Your operational infrastructure at hotel level must be right

All the best hotel business development and marketing projects in the world just won’t function optimally if the infrastructure, skills and knowledge base at the hotel level isn’t capable of, or can’t support them.

We regularly experience this in practice, so that part of our project work will always be ensuring that  the prospects of success for the project are fully supported and mirrored at hotel level.  Dependent on the scale of the solution, little or no adjustment to your infrastructure may be required, but as we are as vested in the success of every project as you are, we aim to ensure that maximum operating conditions prevail.

As part of any project. We’ll undertake a brief audit of your current infrastructure, notably knowledge and IT, so that you are not hit with any surprises or unforeseen costs.

One of the key knowledge/skills requirements is in maximising the operational effectiveness of your ecommerce system and function, which is at the core of many projects. We are delighted to say that the training and support offered by Navarino Services in this area is world class, accessible, and free of support costs.

One particular area which often raises issues is the quality of your Property Management System (if you have one), and its ability to integrate with the Sabre/Synxis reservation and distribution CRS. 

Find out which PMS’s integrate with Sabre CRS

Benefits of integration

We cannot emphasise enough how important the efficiency of your core CRS is to your business. Many hotels have what we call PMS vendor links to booking interfaces of all shapes and sizes, usually supplied/controlled by the CMS vendor. The big question is PMS vs. CRS.

A key attribute we recommend hoteliers to focus on is that the PMS is exactly that, a PMS, not a CRS. PMS vendors try to differentiate themselves from other PMS vendors by offering a number of other functionality variables like channel management, booking engine, revenue management, but as we know well, these extra bolt-on’s are often developed to a sub-market standard and never fully developed or ever market leading. How can they be if the PMS vendor is selling the product at below cost just to win the PMS sale. It is the PMS product itself and the service levels the PMS vendor supplies that’s the key, not the bolt-on’s.

Another really important point to remember and take in to consideration; hotels reach out to OTA’s, web marketing, SEO and GDS and use these channels to distribute out and reach new customers. OTA and GDS channels spend a combined millions of pounds a year on customer retention and provide a professional customer engaging booking experience. For a hotel to have a fair chance of converting customers to booking on the hotels website and coming back a second time to booking directly with the hotel, the hotel should deploy a booking engine that provides a booking experience as good as, if not better than, that offered by the referring OTA channel.

If a CRS was to ever produce and market a PMS, the two products would always stand apart, they are two totally separate products and both need to be market leaders, developed and addressing their market segments and serviced accordingly.

The Navarino CRS has an uptime of 99.98% and most PMS have real time availability less than 96% of the time. There are so many issues effecting PMS stability and functionality, as example, CRS 99.98% up-time = 105 minutes downtime per year whereas PMS uptime of 99.50% up-time = 2,630 minutes downtime per year. As I say most PMS vendors are unable to sustain a stable and reliable connection of more than 96%+ and so the example would be even more dramatic.

Booking engine functionality – advantages of CRS over PMS

It is in our best interests, and yours, to maximise hotel efficiency in the areas crucial to your project success. We’ll work with you to ensure that all the boxes are ticked, recommend solutions where required, and ensure your key staff are trained in and fully conversant with all the disciplines necessary to ensure that your project is a complete, and continuous, success. Again – together we will make a difference.