What is a hotel PMS? A plain-English guide for hotel owners

A hotel property management system (PMS) is the software that holds the facts your hotel runs on: which rooms you have, who is booked into them and for which nights, what each guest owes, and whether each room is clean. Everything else, from your channel manager to your restaurant till, either feeds it or reads from it.

If you run your property from a paper diary, a spreadsheet or the Booking.com extranet, you already have a PMS. It just lives in your head, and it only works when you are there.

Vendors draw the line in different places, but a PMS worth the name covers six jobs.

1. 1

   Reservations

   A calendar of rooms against nights, where a booking can be created, moved, extended or cancelled, and where two guests can never be given the same room on the same night.

2. 2

   Front desk

   Check-in and check-out, guest details and identity documents, room assignment, deposits and payments.

3. 3

   The guest bill

   Every charge for a stay in one place, usually called the folio: the room, the restaurant, the minibar, the airport pickup, and what has already been paid.

4. 4

   Room status

   Which rooms are occupied, vacant, dirty, clean or out of order, so housekeeping and the desk work from the same picture.

5. 5

   Night audit

   The end-of-day close that posts the night's room charges, marks no-shows and freezes the day's figures.

6. 6

   Reports

   Occupancy, average daily rate, revenue per available room, arrivals and departures, and who owes you money.

Very few hotels run on a PMS alone. These are the systems around it, and the question to ask about each one is whether it shares the PMS's data or keeps its own copy.

• Channel manager. Sends your rates and availability to Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia and Airbnb, and brings their reservations back. Read what a channel manager does.
• Booking engine. The booking page on your own website, where guests book without an OTA commission. See how direct bookings work.
• Point of sale. The restaurant and bar till. In a hotel it has to post a bill to a guest's room. See what a hotel POS needs.
• Payments. Card terminals, payment links and deposits.
• Accounting. Your accountant's books, usually fed by an export at month end.
• Guest messaging. Confirmations, pre-arrival messages and requests by WhatsApp or email.

When these are separate products from separate vendors, the gaps between them become work for your staff: a restaurant bill typed onto a room by hand, a rate changed on Booking.com but not on your website, a room sold twice because two systems each thought it was free.

• You have given the same room to two guests, or moved a guest because an OTA sold a night you had already filled.
• Checkout means adding up restaurant slips and the minibar on a calculator.
• Rates are changed in three or four places, and one of them is always out of date.
• Housekeeping finds out which rooms to clean from a WhatsApp group or a shout down the corridor.
• You cannot say, without an hour of work, what occupancy and revenue look like for next month.
• Only one person really knows how bookings work, and the hotel struggles when they are off.

Any one of these costs money every month. Two or more usually cost more than the software that would fix them.

Older systems are installed on a computer at the hotel. Most modern ones run in the cloud and open in a web browser, which means updates arrive without an engineer's visit, owners can check the figures from anywhere, and a broken front desk computer can be replaced by any other device.

The trade-off is the internet connection. Ask any cloud vendor exactly what your desk can see and do when the connection drops, and whether staff can keep working from a phone on mobile data.

• One shared inventory, so the desk, your website and the OTAs cannot each sell the same room.
• A calendar you can work quickly: drag to move a booking, with a clash check before anything is saved.
• Restaurant and extra charges that post to the room automatically.
• Room status that housekeeping updates from a phone.
• Tax and service charge set up the way your country and your invoices need them.
• Your data exportable at any time, without a fee.
• Support from people who answer in your time zone.

Our buyer's checklist turns these into questions to ask on a demo.

Orian HMS is a PMS with the rest of the hotel built onto the same data: reservations, the front desk, housekeeping, a restaurant POS, a commission-free booking engine, a channel manager, a guest app and the accounting behind it. Because there is one set of data, a restaurant bill lands on the room the moment it is settled, and a room booked on your website is closed for every other channel in the same action.

We set it up with your own rooms, rates and existing bookings before you go live, which typically takes about a week for a single property.