Can Hotel Software Be As Easy to Manage as Your Smartphone?

If I want to manage my money, I can download the Mint app. If I want to manage my image, I'll pop open my Linked In app. If I want to manage groceries, menus, and food budgets, I can download an app for that, and then I can use a different app to have everything I need delivered to my door. I can use my Uber app to get transportation to an event downtown. And I can use any number of messaging apps to coordinate with my house cleaning service, my lawn people, the guy who paints the house, my friends and colleagues… There's an app for medical records and one for finding the best gas prices. I can order books—and anything else I need—on Amazon's app. I can adjust the lights and heating in my apartment. Looking for a date? There are a million apps for that. Syncing up calendars with a friend or partner? There's that, too.

The business of life is complicated, and, yet, I can basically run the whole thing on my iPhone. (And when I do, I'm freed up to spend more time with my people.) Hotels are complicated, but there's no reason they can't be managed from an iPhone either. Actually, we're not suggesting you use your iPhone to manage your hotel, though you could and maybe should, but what if you could pick and choose and customize apps to manage your property with the same ease as a smartphone? Snapshot's new Marketplace aims to do just that.

Where hotels have had overwhelming challenges with managing the software for different aspects of the property is, more often than not, the integration piece. With so many different softwares—some of which integrate and some of which don't—hotels have ended up with a mess of technologies to manage. And they don't all play nicely with one another.

As you well know, hotel software is available for just about everything, but as it stands, each time new software is added, it's a major process. Conference calls, getting buy-in on budget and functionality, contracts and infinite changes, implementations and integrations, and onboarding. And then we multiply this process by so many softwares: from revenue management and housekeeping workflow to travel review management and check-in and checkout technologies. But these things all affect each other. Revenue management is closely tied to guest perception and, therefore, travel reviews can influence rates. Housekeeping workflow is closely tied to check-in and checkout technologies. (Imagine if you can make ancillary revenue when the room comes available early and the guest is notified immediately that for a small fee they can check in right now.) As a result, guest satisfaction may increase, which then influences rate management. SnapShot Marketplace offers one fully integrated space in which to handle all of these interconnected and constantly moving pieces.

Hotels can have a central location where PMS data is already integrated and all applications are available within one single login. Think of it like an iPhone with screens full of apps that can easily be added and removed. And, of course, if you want to create a new app, there's always that option, with access to API documentation that allows a hotel to customize to their exact specs.

If something's not useful, let it go. If you want to try on something new, download it and give it a whirl without having to worry if it integrates with your PMS, and without having to sit through demos all day or spend valuable hours talking to sales people. Which brings up another good point… no more running contracts by the legal department or, worse, riding out contracts on software that isn't working for your property. No more data security concerns to address every time you look at a new piece of software.

All of those basics are set, so hotels just get to play around with what works, making business, dare we say, fun again! And tapping into the crazy potential to change the way we manage hotels in a big way. Every single time we improve the process of managing hotels, you know who wins? The guests. When guests win, we all win.

About SnapShot

Founded in 2012 with the vision to build hospitality's premier data platform independent of any brand or software provider, SnapShot is now one of the largest hospitality data processors in the world, managing transactional data of over 6,000 independent and branded hotels worldwide, with over 45 different connected PMS systems, and growing. With the release of the Hospitality Data Platform, SnapShot enters its third phase, which brings forward its founding vision: a secure data platform, visualization capabilities, and marketplace.

To find out more, please visit snapshot.travel.

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