A comprehensive hotel software should provide users with a wide range of diverse functionalities, all of which will positively impact various aspects of managing a hotel and resort. And let's be honest, the reception area in a hotel software program attracts the most attention. The reason for this is simple and prosaic: it's this department that has the greatest impact on revenue generation. Good software, such as NFHotel from Polish manufacturer NetFactory, offers several useful tools that, when implemented, will result in increased occupancy, sales, and profits.
Some modules do this directly, while the impact of other functionalities on the swelling of the caboose is less obvious. This article will focus on those from the first category. Introducing the equivalents of reception in hotel program, it's important to pay attention in advance to the growing trend of tourists booking stays—for virtually any occasion and date—via websites. Both through the official websites of hotels, guesthouses, and other accommodations, as well as through the increasingly popular online booking services. The main task of the reception system will be to create an automated service point for orders for hotel and tourism services flowing in from all over the web.
Overbooking? What is it?
Hoteliers who have a fully developed reception desk in their hotel software could ask this very question of their colleagues who prefer paper calendars. And they update availability in online sales channels manually every time, which takes several long minutes for each reservation. Such a long window of time between hanging up the phone and sending the information to the extranet will sooner or later result in having to cancel overlapping sessions. Meanwhile, every decent hotel and reception system operates a channel managerIn NFHotel, this element primarily provides a two-way connection with booking.com, arguably the largest and most popular portal in its category. Of course, the same applies to other sales channels integrated with the hotel software's reception. Therefore, for users of this software, worrying about overbooking is nothing more than a disturbing vision from a completely unrealistic nightmare.
Customer self-service point
This intriguing term could easily be used to describe online reservations made via a website, which every accommodation facility probably already has. An equally apt expression would be "internet reception in a hotel program." Taken quite literally, the so-called booking engine will automatically find available dates, indicate available standards, and calculate costs after adding food and other add-ons, will redirect to online payments, finally it will send all the necessary confirmations itself. By e-mail, text message Or both. As for the technical details, embedding an online booking module on a website is as simple as pasting a small piece of code from the system into the website's source code. Therefore, many such additional reception areas can be created in hotel software, for example, on social media profiles or on typical advertising portals. Although it should be noted that relatively few websites allow for such enrichment of tourist advertisements.
It will also be easier for the hotel staff at the reception
Since time is money, it's undoubtedly worthwhile to invest in solutions that streamline certain tasks. The same applies to the tourism industry and employees primarily involved in customer service. Simply adding new reservations to the schedule with an interactive reception desk in the hotel software will significantly speed things up. Using NFHotel as an example, the entire process can be completed in about a minute – including adding the customer to the database. It's absolutely clear that a computerized system will find available dates much faster than even the most skilled human eye (and a keen mind). It's somewhat similar to an online booking engine, except that the receptionist, based on a conversation with a potential customer, enters information about the number of participants, the age of each guest, the date range, and the preferred length of stay into the search engine. Another example of the positive impact that the reception desk in the hotel software has on efficient workflow is the creation of ready-to-send messages for tourists. Automatically populating content with data from a specific reservation saves a significant amount of time, which without such a module would be spent on tedious rewriting.
The Polish hotel software NFHotel offers all of the above features, along with many more useful and relatively easy-to-implement options. Check out specialized hotel software and take your tourism business to a new level.
