Hotel Management System (HMS): A Comprehensive Development Guide

• Web
• August 1, 2023

by Beantsingh Duggal

Hotels are an essential part of tourism in any country, and their reputations are set by accommodation and staying experience. Imagine transforming your hotel’s operations with a single, custom-built software solution. Then, you have the opportunity to elevate customers’ staying experience at your hotel. This ultimate guide to hotel management software development unveils the secrets to streamlining your processes, boosting efficiency, and enhancing guest experiences.

Hotels have so many tasks in their pipeline to execute! Some of them have different software to do specific tasks, while some use traditional hotel management processes.

Now think of a situation where the reception area of your hotel is flooded with guests coming with their inquiries, some staff members asking to do entries, and so on. Your reception team must be feeling exhausted about what to answer first as they have to deal with tons of registers or spreadsheets. Or it’s hard to do even if they have hotel management software in place, but not up-to-the mark.

What if all your hotel management tasks can be streamlined in a seamless manner? Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a centralized hotel management system with modules for each hotel task and team to do their part?

If yes, it’s time to create your custom hotel management software, meeting your business needs. But to build an end-to-end hotel management system, you need to know so many things.

Fret not! As we’ve prepared this comprehensive guide on hotel management software development. This blog covers everything you need to know, such as types, features, development processes, cost analysis, and more.

So, let’s align in a queue to pass through and gather all the information about hotel management software development.

What is a Hotel Management System?

The hotel management system (HMS) is a type of hospitality software. It helps you manage your hotel business operations and offer guests a seamless hotel experience. But how does this hospitality software offer such management conveniences?

Using end-to-end hotel management software, you can manage reservations, staff, inventory, billing, and all in one place.

You can even integrate it with third-party apps, such as online hotel booking platforms and payment gateways. So, regardless of the booking platform, you receive reservation notifications right into your all-in-one hotel management system.

Apart from this, are there any other types of hotel-related software you can build? Yes, there are, which we’ll take a look at in the next section.

What are the Different Types of Hotel Management Software?

Of course, to make your hotel management process easy, you need a complete solution with many modules. And those you can even build separately and then integrate them together at your convenience. Keeping it aside, here’s the list of hotel management software types you can build:

Hotel Property Management System (PMS)

A must-have hotel management software type that every hotel business should have. A hotel property management system helps you manage front-desk management, housekeeping, accounting, reporting, and more.

Central Reservation System (CRS)

It is an integrated system that can help you manage hotel tasks, like inventory distribution, rates, reservations, and more in real-time.

A central reservation system gathers your data from systems, like PMS, global distribution systems, internet booking registries, and so on. So you can easily access your hotel data through a single glass pane.

You can even call this CRS solution the backbone of all the hotel management systems you use. The reason is it transfers data from one software to distribution channels.

Hotel Staff Management System

Just like any other business, the hospitality business has a staff divided into specialized teams for different types of jobs. For example, teams for the reception area, room service, kitchen, etc. So, if your hotel entity is a huge one with a big staff, managing them can be a headache.

That’s where your hotel staff management software comes to your rescue. You can build your hotel-specific HRMS with HRA, Daily reporting, etc., to manage your team with task assignments, all in a seamless way.

Online Hotel Booking Engine

If you want to launch your business based on a hotel-related product, you can go for an online hotel booking app development. But what is that? Online Booking Engine is a platform that lets hoteliers list their hotels to get reservations.

One research shows that travelers looking for hotel reservations often come across around 38 sites, and most of them are often online hotel booking engines. Also, they charge hotels and guests for their platform service fees and take commissions for each deal’s success.

Revenue Management System (RMS)

There are travel seasons designated for each corner of the world based on their climate. And the travel season means the best time for hotels to do more business and earn great revenue.

In such cases, having a hotel revenue management system in place can be of great help. Basically, RMS helps hotels optimize their pricing and other revenue streams as per the market demand.

