Choosing the right property management system (PMS) is challenging, but connecting it with all the other tools you use at your hotel every day can be downright overwhelming. The decision about which PMS to choose sits squarely at the beginning of a domino effect of purchasing decisions. For every opportunity or challenge a hotelier faces, there’s a vendor who can solve it with software. So identifying which integrations you need, plotting out the installments, and planning for ongoing investments in time and money isn’t just about making the PMS purchase , it’s your PMS implementation timeline. And that network of integrated tech should be a critical part of your PMS decision-making process. Because without those key integrations, your shining new PMS is just an isolated island of technology. Your team will be stuck logging in and out of different systems, duplicating data, and wasting time on manual work-arounds.
Channel Manager Integration
Your property management system talks to a channel manager right from the get-go. Imagine arriving at a busy intersection where dozens of roads converge. Your PMS is your traffic light. It tells cars when to stop and go. If you leave this crucial step out of your tech stack, you’ll have chaos with cars going everywhere! Our two-way channel manager automatically tells all other booking sites how many rooms you have left and at what rates. Then when a booking is made on any site, the availability is instantly updated on all the others. This seamless real-time synchronization ensures you’ll never overbook your property. And the best thing? No time-consuming daily rate updating or worries about channels undercutting you. This integration is the second thing you’re going to want to set up during your PMS implementation timeframe. The PMS-channel manager connection typically uses an API key for authorization and data sharing.
Payment Gateway and Processing Systems
Good distribution technology and growing your relationships with the OTAs, GDS, travel agencies, and other booking partners are all for nothing if you’re not getting paid for those bookings. Most PMS solutions integrate with a variety of payment gateways. Though your PMS provider can assist, it is your responsibility to set up and manage the relationship with your gateway provider. Successful onboarding of a payment gateway integration requires attention to detail, but nothing too out of the ordinary. You provide a merchant ID and terminal ID to your PMS provider, who will use that information to work with the payment gateway provider to set up the integration. It is imperative for your PCI compliance, and for your guests’ financial security, that you operate under the parameters set by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Most payment solutions communicate the payment details associated with the guest and/or folio via a token. This token can be used for subsequent charges, so you never store sensitive payment information on your PMS. For your protection, it is strongly encouraged that you require tokenization for your payment setup.
Revenue Management System Connection
Pricing engines can adjust rates not only daily but hourly based on demand, competitor rates, and even local events. But no pricing engine is an island unto itself; it must be integrated with at least the PMS and often with a channel manager and even a hotel CRM. As with the pricing engine, during the implementation timeline, the RMS vendor will work closely with your team to capture your property’s pricing strategies and the rules by which they determine how rates will change according to demand. If you have extra beds, for instance, you might choose to offer the first one for free but charge for the second. Or you might offer incremental discounts when rooms are booked for a week or longer.
Point of Sale and Food & Beverage Systems
As a hotelier, are you used to guests checking out with paper bills two pages long? POS integration can help reduce that shock. Want to eliminate errors caused by manual charge posting? RoomKeyPMS allows you to integrate with most POS systems to automatically post charges to a guest’s room in real time. Customers appreciate the convenience of simply signing for dinner knowing it will be taken care of at check out, and you’ll appreciate no longer charging guests for items they pay for directly with the restaurant or bar. You’ll also get better inventory management and detailed F&B revenue reports as part of the deal.
Guest Communication and CRM Platforms
One important connection to establish if you want to expand your potential guest pool is an online booking engine (OBE). It’s a two-way street: your PMS sends booking engine availability and rates, while the booking engine sends reservation details and new guest profiles. You can choose a standalone engine, one that integrates with your website, or a meta search engine. The integration itself could take as little as a few days, modifying your website to embed the engine. While this linkage is especially important for small to mid-sized hotels needing to reduce time and resources spent on manual data entry and updates, all hotels should want to minimize the booking errors that come with manual processes. Psychologically, this connector is significant as it’s the first outward step in expanding your property’s digital network. People from all over the world can already book your rooms! How cool is that?
Housekeeping and Maintenance Management
Real-time room status updates are a game changer. They let your staff update room status as they work on their mobile devices. The front desk instantly knows which rooms are ready, enabling them to get guests checked in faster. This connection also gives you a clear picture of maintenance and room cleaning requests. The system keeps detailed records, letting you verify resolution and even identifying any recurring issues that might require a long-term solution. Room readiness can be tracked against the housekeeping staff’s availability and their last assignment, decreasing the time rooms must stay vacant. Rooms are automatically marked as Do Not Move, allowing housekeeping to clean stayover rooms without fear of a new guest arriving unexpectedly. Where available, room status can also be made visible to your online booking engine to avoid overbooking or to ensure housekeeping has all the necessary information to manage room assignments.
Planning Your Integration Timeline
Setting up your PMS for success demands attention to detail. The integration landscape of your technology stack, as seen in the number of systems that need to connect to your PMS, is like the cables connecting a professional sound booth , there are many, and they need to be plugged in correctly and precisely. A seamless setup includes connecting your PMS to your channel managers, GDS/IDS systems, website booking engine, door locks, POS systems, and payment processors. Then there’s the system architecture to review. Check if your underlying technology, like routers, switches, or servers, needs an update to handle additional integrations without sacrificing performance. Most importantly, check if your integrations truly are two-way connections. Finding out too late that setup is one-way can be severely damaging to a project timeline. Fixing that usually requires significant modifications to your PMS’s data handling or your integration partner’s software. Smaller properties can get by with doing exports at the end of the shift and re-uploads at the start, but only for so long – a PMS should work at your pace, not slow you down.
