Leveraging Mobile Technology to Combat 5 Common Hotel Operational Hiccups – stayntouch

Hiccup 3: Overwhelming Administrative Work

For the hospitality industry, administrative work is the very definition of a necessary evil. While hotels require a certain amount of repetitive paperwork to function, too much can contribute to employee burnout and stand in the way of engaging staff-guest interactions. 

No guest wants to talk to a staff member who is constantly buried in their screen, and no hotel employee started a hospitality career with the dream of doing paperwork. Fortunately, a cloud-native PMS can automate many common administrative tasks, such as room assignment, payment collection, report scheduling, and bulk check-in/ check-out, leaving staff with more time to serve their guests. 

Hiccup 4: Overwhelming Number of Guest Requests

Traditional landline telephones are a terrible way to manage guest requests in today’s operational environment. Travelers shouldn’t have to downgrade to 1990s technology just to order room service or an additional turndown. Nobody likes being put on hold while a staff member tries to answer the phone or transfer a call, and answering calls takes the associate away from serving other guests. As demand for travel increases, so does the frequency of these delays, causing staff to feel overwhelmed and guests to feel underappreciated. 

Integrating a cloud PMS with a mobile guest messaging platform will allow guests to instantly communicate with staff through their preferred app on their mobile device (Facebook, SMS, Whatsapp, etc), while staff will be able to handle multiple message threads simultaneously. Choosing a guest messaging system with a natural language AI can streamline this process even further by automating answers to common guest questions, thus saving employee bandwidth for more complicated requests.