Changing your property management system is not for the faint of heart. But don’t let fear of the unknown keep you stuck in a bad relationship with an underperforming pms. Give it to the count of 5 (minutes that is), and you’ll gain the insight you need to make a smooth transition. Let’s break down the pms implementation timeline step by step. What are you waiting for? It’s time to cut the cord and start the race to system success!
Why Hotels Switch Property Management Systems
These days, some property management systems use more open approaches to guest information. During training sessions on any new software, it’s important to underscore the purpose of these systems, delivering single guest profiles available to everyone with permission to view them. Helping your employees understand that standard feature can go a long way in easing their concerns. All PMS providers will conduct one or more online discovery calls with you. Your goals for these meetings should be to outline your property’s unique features, explain your existing business practices, and convey the software qualities you consider necessary. When your PMS implementation will begin with virtual training, it can be a good idea to request a degree of face-to-face interaction with your provider’s training team.
Phase One: Discovery and Planning (Weeks 1 to 4)
All this intel lets you make the business case for migration. Set your budget, considering acquisition costs, onboarding fees, and ongoing subscription or maintenance expenses. Calculate ROI based on time savings and error reduction, for example, with an automated booking engine that links direct to your website. Plan the migration timeline carefully to coincide with your low season and avoid business interruption.
You will also determine the quantity and quality of the data you currently use. How many guest profiles are in your pms? Are the reservation records clean and complete? For a week or more, bad data migrates as bad data, so schedule time to scrub duplicates and correct errors in advance. From your organization, you will assign a project champion, someone who can make choices and hold everyone in your team accountable. This would be your new supplier for the liaison and the pms implementation timetable.
Phase Two: Vendor Selection and Contract (Weeks 5 to 8)
Next, schedule a conference call with your top employees from various departments to identify your specific goals for this new system. What problems do you hope it will solve or what opportunities might it create? The front office wants to improve guest interaction, and the marketing team seeks better data to drive revenue. Housekeeping wants less paperwork. Engineering needs routine maintenance and repair monitoring. F&B would love to do more with food costing and inventory control. How would you like it to integrate with your current accounting system? What is your budget? How important are mobile options to you?
Integration capabilities should be top of your list of pms selection criteria. You’re probably going to keep all your other software services when you migrate to a new property management system. So, it has to integrate perfectly with all of them, including your booking engine, channel manager, payment processing, not to mention any other tools you love and won’t give up. Get your shortlist of prospects together, then ask the vendors how they could integrate with your current systems. Ask for case studies and references. It’s a critical element of the contract too. So not getting the features and functions you need around this is likely going to be what you remember your biggest pms implementation failure. The only hidden integration costs should be any additional fee for a rushed job you insist on. Nothing else. Make sure you get a clear statement of the vendor’s proposed solution, the costs, and the factors that could extend the time it takes to integrate systems. It’s one of the price negotiation points you’ll want to discuss before putting your signature on the line. And detailing in the context the work for each party and what’s expected in terms of performance keeps the very best vendors honest. Even your last pms should have had the ability to import and export customer details, commissions, and reservations from and to your existing apps. There was no real ease of collaboration or efficiency improvement if it didn’t. How did you find it post contract stage to relax a little after all those initial promises and a smooth sales pitch? Hopefully, as it’s a buyer’s market in the pms world today, you’ll have vendors on their toes, doing what they say they will do, and not hesitating over your commitment to walk if they don’t. No good vendor will let you downwork. Get it in the contract, specifically.(DialogInterface shortened)
Phase Three: Configuration and Data Migration (Weeks 9 to 16)
The direct data conversion & application setup is only the beginning. Let’s call this the mass waltz of data. In this phase your new system gets to know your property inside out from guest profiles to your valuable AA and company profiles. Then together you identify what will be left behind in the old roomKey system.
After the vendor assures you that all your original data can map to the new database, it’s time to start the actual migration process. Your historical data will go through a “test migration” first. This is a scaled-down version of the process during which the integrator takes a subset of your full data and populates the new system. This way, you’ll be able to see potential problems before they can cause serious damage or delays. Then, there will be at least one more test migration once all your data goes over to your new system. This is where things get really serious. Because changes will affect your program’s operation, user acceptance testing often takes place during this final trial. Make sure the hotel software provider has tools in place that will let you quickly and easily locate mismatches in the data. If not, there’s plenty of software available that will.
Phase Four: Training and Testing (Weeks 17 to 20)
Teaching a generation of employees used to intuitive software, the ins and outs of a property management system is not easy. However, here’s the big secret: even the most user-friendly PMS isn’t intuitive. No one opens up a PMS for the first time and is immediately able to navigate its many dashboards and fields. It’s a complex system tailor-made to the specific needs of your hotel, they don’t come with a one-size-fits-all manual.
Performing all-encompassing tests makes the most sense. Once you think you have everything set up correctly, it’s time to push all the buttons and turn all the dials. Run through every daily task the system will handle and see the results. Far better to learn you missed a step now than when a queue of guests is forming and your open-for-business adrenaline is surging. Testing automation is your friend, and you’re looking to push your system through thousands of scenarios to expose those sneaky bugs. Your hotel staff must be highly involved at this point and, they must take it seriously. How seriously? You might remind them that discovering flaws now could save hours of hassles and embarrassment later. A well-designed pms will make a perfect checking account mess up near impossible, but faulty data inputs can throw billing badly out of whack.
Phase Five: Go-Live and Stabilization (Weeks 21 to 24)
My advice? No matter how long you’ve been prepping, anticipate that the final weeks and days will be intense. Everyone will be running on adrenaline, caffeine, and short tempers. Stress rolls downhill, so make sure your team knows you have their backs. Most issues can be resolved quickly if you empower your staff to make decisions on the spot. Trust that you’ve adequately trained them, and that they’ll follow your procedural documentation. If you do all this, go-live will be the breeze you dream of.
These lines show the importance of a well thought out implementation process. Post-launch issues are a given no matter how well you plan. But with the right hotel PMS vendor they don’t overwhelm. A good partner will be in the trenches with you, listening and making the adjustments you need. A software upgrade isn’t a few weeks of inconvenience but a big leap forward in your business. The right vendor helps you reap the benefits faster. They should be available to help guide release of “big rocks,” of portions of your system that will have a big impact on operations but require detailed testing. Guest history details are an example of a big rock. Assure your host pms implementation checklist has them scheduled, or that you’ve asked what other upcoming big rocks you should prepare for. Considering that September normally is the beginning of slower season for most markets, it’s an ideal month for a big install. It gives you a full month to shake don the bugs before high season starts. Ideally your hotel pms integrations layer should already be designed and wrapped up with the interface. If you’re a large operation, you can expect the interface to be about a one-month task. Be sure you run a connectivity workshop during the off-cycle of the implementation timeline. Even if you’re smaller, your go-live processes should already be scheduled to begin October 1st. Testing with the hotel PMS form grabbers and evaluators should be solidly underway by now.