Apart from that, RMS is also equipped with a data analytics feature that helps you study online visitors’ behavior, booking scenarios, and more parameters. Utilizing this study, you can figure out hotel business strategies to offer the best deals to your potential guests.

Housekeeping Management Software

Housekeeping management software can be a standalone app if you want to make it this way. You can also build housekeeping management software as a module to integrate with your HMS. 

Housekeeping management software can be a handy tool for the housekeeping/room service team. It enables them to easily assign and schedule cleaning tasks and maintain high levels of cleanliness and hygiene in your hotel.

Hotel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

CRM software is a basic need when it comes to getting business and maintaining relationships with clients. If your hotel business is a large hotel chain, like Marriott and Hyatt, you should have this software to connect with guests for them to choose your hotel for their next trips.

So, what’s different about CRM for hotels? What’s the role of CRM in the hotel & hospitality industry?

CRM for hotel management is a cloud-based tool that tracks guest data, such as reservation history, travel preferences, and more. You can use those data for marketing purposes and offer personalized hotel-specific app experiences to app users.

You can use a CRM system for guest profiling, segmentation, personalization, feedback management, loyalty programs, upselling and cross-selling, and more.

Hotel Inventory Management Software

The supplies in the hotel world are vital to maintaining to provide guests with a great stay experience. That’s where the inventory management system for hotels comes in great help. It lets you keep track of your hotel inventory, from kitchen supplies to room goods with bathroom and cleaning essentials. Moreover, with this you can keep your hotel inventory under control.

Hotel Tour Assistance Software

When your hotel covers a large-scale area and has a bit complex and yet many things to explore within the hotel, you need a hotel tour assistance/guiding feature in a hotel-specific experience app.

You can employ AR/VR or metaverse technology to launch your hotel tour experience app that lets your guests explore your hotel space virtually and even while exploring it personally.

It helps your guests to find their rooms easily without any assistance from personnel and even effortlessly explore other hotel attractions.

It is high time to employ AR/VR like web3 technological solutions for the hotel sector as many hotels have adopted or are planning to adopt VR technology to improve their guests’ hospitality experience.

Why Should You Build A Hotel Management Software?

In revolutionizing industries, digital technology plays a crucial role. Even the hotel and hospitality sectors have joined the party of digital transformation.

According to a HotelTechReport survey, 81% of hoteliers voted in favor of using technology to lead their hotel business toward success in the next five years.

Additionally, around 39% of hoteliers believe in technology’s top-most part for improving operational efficiency, whereas 31% vote for transforming guest journeys, 15% for improving business agility, and 13% for future innovation.

Apart from that, 21% of hoteliers have seen technology transforming their hotel business processes, 19% got results in getting more revenue, 18% noticed better customer experience, and 11% noticed reduced operational costs.

Moreover, hotel management system can introduce you to the following benefits:

Easy Inventory Management

Hotels often use different inventory distribution systems for different purposes. A hotel system also helps you easily access and manage your hotel inventory. But how? By centralizing inventory management.

So, say goodbye to your hurdles of going through tons of paperwork and checking processes. And welcome real-time inventory management at your fingertips.

Simplified Reporting

A hotel management system helps to create detailed, filtered, and real-time reports on revenue, occupancy rate, average daily rate, housekeeping, forecasting, marketing and sales, kitchen supplies, and more in just a few clicks.

Thus, you don’t need to go through the hectic hotel analysis part as you can get everything ready with your tech-powered hotel management system.

Streamlined Hotel Management Processes

A hotel management system provides visibility over tasks your teams are aligned with. You can also get information about the free resources to align for the next tasks or emergencies.

Get your team daily reporting and even make it visible to certain staff members with senior ranks to do their part of management work. Not just get staff reporting but also assign tasks to any staff member without going on the field to find them and then tell them what to do next.

Hotel management tasks are often streamlined, but centralized hotel management software can definitely add its plus point.

Save More Time

With easy task assigning, team management, visibility over the hotel staff, and many other areas, hotel management software saves your efforts and time on many mundane tasks.

