Switching hotel software without losing a booking: a cutover checklist

The fear is reasonable. Your future bookings, deposits and OTA connections are business you have already sold, and nobody wants a guest to arrive at a desk that has never heard of them. But the risk sits in a few specific places, and each one has a check.

Take these out of your current system, even if your new vendor is doing the import for you. You want your own copy.

• Future reservations, with room type, dates, rate, guest details and booking source.
• Deposits and payments already received for future stays.
• Guest profiles, including contact details and notes.
• Your rooms and room types, with rates and rate plans.
• Company and travel agent accounts, with any balances they owe.
• Unpaid balances on stays that have already checked out.

1. 1

   Choose a quiet day

   Pick a day with few arrivals and departures, away from a holiday weekend.

2. 2

   Pause changes for a few hours

   Take the final export late the night before or early on the day, and note any new bookings on paper until the import has been checked.

3. 3

   Import, then reconcile

   Count reservations, total the deposits and check a sample of bookings by hand against the old system.

4. 4

   Connect the channels

   Connect and test each OTA with a real change before relying on it. Until a channel is connected, keep managing it in its extranet.

5. 5

   Train by role

   Front desk, housekeeping and restaurant staff each learn the screens they will use, on your own rooms rather than a demo property.

6. 6

   Do the first night audit together

   The first end-of-day close is where missing charges and odd balances show up. Have someone who knows the new system there.

It is tempting to keep the old system going alongside the new one. For a day or two it is a useful safety net. For longer, staff enter a booking in one and forget the other, and within a week neither is right. Set a date to stop, and stop.

• Compare each morning's arrivals with the OTA extranets for the first few days.
• Check every checkout bill carefully, especially restaurant charges posted to rooms.
• Confirm that deposits were imported against the right bookings.
• Watch new bookings arrive from each OTA and confirm they land on the calendar.
• Keep a short list of staff questions and go through it at the end of each day.

For a single property with reasonably clean data, a switch usually takes about a week from setup to go-live. Groups, properties with years of untidy data, or hotels changing their rate structure at the same time take longer, and it is better to plan for that than to rush it.

When a property moves to Orian, we do the setup: room types, rooms, rate plans, policies and taxes, and an import of your future reservations and guests from your old system's exports. The importer runs as a rehearsal first and reports every row it cannot read without writing anything; running it again updates rather than duplicates; and an import can be undone if something is wrong.

Your OTA connections are set up with you and tested before cutover, staff are trained on your own setup, and someone from our team is with you through the first check-ins and the first night audit. Read the buyer's checklist for the questions to settle before you get this far.