We’ve all given ourselves a new year’s resolution or two at some point in our lives—eat healthier, finally get our household clutter under control, travel more...you know the drill. Most of the time, our well-intentioned resolutions are abandoned within the first few weeks of the year. No judgment—we’ve been there too!
Whether or not you buy into setting new year’s resolutions, when you operate a small hotel, the start of a new year is always a great opportunity to evaluate your performance and set goals for the coming year.
To help you kickstart 2024 off strong, we’ve whipped up 7 goals—or, new years resolutions—to strive for in the new year:
- Get more bookings
- Save time on channel management
- Implement contactless check-in
- Focus on guest satisfaction
- Get smart about revenue management
- Stay on top of preventive maintenance
- Simplify your tech stack
Set your sights on one resolution or multiple! Let’s get started.
1. Get More Direct Bookings
In a booking landscape dominated by OTAs (and their fees), getting more direct bookings is key to maximizing your RevPAR.
To get more direct bookings, you’ll need two things:
- A hotel booking engine that integrates seamlessly with your website
- To match your rates and availability across all your booking platforms, including OTAs
With a simple hotel booking engine integrated directly with your website, it’s easy for guests to compare rooms and prices, check availability, reserve add-ons and upsells, and book their stay on any device right from your website. That means fewer bookings lost to OTAs—and less money spent on OTA fees and commissions.
A direct hotel booking engine should include these features to help create the smoothest possible booking experience for small hotels:
- Rate checker: Your direct booking engine should show the exact same rates you send to OTAs to help reduce abandonment and save on commissions and fees.
- Availability calendar: Guests should be able to view availability and rates by room and by date so they can plan their trip accordingly.
- Upselling options: Make it easy for guests to reserve and pay for upsells or add-ons at the time of booking, such as meal packages, bottles of wine upon arrival, spa visits, and more.
- Mobile access: Your booking engine should be mobile optimized so guests can book their stay on their phone. 81% of reservations are made on a mobile device!
INNROAD TIP: innRoad customers report seeing a 20% increase in their direct bookings from our high-converting online booking engine and increased visibility through channel management.
2. Save Time on Channel Management
Giving your guests the option of booking their stay on whatever platform they prefer can help maximize your occupancy, but managing multiple booking channels individually requires a major time commitment—one that small hotel owners can’t always make.
With channel management tools integrated into your property management system, you can update important information in just a few clicks. Instead of modifying each platform manually, you can quickly update your rates and availability in your PMS dashboard and all of the relevant information will be synced across every OTA and your direct booking engine in real-time. That means less annoying admin work and more time to focus on higher-value activities.
3. Offer Contactless Check-in
In 2024, sleeping on contactless check-in puts you at risk of falling behind your competitors. Unparalleled customer service may be your hotel’s bread and butter, but guest preferences are changing—post-pandemic, nearly ¾ of travelers say that they’d be more likely to stay at a hotel that offers self-service options that minimize contact with staff and other guests. And hotels are listening—a survey by Skift and Oracle Hospitality found that adopting contactless services is the highest priority for nearly 40% of hotels in the next three years.
Contactless check-in isn’t a death knell for your stellar service. Online check-in tools help you do more than just meet your guests’ expectations—instead, by reducing time spent on checking guests in and the admin work that goes along with it, your front desk staff can spend more time ensuring each guest has an unforgettable experience at your small hotel. With online check-in tools, you can:
- Schedule emails inviting your guests to check-in online pre-arrival. When they check-in online, they can also request early check-in if needed, as well as reserve and pay for other perks and add-ons during the process.
- Share essential arrival information such as check-in times, dining room hours, parking locations, or other things to do nearby
- Collect check-in and payment information online before they arrive, such as contact information, IDs, credit card information, and signed registration forms and documents
4. Prioritize Guest Satisfaction
Small and independent hotels are uniquely positioned to provide a friendly, personalized guest experience compared to larger, dispassionate hotel chains. But when small hotel owners are used to operating with smaller teams and tighter budgets, it can be hard to carve out the time to provide an incomparable experience while also seeing to the myriad aspects of operating a small hotel.
With an all-in-one PMS, you can spend less time on admin and other management tasks and more time helping guests, creating packages and unique experiences that set you apart from your competition, and providing a memorable guest experience. And that’s not all—with the right PMS, you can make sure your guest experience is matchless right from the start. Here’s how:
- Easy booking: Start their stay off on the right foot by providing simple booking options and making sure key information is consistent across all possible booking channels (including OTAs and your website).