Not just that, with this, you can even automate many of your hotel management tasks, such as managing room availability, accepting booking requests, payment processes, reporting, task assigning, and much more.

So, automation, visibility, accessibility, and centralized control that your hotel app offers make your work easy and help you save more time on administrative tasks.

Competitive Advantage

Your hotel management system can be a gateway to do many wonders in the hospitality sector. It includes effortless hotel management, offering guests a world-class hospitality experience, the best staff working experience, and more.

So, you can run your hotel business like a tech-savvy business on a service. It sets you apart from your competitors. And a good staying experience makes your guests loyal and spread good words about your entity in their inner circles.

The better experience you provide to your staff, the longer they tend to stay with your business. The happier they are, the better services they can provide to your guests, resulting in better business and brand reputation.

What Features to Implement in a Hotel Management System?

It’s not about adding more features to your hotel management software to make it rich. It’s about adding the right features to your hotel system that make it a useful tool to improve your hotel management operations. So, let’s take a look at some must-have features in your hotel management software:

Reservation Management

When it comes to hotel reservation/booking management, hoteliers highly prefer to make their reservation system centralized. It allows them to track reservations coming from different platforms, including booking, modifications, cancellations, and room assignments.

Front Desk Management

After the reservation confirmation, the work of the reception team, the face of the hotel comes in line. They communicate with guests, allocate rooms by ensuring room cleaning, and even deal with many hotel distributions and subjects.

It can be a plus point to include this feature in your decent hotel software system. So, with this feature, they can streamline check-ins and check-outs, guest profiling, and room key management and room allocation.

Back Office Management

Staff management is an essential task in hotel management, where back office management is the one responsible for staff efficiency. With this feature, you can keep track of your staff, like assigned tasks, breaktime, leave, attendance, etc.

Billing and Invoicing

As a hotel entity dealing with many guests, you certainly don’t want to rely on traditional register practices to note down extra services availed by guests. This will only complicate your billing and invoice generation process.

Your hotel management software should include automatic bills and invoices generation. It helps you keep track of entries with predefined prices. Thus, at the time of check-out, you can generate their bills in just a few clicks.

Your billing and invoices feature can also include the online payment acceptance part.

Reporting and Analytics

Of course, using traditional hotel management practices, you can also gather much data, but to analyze that, it requires much efforts. Thanks to technological advances, hotel management software is now equipped with AI/ML capabilities that can help you harness the power of data through advanced analytics and reporting features.

And this feature should be included in hotel management software to gather quick and real-time insights on revenue and other hotel departments. You can utilize such insights to create marketing and operational strategies and run your hotel business efficiently.

Extra Service Monitoring

Most hotels offer various types of activities and services on their premises, such as cafes, bars, restaurants, swimming pools, gyms, and spa centers. As guests pay more for these services, they do want to try such out.

Some activity areas can be chargeable, while others can be complimentary. By using this system, you can keep track of data on activities/services availed by guests. This data will help identify the services mostly used by guests and how they have contributed to increased profits.

Additionally, this information is useful for monitoring occupied areas and managing rush for certain services/activities.

Security and Access Controls

Your data and your guests’ data are valuable, and you don’t want to risk losing them to hackers. Therefore, when developing software for your hotel, you should prioritize implementing robust security measures and access controls (such as multi-factor authentication, hierarchy-based accessibility, etc.).

It is also essential to ensure that your system complies with the hospitality industry’s regulations. Keeping your software up-to-date with security best practices will help protect your system from cyber threats.

Dynamic Pricing Control

Likewise, to other industries, the hotel sector highly relies on market demand. Peak traveling seasons are the best opportunities for hotel businesses to make business. It’s understandable to manage your room booking charges as per user behaviors and market situations.

Thus, the hotel booking module of your hotel management system should have this dynamic pricing control feature to manage pricing to gain a better conversion rate.

Emails, Notifications, and Surveys

Communication is the key, we all say, and it is even more important when managing the hotel & hospitality business.

