In these days I'm very desperate for a PMS for a hostel with around 200 beds, because ... I need a holiday and keep myself a little away from the hostel.
What would be your ideal PMS? Here are my thoughts. Do you think any existing PMS is close to it? Or maybe some ideas below are actually not necessary? Please share your thoughts.
1. It should be as flexible as Excel, maybe similar to a formatted excel. I think the one who is very interested at switching to a better PMS is probably using Excel now. If the PMS looks similar to Excel, it will take much less time for learning.
2. ONE single sheet in a calendar format to show all reservations, all checked-ins, all guests with undue balance or paid balance. It sounds quite possible, at least that's what we're doing with excel, and i think many do it in the same way. We only have one single excel sheet for everything and it's very handy. Overall I'm satisfied with Excel, but Excel can't link with the POS system and we have to manually put the receipt number to each booking. It's very inconvenient and makes it hard to check all the receipt every day.
3. Work both online and offline. Front desk is critical and any lagging will easily bring dissatisfaction to impatient guests. Even Gmail can have a moment of server down time, and I'm not sure if any cloud-based pms companies can guarantee that it won't happen. It would be great if an offline client has a sync button or an option to sync every designated period of time with the server.
4. DormProject seems to have a great function to flexibly set a room to be female / mixed / male room. Without this function, I don't know how the Channel Management can automatically tell different channels how many mixed dorm, female dorm and male dorms you can sell. In many PMSs I tried, they don't seem to have an input field for the gender of a guest. In my hostel, when there's a female staying in a dorm, that room will be a female dorm. When a male stays in that room, it automatically becomes a male dorm.
5. Linked with a POS system, so that all payment information is attached to each booking cell.
6. Integrated POS for grocery items and restaurants.
7. A remark note for the booking. Some PMSs don't seem to have a little textfield attached to each booking.
8. Some simple auditing function: Many bookings are made through HW, Paypal and other engines. It makes money received from each guest different. For Paypal users, they've already paid all the room charge before checking in; but for HW guests, they'll usually need to pay 88% of room charge. I think it's a loophole to cheat. While it's probably difficult for a PMS to link up with a paypal account or hostelworld account and validate each booking, it's good enough if I can generate a list of all bookings from a particular source and validate it manually.
9. Deposit management: Maybe some other hostel managers also think of abolishing deposit? It always causes some confusions and troubles when you allow the staff to return money to the guests. I think a good POS should be able to solve it.
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