- Speedy check-in: A smoother, streamlined check-in process means guests can get to their rooms faster. Online check-in options can make the check-in process even more efficient by collecting key information before guests arrive.
- More personalization: Give guests the chance to customize their stay by offering upsells and add-ons at the time of booking, such as early check-in, spa visits, and other perks.
5. Get Smart About Revenue Management
Profit margins for small hotels can be tight, especially in the off season. Revenue management strategies can help you maintain your cash flow throughout the year, but unless you have a dedicated revenue manager on staff or you’re ready to manually calculate key metrics on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, you’ll need some smart tools to help you cash in.
With an all-in-one PMS that includes revenue management features, you can simplify every aspect of your small hotels’ revenue management and make well-informed choices year-round to maximize your occupancy and increase revenue.
If you’re ready to get smart about revenue management, look for tools like:
- Goal setting: Set custom goals for key metrics like ADR, occupancy, or revenue, get recommendations on how to meet your goals, and see real-time projected revenue forecasts.
- Monitor progress: Get key metrics automatically sent to your inbox as often as you want so you can track your progress towards reaching your revenue goals, whether you want to monitor your daily occupancy percentage, dig into last month’s RevPAR, or compare performance year over year.
- Surge alerts: With real-time notifications when bookings surge, you can adjust your rates in real-time to make the most of the increased demand.
- Automated rate changes: Some property management systems can automatically adjust your rates in response to changes in booking activity—that’s one less thing for busy hotel owners to worry about. For example, innRoad’s Yield Management tool can increase or decrease your rates based on occupancy percentage, and will automatically issue a rate change when you receive a surge alert or reach an occupancy target.
6. Stay On Top Of Preventive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance is crucial to maintaining your small hotel’s cash flow and budget, managing preventable repairs, and reducing unplanned downtime, but developing a maintenance schedule isn’t always a top priority.
If it falls during your usual off-season, the start of a new year is a prime opportunity to build a preventive maintenance schedule for the year ahead—and start taking care of all those maintenance tasks you might have been putting off.
Whether you have a team of two or twenty, managing to-do lists for your entire staff (along with your own) is never easy—and never ending. Instead of manually managing your maintenance schedule, simplify the process with an all-in-one small hotel PMS that includes dedicated housekeeping and task management hotel features. With these features in your toolkit, you can:
- Get complete visibility into the status of different tasks that need to be tackled around your property
- Create, assign, prioritize, and track tasks for different departments and individuals, such as front desk, maintenance, or housekeeping
- Prioritize tasks based on guest arrival time
- Assign tasks to team members and mark them complete in real-time
7. Simplify Your Tech Stack
We’ve talked a big game about software tools that can help you achieve your small hotel goals in 2024, but the last thing you need is a handful of different software platforms that each manage individual aspects of your key daily operations.
Instead of using multiple separate systems to track your operations, consider an all-in-one PMS that integrates all of your key functions into one platform, including:
- Booking, with a direct booking engine and channel management tools
- Reservations, with reservation management and online check-in features
- Housekeeping and maintenance task management tools
- Bookkeeping and accounting, with revenue management and advanced reporting dashboards. A PMS with real-time advanced reporting features gives you visibility into all areas of your operations, allowing you to easily track goals and key metrics such as ADR, revPAR, occupancy rate, and more.
- Payment processing options so you can use just one vendor to process payments. That means instead of managing multiple vendors, you can manage all your payments, chargebacks, and deposits from one dashboard.
INNROAD TIP:For even more functionality in your PMS dashboard, look for a PMS that can integrate with third-party software like guest messaging or remote door locks so you can manage these systems in your PMS as well.
Checking Out
No matter what hotel goals you set for your small hotel in 2024, an all-in-one PMS can help you streamline your operations and set you on the path to sticking to your resolutions all year long. Goal setting features and the ability to monitor your progress are key tools to look for in any PMS, along with:
- A direct hotel booking engine so you can get more direct bookings right on your website
- An integrated channel manager so you can easily manage all your booking channels right from your PMS
- Online contactless check-in so you can cut down admin time and provide the self-service guests are asking for
- Features that save time and streamline standardized processes so you can focus on providing an unforgettable guest experience
- Revenue management features so you can maximize your occupancy and revenue year-round
- Task management tools so key preventive maintenance routines don’t slip through the cracks
