A great PMS vendor needs to help properties grow the top line – and there are many ways we can do that. We need to help our properties provide better operational outcomes. Hotels are businesses – and one of their clear goals is to do more with less, to become more efficient. It’s not enough to create more revenue, you have to create more profit. Operational systems like Skytouch help manage hotel operations more efficiently.
We also need to help provide better guest experiences because hospitality at its core is the “guest experience business”. In the modern age you get judged as a hotel operator on your guest experience every minute of the day – and that judgement is available in a brutally public fashion. The ability for us to help hotel operators drive better customer experiences is critical. Not only in the transactional relationship a property has with its guests right now, but the relationship you’re building over time – and that’s a critical driver of long-term growth.
We view our mission as partnering with hotel companies, and with brands, and with hotels at a property level to really help them across all of those major areas. And so that’s our vision for the organisation. That’s what we’re trying to solve for them.
Understanding the market
To achieve this, firstly we’re going to listen to and understand market views. We are not presumptive enough to know what the market needs. We have to get out there and we have to listen and so we’re investing heavily in our organisational product management team whose job it is, is to get out into the market and listen. And so we spent a lot of time – not only with our existing customers – but also with prospective customers understanding their pains to make sure we’re driving our long-term road map to solving those pains.
We run a process where we spend time at a property shadowing the property team, be it the front desk team or the revenue manager or the hospitality team to understand how they go about their day-to-day business, what problems are being solved – and what problems we could help solve for them. This way, we make sure that we’re driving the ball to meet our vision.
Investing in technology
We’re also investing heavily in technology. Software is only as good as the software we deliver to our customers and the way we make that better is by investing a lot of time and research and money in continuing to improve our platform.
There are a lot of vendors in the market who do a release every year or two years – doing those upgrades is difficult. We have the great benefit of being able to keep of our customers on the same version, so we don’t have to worry about providing support for the version from six years ago which means all of effort can go into improving what we have.
You can talk about features and functionality but that doesn’t matter if you can’t offer a system that’s easy to use. If customers find it difficult, they’re not going to use it. You can have all the bells and whistles you want, but it doesn’t matter if it’s not being used.
A 24/7 industry
Finally – we realised we’re in the hospitality industry. Our customers run businesses that are up and running all the time – and that have tremendously deep needs to make sure they can be using their system all the time with no problems. And so support, I would argue, is one of the unheralded issues in this market that we are dedicated to working to provide world class experiences for our customers.
Imagine that you’re the night desk clerk at a property. It is 10 o’clock at night and you’re checking in a guest and you have issues with the property management system. You want to call your vendor but your vendor is only open 9-5. What do you do? You issue the key and write it down on paper and hope you can solve the problem. That’s not going to solve these problems! And the problem is I think – in hospitality in general – the fact that you have so many software vendors, that so many of them are small, that many of them are under-resourced, means we’ve gotten used to not expecting as much.
We looked at our launch and evolution and we’re investing heavily in providing the best in-market capability in our support because the kind of service you provide your customers is going to reflect on the kind of service they can provide. That’s our focus. As an organisation we’re committed to working with our customers and future customers to really become the best in class property management provider in the market. Because our customers’ experiences are not only based on our software or support, but every interaction they have with us and that’s what we’re working on.
The “Cloud”
Other industries really expect a lot from their vendors and in hospitality you kind of get what you get. You might ask for features which may or may not come. In order to be responsive to your own guests and to the market, you’ve got hire vendors in lock step with you – they’ve got to listen to what your needs are. They’ve got to listen to what your channels are, and they’ve got to be able to respond in a reasonable manner.
It’s really difficult with some of the legacy technology with on premise systems – it is difficult to get new updates out there on a frequent basis, it’s difficult as a vendor to support multiple versions in production at the same time when they’re geographically distributed around the world – having to ship CD-Roms or having to deal with hotels to upgrade that software on premise. And so the transition to cloud-based technology really unleashed the ability for vendors to be a lot closer with their customers and making sure they’re delivering the capability on a much more frequent basis to their customers when they need it.
Vendors shouldn’t be in the position of telling customers what they need – they should be out there in the market listening.
Where to from here?
The conversation we want to have is really around the property management system – and where we think it is going. I think if you look at the last five or ten years there hasn’t been as much evolution in the Property Management Systems market as I think there needs to be. Our belief is hoteliers should expect more from their property management systems. This is the mission critical software upon which a hotel runs every single day. I mean – shouldn’t properties expect more?
