7 ways a customized hospitality management solution (HMS) can revolutionize your hotel or travel business

It's a particularly challenging time for the hospitality sector. The industry has worked hard to reinvent itself of late, and its leaders are focused on ways to evolve their businesses—embracing innovation and technology to ensure stability and long-term success.

What is a hospitality management solution (HMS)?

A hospitality management solution is an integrated system that helps streamline the day-to-day administrative, commercial, and operational activities of businesses in the hospitality industry.

Before integrating tech into your hospitality business, there are certain key things to consider. If implemented correctly, it can help optimize routine processes and render them more efficient. Low-code application development has become a leading choice for many businesses owing to its ease of use, cost-efficiency, and quick turnaround time, among other benefits.

By evaluating existing workflows and automating core processes like reservations, event planning, inventory control, pricing, and revenue forecasting—businesses can build a custom low-code solution to improve operations and increase revenue.

Here are seven ways hotel and travel businesses can harness a customized solution, built using low-code technology, to adapt to changing times and achieve resilience.

1. Embrace evolving guest expectations

A great customer experience can only be possible through consistent services across your customer's multistage journey, from reservation to check-out. Automate core processes and build a unified solution that helps your team deliver a consistent experience to your guests through changing conditions.

As properties move toward contactless methods, mobile-friendly and web-based check-ins and check-outs and mobile payments via personal devices have already become the norm. Customers also expect the same self-driven experience across all touchpoints during their stay. Create visibility and ensure your guests' expectations are met while remaining flexible enough to respond to future needs.

2. Maximize the value and revenue potential of every property

Even under the best conditions, hotels are not content to leave rooms empty and let revenue quickly dwindle. Create and nurture new revenue streams by rethinking divided spaces and adapting them to serve evolving needs. Be it guest rooms or outdoor event spaces, track their usage and analyze patterns to increase the profitability of every property you own. Integrate critical systems like property, events, and revenue management to forecast trends.

3. Empower your staff with the tools they need to succeed

One of today's toughest challenges for hospitality leaders is keeping their teams engaged, productive, and focused on giving their customers a consistent, standardized experience across disparate locations. Build a scalable low-code framework that'll help bring everyone together in a single place. Improve collaboration among guest-facing teams like housekeeping, incident management, maintenance, food services, and other operational areas while keeping health and safety precautions at their center.

4. Personalize guest experience and create loyal customers

As technology advances, customer behavior has become more granular. Batch-and-blast direct mails became more personalized and targeted, and interaction and engagement moved to new mediums as customers embraced smartphone technology.

Hospitality needs to embrace new technologies like low-code to build scalable solutions that manage and analyze customer data like visit histories, preferences, and activities. Leverage the intelligence to create incentives and rewards that strengthen your brand and guest relationships by integrating the application with third-party loyalty programs and rewards.

5. Create an integrated, unified solution using low-code

Data-driven and timely decision-making are crucial to creating and maintaining business momentum. Unifying your core business processes with a single, reliable low-code solution helps create a seamless data flow across departments like operations, IT, revenue management, and so on.

Low-code solutions ensure rapid mobile deployment, data reporting and analytics, advanced data security support, and minimal system downtime. Unlike legacy on-premise systems, a cloud-based application can help you stay agile and flexible enough to keep pace with ever-changing market conditions.

6. Efficient data collection and analysis to drive strategy

Hospitality businesses can no longer solely rely on their product or service as their primary competitive differentiator; they must compete to deliver a superior experience. But how do they leverage the data silos they already have and convert them into actionable insights?

Businesses must embrace an open-ecosystem technology like low-code to build a solution with a single point of control over customer data, decisions, and orchestration to execute digital customer experience strategies successfully. Insights on preferred digital channels, previous purchase history, patterns, and intent in the form of structured reports and dashboards can help maintain a frictionless and profitable relationship between the brand and customer.

7. Data security and transaction integrity

The increasing value of data has made industries like finance, the public sector, and hospitality a prime target for cyber crimes and attacks. To safeguard sensitive customer data and establish trust, hotels and travel businesses must create a secure environment for data storage and processing.

Apart from anti-virus software, firewalls, and constant security monitoring, businesses need to make sure the solution they run their processes on is just as safe. Low-code platforms like Zoho Creator come with enterprise-grade security features, end-to-end encryption, built-in privacy controls, and protocols to ensure that your application's data is always safe and secure.

A new era is unfolding

Even before today’s disruptive economic and social shifts, emerging technologies were already upending traditional practices, from check-ins to payments. As the global crisis continues, these technologies are invaluable tools for meeting guest experiences and expectations. Not only are they flexible enough to respond to the situation at hand, but they can also help businesses prepare for what’s to come in the future.

Zoho Creator is a pioneer in the low-code application development space, empowering enterprises across industries for over a decade. With over 13,000 customers across the globe and over six million solutions built on the platform, it continues to empower digital transformations. So what are you waiting for?