Let’s take the example of the Hilton hotel chain. Its staff has a CRM system, which utilizes it in the right manner, with features for email sending, notifications, and surveys.

Hotel Hilton’s staff sends season, awareness, marketing, praise, and even offer-related emails to inform their customers about hotel memberships, benefits, offers, etc. This is the biggest reason why the Hilton Honors program has over 146 million members globally.

Any customer that books a room with any hotel wants to receive a booking & payment confirmation email. This ensures that their payment is done and received successfully by the hotel and they can check-in to that at the given time without any hurdles.

So, you can expect to send emails and notifications in this manner:

1. Marketing
2. Booking confirmation
3. Before arrival
4. After check-in and during the stay
5. Post-check-out experience survey email
6. Gratitude and expectations for the next stay
7. Referral offer emails, etc.

After the booking confirmation, you can even send emails regarding things to do and places to explore nearby hotels and more.

During the stay, you can share their activities to do within the hotel premises, popular hotel dishes to try, bar to explore, parties alert, etc.

After check-out, you can send them emails to survey their staying experience and get feedback and a referral code if they want to suggest your hotel in their network.

So, with your hotel management system integrated with CRM, you can send such emails to your group of customers in just a few clicks without switching to other tabs or browsers.

Dashboard

To manage hotel operations effectively, you need all the essential information readily available at a single glance. It means your hotel management software should include a dashboard displaying data insights in a visual and easily graspable manner.

The dashboard of your hotel management software will showcase information such as total rooms, occupied rooms, vacant rooms with cleanliness status, and more. Moreover, the dashboard can be tailored based on given access and organized according to users’ roles, even allowing customization to suit an individual’s preferences.

These are just a few features that you should implement in your hotel management software. But you can even implement other features depending on your requirements.

Key Factors to Consider When Developing Hotel Management Software

Before you approach any software development agency, you should consider these things to clarify your product requirement to build your effective software product:

Understanding User Needs

Of course, you are designing your hotel management software for your internal staff use. But still, you need to define things that can help to ease the operational efforts of your hotel staff. 

Easy Navigating UI/UX

It’s important to ensure system navigation is easy-to-understand and appealing to users. So, your hotel management system’s UI/UX design plays a vital role in increasing its usability.

Necessary Integrations

Integrations, whether they are internal or third-party, are crucial to make your product whole and end-to-end hotel software. So, to make your hotel management software an all-in-one platform, you can integrate payment gateways, online booking platforms, channel management platform, POS systems, CRM software, accounting software, mobile apps, etc.

Mobile Accessibility

When you think of easy accessibility to your hotel management software, then making it mobile-compatible becomes very much important. Apart from being easy, a mobile version of the hotel management software or a mobile app for hotel management can help you get real-time notifications, digital room keys (if you have smart room door locks), easy task allocation management, quick accessibility, and many other ways.

A Step-by-step Guide on Developing Hotel Management System

Finally, it’s time to go to know the steps to build hotel management software that will make your development journey a buttery ride. So, let’s get started:

1. Identify Your Requirements

Gather all your hotel management pain points, conduct your competitor research and analysis, do your internet research, and even feel free to use this guide as your reference to identify your requirements.

You can consult hotel software providers to refine your requirements and prepare a proper software product requirement document to send it to IT companies you feel can deliver the solution you need.

The clearer your requirements will be, the more effective hotel management solution you can build for your hotel to be efficient and thrive.

2. Searching for Hotel Management Software Development Partner

If you want your business-oriented software to be developed effectively, finding the right-fit partner for your project becomes essential. But how do you do that?

To find the best app development partner, start by listing down your preferences, required skill sets, industry experience, and more, and then begin your search.

When assessing hotel management software development partners, consider their total experience, diversity in the portfolio, previously completed projects similar to yours, client testimonials, team strength, communication skills, and the quotation they offer.

3. Finalize the Technology Stack

Technology selection plays a core role in hotel management software development and in making your product robust and scalable. Considering the complexity of the hotel management software development, you should carefully choose your technology stack.

