Newcomers to the hotel industry would be forgiven for thinking that a PMS (property management system) is a piece of tech for managing utilities, access, and elevators. It’s not. That’s a BMS (building management system).
“We have our own jargon-centric language in the hotel business, and we assume everybody thinks like we do. Thank heavens they don’t,” commented John Burns, president, Hospitality Technology Consulting.
So, what exactly does a PMS do? Incredibly, ask several experts and no two answers will be quite the same. One reason for this lack of clarity is that, over time, the role of a hotel PMS has been stretched to the point where it is now performing functions that it wasn’t designed for.
Traditionally, front desk agents and receptionists use a PMS to manage day-to-day room inventory, performing tasks like check-in, check-out, billing, payment, and housekeeping.
Now, as hotels focus on the guest experience and maximising total revenue, PMSs are stretching to manage guest data and communications too.
Andrew Pirret, SVP product, Alliants, said: “Historically, the front desk staff play a key role in the guest experience so the PMS has been flexed to accommodate that, by adding custom fields or putting in notes, so when the receptionist is checking a guest in, she can say: ‘Oh Mr Walker, I see you’ve got this booked and that booked.’ It’s been flexed to do the job of a guest experience platform which it wasn’t built to do.”
He added: “We constantly get asked: Can you pop that restaurant or spa reservation back to the PMS? And our question is: Are your restaurant staff using the PMS? No. Are your spa staff using the PMS? No. Then why should everything be in there when it’s only your colleagues on the front desk who see the PMS?”
A customer-focused future
How has this situation come about? Commenting on the origins of the PMS and inventory-centric mindset in the hotel industry, Kevin Edwards, CCO, Nevaya, said: “If we look at the way in which Oracle evolved the PMS, they’ve made it the most important thing, so every hotel is absolutely dependent upon the PMS. Then what happened was that all the competing products felt that they had to compete with what Oracle were doing. This created a huge dependency. And to some degree, from a systems architecture point of view, we started designing systems incorrectly because we’d built dependencies upon the single system.”
“Everything should not revolve around the PMS,” Edwards continued. “It should revolve around the guest interface and the staff interface. All of the systems should almost be micro services that ultimately support the guest journey and the staff’s day-to-day experience.”
Businesses and tech vendors are now realising that old enterprise software is no longer an effective way to keep up with changing customer expectations. Some hospitality operators are turning to MACH architecture to stay customer-centric and future-proof.
The MACH acronym stands for microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless. Headless means that the front-end user experience is completely decoupled from the back-end logic, allowing for design freedom in creating the user interface and for connecting to other channels and devices such as existing applications, IoT, and sensors.
MACH architecture has been deployed by next-gen hospitality brands like Limehome, Placemakr, Blueground and Stay Koook. But it’s not just for cutting-edge newcomers. In the publishing world, for example, MACH architecture has been embraced by The Spectator, Britain’s oldest weekly magazine founded in 1828.
With MACH architecture, every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable and can be continuously improved, according to Sitecore. A MACH structure gives businesses the freedom to choose from the best tools in the market and makes it easy to add, replace, or remove those tools in the future.
Pick and mix API stores
In the hospitality space, several vendors are now offering this type of service. “The move to API stores - whether it’s Mews, Apaleo or Oracle - is a revolution,” said Burns. “Apaleo is positioning itself at one end of the spectrum where there is a fairly small set of core capabilities but a large choice of add-ons. Others are saying: ‘We’re going to have our own proprietary core that’s quite expensive – Oracle is a good example – but then we’re going to add a further layer of optional add-ons through the OHIP (Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform).’”
How is the migration from on-premise legacy PMS systems to more open and agile platforms progressing? Burns observed: “A franchise organisation has limited power to mandate. Even if they do mandate, they have to sell and sell internally through the various committees of owners and operators, to convince people that change is a positive event.”
Vibhu Gaind is the CIO of RBH Hospitality Management, a multi-brand management company with around 50 UK hotels. He sits on various boards including the Marriott Technology Council.
Gaind said: “Our upgrade programme is going really well. 22 sites have been migrated across to a newer generation of PMSs and away from legacy technology. The investment is coming back which makes a huge difference because it takes funds to deploy these solutions. Over Covid, there were challenges in generating capital to do these advancements. Now that investment is returning, we are doing the refreshes, the investment in the Wi Fi networks and the systems.”
He added: “There’s a big piece around training and onboarding which still costs a fair amount of money. And consultancy. It’s not as if you can buy a system off the shelf and it’s ready to go. There’s the configuration, the build, the transfer of data, the training, the onboarding, the handholding and the going live.”
Pirret added: “With our customers mainly being enterprise hotel groups, the considerations and due diligence they have to take in changing a PMS are very large. Will it comply in every region? Interestingly, Accor has gone down a multi-PMS route which gives them more flexibility but it also brings in other challenges as well.”
Geopolitical considerations
Hotel companies are starting to move in the right direction, but it’s a complex process with geo-politics in the mix too.
Shiji’s Enterprise Platform is considered a particularly viable product that has been adopted by operators like Peninsula Hospitality Group and Langham Hospitality Group. But because Shiji is a Chinese company, it’s very hard for North American hotel groups to justify that Shiji’s tech platform is the way to go.
Oracle’s Opera PMS has dominated the market for decades and remains the preferred choice for many global brands. Scott Scott Strickland, EVP & CIO, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, said: “We needed a single PMS that we could deploy globally, and Opera Cloud fit that bill. It’s always up, it has the localisations and it’s easy to use. We can have a complete global consolidated view into our guest’s activity without having to write thousands of interfaces to the property level.”
Apaleo and the smaller PMSs are providing smaller hotel groups with flexible technology, but they are not currently suitable for larger hotel companies.
This means that some of the medium-sized hotel groups are taking longer to adopt cloud solutions and are understandably nervous about the cost of migration and the logistical challenges involved.
Pirret observed: “People have said: ‘What can I do with the systems I’ve got today and manually get around these issues?’ and that’s ultimately how the PMSs have become these de facto guest experience management systems but they are not really built for those needs.”
Removing an old PMS is like getting a knee replacement, said Burns. “You keep delaying and delaying. You know there’s going to be downtime, but you know it’s going to be an improvement when it’s done.”