ele-ments about the hotel which created a massive database of valuable information. The known ele-ments about the hotel were: the state, the zip, the brand, the owner, the management company, the AAA rating, the hotel classification, etc. By com-bining this known information with the three key pieces, they produced a plethora of reports.
Do you know who this company is? Well… they are now the largest resource of competitive mar-keting data, industry trend data, and hotel asset value data in the country. This company started by one person with the vision to keep collecting his information and over time create a valuable asset, is known as Smith Travel Research or STR/Global.
I hope you have found this “Info Doc” enlighten-ing. Now go out there with the confidence to know what you are looking for and find it. If you have questions, we always welcome your call and will be glad to show you some of this technology that exists today.