So, here’s the list of tools and technologies you can choose to develop your hotel management software:

4. Choose the Engagement Model

In the market, you’ll find many IT companies following different engagement models, such as fix-cost, time & material, dedicated hiring, contractual, and many others. But to keep your expenses lower, you can be smart and pick the right-fit engagement model, offering to utilize your remote team extensively to reap the most benefits.

Though having many choices, we suggest two engagement models you should consider when hiring technical talents. It includes a fixed cost model if your requirements are well-defined and dedicated hiring if your project requirements include some experimentations and varying scope.

5. Designing a Hotel Management System

To execute this task, you need to hire UI/UX designers who are very well-skilled to creatively execute the design of your hotel management system that is easy to navigate and appealing.

6. HMS Development

Now that you have hired the best travel and hospitality software development company, you’ll have to maintain regular communication to know the progress of your project. It helps you get suggestions from developers to make amendments to your hotel software development to make it more effective.

7. Testing, Bug Fixing, and Hosting

No software is up-to-date when it is being developed. Of course, software needs ongoing touch-ups even after it’s being developed. That’s why along with hotel software development services, you should subscribe for software testing & quality assurance services. It helps you build a power-packed hotel management software and host it in robust servers offering faster performance and top-notch security.

8. Post Development Update & Support

Your hotel management software is finally in use, but it will not perform the same every time. With time, it also needs updates as per technological updates and trends to ensure its robust performance all the time. Hence, when looking for the product engineering team, you need to ensure that they also provide post-delivery support services.

You have finally gone through the hotel management system development process; now, you do want to know the potential challenges you can face during that.

Key Challenges to Consider When Building a Hotel Management System

Now, let’s get familiar with potential challenges you can face when building a hotel management system:

Meet the Complexity

The hotel management system contains many modules which are highly integrated. And that makes the development process of this product complex to execute smoothly.

Integration with Existing Systems

Your hotel can have different software to manage various tasks. But to integrate them with your newly created system to make it a centralized hotel management system can be a mind-bursting task as it requires understanding the code to integrate seamlessly.

Training and Support

If you’re a hotel that is already using different systems for various functions and your staff have high command, then it can be a bit hard for them to get onboarded to a totally new system. Training and support play a crucial role, but it can be a challenge to give personalized training. There your hotel app development team comes up and provides training and timely software support.

How Much Does it Cost to Build A Hotel Management System?

The cost to develop a comprehensive hotel management system (HMS) can range in between $20,000 – $150,000 and more. However, as we are speaking of a high-end hotel management system that takes care of entire hotel operations (which is largely scaled), it can make it difficult to provide the exact cost without knowing your requirements. But to get a little bit of an idea, you can consider these cost-affecting factors to build your digital hotel system:

• The complexity of the project;
• The size of the team associated with the project;
• The experience and skill set of the team;
• The location of the company you choose;
• Types of tools and technologies you use, including hosting system;
• The need for project management;
• The requirement for the post-development and delivery support.

So, your product engineering cost is designed by considering these factors solely. Being your ideal choice hotel and hospitality app development team, we suggest you go for the dedicated hiring model to avail of maximum benefits in terms of cost and effective development.

However, in dedicated hiring, the hourly pricing can differ as per the changes in the region, as shown in the image given below:

Note: The prices mentioned above are subject to change as per the market demand and scenarios.

How Can MindInventory Help You Build Your Hotel Management System?

Developing the hotel management system can unlock many benefits for your entity from which the efficiency in handling hotel operations and providing guests with the best staying experience can do a lot for your hotel business. And many hotel businesses like yours have already excelled a lot in their business path, and so can you, which starts with an idea of developing a hotel management system and a right-fit partner.

Speaking of which, MindInventory can be your ideal hotel technology partner. From requirement furnishing to design to development with long-time association for improving your hotel system, we can be your one-stop shop for your end-to-end digital hotel technology needs. So, share your requirements with us today and get the ideal hotel software solution that meets your needs.

FAQs on Hotel Management System Development