How to Build Custom Hotel Management Software: Benefits, Features, and Cost

The thriving and highly competitive hospitality industry is facing new levels of challenges due to sudden changing demands. From providing exceptional visitor experiences to upholding operational coherencies, the hotel industry is faced with continual navigation of approaching the latest trends and utilizing modern emerging technologies. Some common issues that are foreseeable include achieving excellent occupancy rates, managing digital bookings, cancellations, and reschedulings, optimizing pricing per season or festival, ensuring streamlined pricing tactics, and ensuring cross-departmental communication.

Hence, more and more businesses are opting for custom hotel management software development to streamline their overall operations and increase the convenience of guests. A custom hotel management software (HMS) is your magic wand for exceptional command and functionalities customized as per your requirements. The hotel management software development services are the ultimate strategic solution to these minute and major hotel squabbles. HMS integrates a variety of operational aspects into one platform, empowering hoteliers to efficiently manage their operations, and improve their guest satisfaction level.

Benefits of Software for Hotel Management

Custom software development for the hospitality industry has grown leaps and bounds in the last few years. More and more businesses are opting for custom hospitality management system software due to its high-performing capabilities. Check out some of the many benefits it offers for your business:

1) Enhanced Customer Service

Developing custom web-based hotel management software opens avenues for instantly accessing your booking records, guest responses, and any special requests. This software can also be employed for sending automatic SMSes, WhatsApp messages, confirmation emails, reminders, and push notifications, to keep in touch with your customer base and keep them aware about upcoming offers and promotions.

2) Inventory Management

This is one of the best things you can streamline with a personalized hotel management system. From tracking hotel supplies to managing in-house product stocks, kitchen supplies, room availability, price, and occupancy fluctuations, your HMS can do it all efficiently. This will help you plan your pricing better and make smart, data-driven decisions about best utilizing your resources.

3) Streamlined Reporting

Efficiently manage and simplify all your reporting processes by rendering intricate reports on monthly revenues, annual expenditures, and occupancy rates. They analyze your overall workload data and identify potential areas for remedies and improvements.

4) Computerized Bookings

More and more travel apps and websites are encouraging digital bookings to avail of exclusive discounts and coupons. Integrating hotel booking software enables you to completely automate your bookings. This helps in enhanced management of available rooms, accepts/rejects booking requests, enables multiple payment gateways, and enables quick check-in and check-outs. Not only does it get rid of the tedious manual booking processes but it also saves a tonne of time and additional labor resources.

5) Monetization Opportunities

Enjoy the increased revenues that come as a complementary advantage of custom software development for the hotel industry. Play around with dynamic pricing, and add different promotional offers, and long-stay discounts for frequent travelers using your HMS. A tailored hotel management app helps you pinpoint potential software outsourcing trends to make smart strategic decisions for progressing your hotel business.

Must-Have Features of Hotel Management Software

Whenever you collaborate with dedicated software developers to develop a bespoke hotel management system, it's essential to identify the primary features that need to be integrated. By selecting a solution that feeds with a thorough set of features, you'll automatically focus on providing better guest experiences and streamline all your hotel's operations effortlessly. Let's check out the potential features to implement in your HMS:

1) Cross-Platform Compatibility

In the digital realm, where everything has an online footprint, ensuring your app and platform perform smoothly across different devices is extremely important. Whatever software solution you get developed from your chosen custom software development company, ensure it's mobile-friendly and otherwise intuitive for web browsing. Your hotel management system should be accessible to your staff via their devices, enabling them to overview all operations in real-time.

2) Consolidated Booking Management

Your custom hotel management software should allow you to centralize all your reservations in one place seamlessly. From easy room checking availability to altering previous reservations, checking monthly booking metrics, and making new reservations, all should come together in one place.

3) Staff Management

Managing and tracking the overall hotel's and its branches' housekeeping tasks and staff is a challenging situation. Hence, it's vital to ensure that your online hotel management system has a separate module that's completely dedicated to monitoring housekeeping schedules, cleaning duties, and other inventory tracking.

