Hilton, InterContinental, Starwood and Golden Tulip have all made strides in the past year in consolidating their property management systems and integrating the systems with other technology components, all of which will enhance distribution and guest data capabilities.
Property management systems are the technology used by hotels to manage inventory and guests. While the most obvious implications of reducing the number of PMS platforms across their hotel brands to have a common data source are internal, benefits from better efficiency eventually trickle down to corporate travelers and travel buyers.
"As a traveler and a hotel guest, you want to get access to your rates, you want the hotel to recognize you in the most up-to-date, real-time manner," said Tim Unwin, vice president of business development in reservations services for Dallas-based Pegasus Solutions. "Integration is important to ensure a hotel is able to deliver accurate information out to the distribution world."
Hilton Hotels Corp. once had a patchwork of property management systems because the company did not have a consistent PMS product to put in place, making it difficult to communicate data across the company, said Greg Cross, Hilton senior vice president of revenue management.
Once Hilton acquired the Doubletree and Hampton brands, it was able to ramp up their system to operate large hotels. Since 2001, it has used that common system across the chain, Cross said. Most hotels in North and South America have been converted. With Hilton's merger with its international arm
(BTN, Jan. 23, 2006), the goal to do so across the company continues. "We're looking at the further ability to integrate the property management system with all other systems like revenue management, sales and catering," Cross said. "From a customer perspective, we can do all sorts of analysis: how much revenue each individual customer generates, how it is spent and what items are popular."
InterContinental Hotels Group, meanwhile, has reduced its number of property management systems globally from 26 to less than a half-dozen, said Gustaaf Schrils, IHG's vice president of global technology in the Americas. As of December 2006, IHG completed a project to move 2,850 of its 3,500 hotels worldwide to the Micros-Fidelio Opera system. The change allows for better integration with the central reservation system, improved capture of guest preferences and easier management of the rate code, which all vary on room type and rate type, be it negotiated, rack or government, he said.
"There's a complexity to having each particular room type with matching, corresponding rate codes, both in the property management system and the central reservation system, and that needs to be accurate no matter what channel you go to," Schrils said. "Having a ubiquitous environment allows us to ensure that we have accurate inventory, accurate rate quotes and provide a perfect match for the desire to all our loyalty guests."
Schrils pointed to another trend of managing systems out of a central location rather than within each hotel. It's another method of improving consistency, and such negotiated items outside of rates as free high-speed Internet access can be managed out of a centralized system, he said.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts has moved toward centralizing some of its property management systems, as well as other technology resources, in its hotels that share a geographic location, according to Gustaf Burman of Starwood's IT division.
"In New York, for example, we have about five or six hotels running on one property management system," Burman said. "We do that when we own our hotels. In a multiple management scenario, we sometimes do not, due to the issues of data security."
There are studies underway looking at more centralization opportunities in Europe, but it's not always feasible even outside of management issues, he said. When Starwood acquired Le Meridien Hotels & Resorts, there were 12 hotels in a centralized environment, but the cost of that outsourcing proved less worthwhile than putting the systems back into the hotels.
Starwood hotels in North America and parts of Asia and Latin America are on Galaxy Hotel Systems, a Starwood-purchased property management system. In Europe and the Middle East, they operate on the Opera system. Because property management systems can communicate with central reservations, such data as guest preferences can be passed from hotel to hotel regardless of the property management system, he said.
At the end of last year, Golden Tulip Hospitality announced that it selected Amadeus to provide a central, multiproperty platform for its property management system. Amadeus can host both the property and revenue management systems remotely through an application service provider and will be able to optimize information delivery across borders as the company, with more than 500 hotels, expands. "We have embarked on an ambitious growth phase which will see us expanding to, and within, many markets," according to Riko van Santen, director of information and communications technology and electronic distribution for Golden Tulip. "It is essential that this growth is founded on next-generation technology."
In a recent speech to the Hospitality Financial & Technology Professions in Amsterdam, Fidelio co-founder Keith Gruen said that in the future, there will be no point in having separate systems for central reservations and property management, as application service providers will be the primary method of delivering software
"This new system will be the most critical piece of technology that hotel companies use," Gruen said. "It will have to include all the typical PMS features such as checkin, checkout, guest invoices, housekeeping and night audit."
Such organizations as the Open Travel Alliance and Hotel Technology Next Generation also have set up standards for these interfaces to aid in this interconnectivity, Pegasus' Unwin said. In the end, integration will be prevalent enough that property management systems that cannot support it will be at a competitive disadvantage, he said. "They're starting to think beyond the pure boundaries of what happens within a hotel, so you're seeing those boundaries start to blur," Unwin said.