Property Management System or PMS is a hotel’s data warehouse, it stores all the information about the property. Information like rate offers, room types, room descriptions, in-house guests, guest reservations, and a lot more.
Implementing a revenue management culture entails being able to analyze the combination of these data. It can give you such results as:
- Is the hotel targeting the right market segments?
- Are you investing on the most cost effective channel?
- Should you accept the group business 4 months from now?
Having a business intelligence tool will be able to aid you in understanding all these data on a deeper level. Whatever your methods are in trying to retrieve and analyze your data, the most important aspect to take into consideration is the quality of your data.
I remember, back in the day, one of the hotels I worked with wanted to retrieve a corporate profile production. They wanted to understand how each of their corporate accounts performed. They retrieved the information via their Property Management System. When they did this, they realized that the profile data in the PMS was a huge mess. For one, there was no standard on how to enter a specific corporate account. For example, HSBC had so many profiles which amounted to about 5-10 different data. One profile was named HongKong Shanghai Banking Corporate, another one was named HongKong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, yet another one was called HSBC Global, then HSBC Europe. It seemed impossible to find out how HSBC produced for the hotel. They had to do a major profile clean-up which took weeks to complete.
Another hotel I worked with wanted to find out which channel was the most productive the previous year compared to the current year. After they got the data from the PMS, they were disappointed to find out that the reservations team was not careful at all when they entered the source of the bookings. They found many versions of same profiles, which were just typos of the original, such as IDS-Book.com, IDS-Booken.com for IDS-Booking.com. All these clean-up tasks could have been avoided from the beginning if hotels were keen on making sure that only quality and clean data were entered in the PMS.
Standards need to be implemented and strictly followed by all in order to achieve clean data. It is not enough to retrieve data from your PMS, you need to make sure that what you retrieve is data with utmost integrity. Always remember that garbage in garbage out. You would not want to create your hotel’s strategy based on questionable data.