4) Tracking Inventories

After staff, we dive right into inventory management. Tracking inventory levels, placing new orders, and restocking other regular supplies as required is a compulsory feature that needs to be added to your hotel inventory management software. It ensures that you never run out of your essential items, and maintain an adequate stock of mandatory items like soaps, towels, linens, shampoos, cleaning items, and more.

5) Analytics and Reporting

Enabling modern reporting and analytics capabilities into your HMS helps you generate instant reports and examine data to encourage more educated business decisions. Create and send reports on total sales, incomes, bookings, occupancy metrics, salaries, bills, and receipts, in addition to analyzing data to spot any anomalies or patterns for improving them in the future.

6) PABX

This is essentially a third-party service that is a part of the Call Accounting Interface, utilized for managing daily call records that are entered into your hotel management system. This feature enables the hotel to easily track every call, bill guests utilizing phone services, and provide your guests with a better experience, all while reducing telecommunication costs.

7) Third-Party Integrations

This is not just one of the benefits of custom software development but also a vital feature to be implemented inside your HMS app. Enabling third-party integrations helps you connect with a myriad of online travel agencies (OTAs) and global distribution systems (GDS). You will also need to integrate with different point-of-sale systems to enable streamlined billing processes. Other third-party services include different payment gateways, digital wallets, CRM systems, and AI tools.

8) Channel Management

This is an integral part of software development frameworks and is used for synchronizing inventories with different digital travel agencies like Agoda, Makemytrip, Tripadvisor, and more. To completely utilize your custom hotel management software and interact with different OTAs, encourage your dedicated software developers to integrate the HMS with them using APIs. This two-way API connectivity verifies that the data is sent live across every channel. Likewise, to drive the booking function as smoothly as possible, it is essential to give OTA associates full access to vacancy data. So when your potential clients visit other channels, they can view all your available rooms and reserve them. It is also vital to note that most distribution agents work with a bunch of properties, and if your systems are facing a technical glitch, they can deny your request. Hence, keep all your vital details, such as pricing, room availability, and payment methods, accurately configured and uploaded.

Cost to Develop a Custom Hotel Management Software

The cost of designing customized hotel management software (HMS) differs substantially based on several criteria. There are a lot of factors,, such as feature complexity, type of platform (web-based, mobile app, or cloud-based solution), size and location of the development team, and more. Let's check out the estimated cost breakdown.

• Standard HMS

For your generic or mainstream hotel management software, features like a basic reservation system, front desk administration, invoice generation, billing, and standard reporting are provided by companies. Estimated Costs: $18,000 to $60,000.

• Intermediate HMS

This is your medium- or mid-range hotel management software, which comprises separate housekeeping management, integration with POS and OTAs, customer relationship management tools, and advanced booking systems, along with predictive analytics. Estimated Costs: $45,000 to $1,50,000.

• High-End HMS

This is an all-inclusive and scalable solution for hotel management software that can be curated by hiring software developers and adding scalable features. Features such as multi-property management, data insights, custom reporting, high-level security, extensive integration capabilities, and more such capabilities are a part of this solution. Estimated Costs: $200,000 and above.

Conclusion

Building any custom hotel management software needs a lot of research, planning, and a hefty amount of investment. But the results are beneficial in the long run. It's important to define all your needs clearly before starting the development process and address the pain points, possible features, and how they can enhance your overall hotel's operations. You should also consider future growth perspectives and select a solution that can scale according to changing needs and market demands. Concentrate on producing a reflexive and user-friendly interface for both the team and visitors. It's also important that you implement robust security measures to safeguard your client data, sensitive guest information, or anything else that could hamper property privacy.

By carefully evaluating features, expense factors, and expansion strategies, you can assemble an influential tool that facilitates operational efficiency, improves visitor experiences, and eventually propels revenue for your inn. If you're still confused about how to start building your HMS app, then connect with our experts at Hyperlink InfoSystem. Being a leading software development company, they specialize in developing multiple apps for the travel and hospitality sectors. Remember, a custom HMS is an asset to the future of your hospitality enterprise.