The difference between a hotel PMS and a POS
A POS is point of sale software available on the Cloud that allows you to take charge of sales, invoicing and ordering for your restaurant, rooms, activities, meals and hotel boutiques. More than just a simple invoicing software, a POS can integrate with your PMS to take charge of transactions during your client’s stay. Hotel PMS and POS integration generates unique, understandable and coherent invoices for all the services offered in your establishment, which ensures a worry-free and streamlined guest experience. A POS will not only work at your restaurant but for hotel activities, the boutique and room service as well. A POS ensures a connection between your hotel’s various departments, makes you more efficient and helps you offer a flawless high-end experience.
Why a hotel PMS and a POS are essential
In all great teams, each member has a strength:
- The hotel PMS handles room booking while the POS processes restaurant orders.
- The hotel PMS manages room inventory while the POS helps manage restaurant or boutique stocks.
- The hotel PMS notifies you if a room needs to be cleaned or is ready for guests while the POS tells you if a table is available or booked.
If you own a resort, your hotel PMS helps book rooms, but your POS lends a hand with invoicing activities or extras directly to the room to simplify your guest’s experience. From the spa to the restaurant to the bar to the souvenir boutique, the hotel PMS and POS are there at each point of sale to ensure consistent and guest-friendly service.
Better service through hotel PMS and POS integration
PMS and POS integration can offer guests the ultimate experience. Since your hotel provides numerous services and has hundreds of rooms and guests, it can be complicated and difficult to check each one and make sure all services are paid before guests check out. So, to ensure that everything goes smoothly, the restaurant, boutique, room service and concierge can access the POS to provide a unique and complete invoice and enter any purchases. This way, the guests don’t have to carry a credit card during their stay. According to some studies, this freedom gives guests the impression of spending less, which encourages them to spend more. This unique invoice approach makes your hotel staff’s job easier and contributes to a pleasant stay for your guests. Moreover, if guests have a package or a credit flagged in their file, the connection between the different services eases communication and avoids confusion.
The hotel PMS and POS combo ensures the perfect stay
By connecting both your booking system and hotel management to all your points of sale, you can offer a true benefit to your guests. You help them enjoy their stay without having to worry about bills or invoicing errors. With the hotel PMS and POS combo, unpaid bills at your restaurant can be automatically added to a guest’s room invoice. Additionally, you can establish a pre-authorized limit for each room to avoid uncomfortable surprises at checkout. Once the limit is reached, all the point of sales linked to your hotel PMS will be alerted and will prompt the guest to pay directly. In this way, you’re guaranteed to avoid invoices that extend your guests’ ability to pay.
With PMS and POS integration, service centralization offers an invoicing mode that’s unique and clear. You’ll get fewer complaints when guests check out as invoices will be transparent. Fewer complaints at the end of the stay also mean less time spent at the hotel’s reception desk, which guarantees a quick and efficient guest experience.
Your hotel PMS and POS are interdependent and help you manage from your hotel from A to Z by drawing on the strength of both software systems to help your company deliver a more connected and efficient guest experience. And by leveraging the power of solutions like these, you’ll have more time to focus on what you do best: take care of guests so they can enjoy their stay. Want to learn more?