For years now, hotels have been operating with dwindling staff numbers and increasing administration. When more pressure falls on fewer people, this can further contribute to high staff turnover. But technology has the potential to work harder for your hotel, easing the pressure on your colleagues, and improving the hotel experience for both staff and guests.
Hoteliers have been keenly aware of the staffing issues in hospitality since the Covid-19 pandemic. Across the world, hospitality staff lost their jobs, then found more stable and better paid employment in other industries. There are other reasons hotels can find it difficult to recruit and retain staff too – with low wages, tight margins and tough working conditions all key reasons why employees can move on quickly. According to EHL Insights, a new position in hospitality becomes available every 2.5 seconds.
When staff shortages are a problem for a hotel, it’s time to look towards reliable, long-term solutions. Technology can play a key role in this – and many hotels discover their hotel management system can make a huge difference. Here are some automations to help.
Guided customer journey
With the right modules added to your hotel management system (or property management system), booking confirmations, reminders, check-in invitations and invoices can automatically be sent to customers. This can be activated whether a guest books through your hotel booking engine or an online travel agent (OTA). This saves staff having to manually do these time consuming and repetitive tasks.
Through SIHOT, you can activate SIHOT.SALES, SIHOT. PRE&POST STAY and SIHOT.GO!, the mobile app, to support these processes.
Payment processing
When it comes to payments alone, staff can find themselves processing multiple payments for the same guest – sometimes dozens of times during a stay. This includes payment for the stay, in F&B outlets, additional room charges – and sometimes refunds and cancellations too.
Through modules such as SIHOT.PAYENGINE, tokens are generated for guest credit cards, enabling hotels to automatically collect payments for reservations while keeping guest data safe. It can also automatically handle refunds or partial refunds depending on the cancellation policy on the particular rate a guest has booked. This saves hours of manual staff processing time.
Task reminders
Every hotel guest is different, and some might have extra needs that staff need to cater for. But time-stretched staff can struggle to remember everything each guest requires. By effectively using a hotel management system, staff can tap into the known information about each guest, and assign tasks or set reminders to ensure each guest’s needs are fully met.
Through SIHOT.SALES, tasks can be assigned to staff users to alert them to things that need to be done to meet guest needs. This could be for extra requirements for a VIP, to book a guest a taxi for a particular time, or anything else related to extra services you’d like to provide to your guests.
Rate changes
Keeping on top of bookings, occupancy levels and rates is more than a full time job for revenue teams. You need to constantly adjust your rates depending on fluctuating occupancy from day to day. It’s absolutely essential for maximising revenue and retaining competitiveness. This is where technology can really come into its own.
Modules such as SIHOT.YIELD can automatically adjust the rates available, depending on pre-defined occupancy percentages. This is a smart way to manage your rates in real time, and means revenue managers can be more strategic in their roles.
Self-service options
Guests are familiar with today’s self-service culture, so embedding it into hotels is a win-win situation. In fact, millennials are 57% more likely to be positively influenced by hotel technology (HotelTechReport) when making decisions about where to stay.
Through self-service kiosks such as SIHOT.KIOSK, guests can check-in and check-out quickly and easily. This means you’ll need fewer front desk staff, enabling you to redeploy staff members to plug gaps elsewhere in the hotel. Digitalised front desk solutions can also be supported by a mobile app such as SIHOT.GO!, which enables guests to do a pre-check-in and make additional service requests.
If you’re struggling with staff shortages, contact us to find out how SIHOT can help.