First hotel PMS: the buyer's checklist

Work through it in order, with a pen. Take it to every vendor demo, ours included. It is vendor-neutral: the questions work on any system, and the table near the end shows our honest answers, including the ones that are not final yet.

Before you start

Hotel

Opening date

Who chooses the system

Deputy for day one

Decision 1. What must your front desk do on day one?

Write the day-one tasks in plain words before you open a single vendor website, then watch each vendor do those tasks with your room types and your rates. A demo on another hotel's data proves very little.

• Take a booking by phone, as a walk-in and from an online travel agency.
• Check a guest in, with a passport for foreign guests.
• Charge a room and extras, take a deposit, and take payment the ways your guests pay: cash, card, QR, transfer.
• Check a guest out and print or send the bill.
• See which rooms are clean, dirty or out of order.
• Close the day.
• A receptionist hired next week could do all of the above after an hour of practice.

Decision 2. How will your bookings arrive?

A PMS runs the hotel. A channel manager is a separate service that pushes your rates and availability to the OTAs and brings bookings back. Some vendors sell both, many sell one. Ask every vendor in writing.

• Which channel managers connect to this PMS, and how? A built-in connection, a connection through an API your channel manager must support, and a spreadsheet are very different amounts of work.
• Who does the work of connecting it, and what does it cost?
• What happens at 11 p.m. when a booking does not arrive?

Decision 3. How will you close the day and count the money?

• Can each cashier shift be balanced by payment method?
• Does the daily close show what it is going to post before it posts?
• After the close, can someone edit yesterday silently?
• Is there a log of who changed what, and when? Ask what it covers.
• Can the close run twice for the same date? What happens if it is interrupted halfway?
• Does it back up before the date rolls, and can you restore it yourself?

Decision 4. What paperwork must the system help with?

In Thailand, a hotel notifies immigration of foreign guests, the TM30 report, within 24 hours of arrival, according to the Thai Immigration Bureau. A system cannot take that duty away from you. It can make the daily list quick to produce and honest about what it does not know.

• It captures passport details at check-in.
• It can produce the day's TM30 list from real check-ins.
• When a nationality or passport field is missing it flags it for staff. It does not guess.
• If you operate or report outside Thailand, you have asked what is supported there.

Decision 5. Who owns your settings, your data and your exit?

• You can change a rate, add a staff user and build a report yourself, without a ticket and without a fee.
• The whole price is on one page: per room, per user, per module, setup fee, change fee, support fee.
• You can export your data in a format a person can open, at any time.
• The written terms say what happens if a payment is late: is access suspended, and is data kept or deleted?
• You know where your data is held and under which agreement. Guest passports are personal data under Thailand's PDPA, so ask for the data processing agreement before you load a single guest.

Work backward from your opening date

We deliberately give no number of days: it depends on how many hours your team can give it. The order does not change.

1. Decide the system and sign.
2. Enter your room types and rooms.
3. Enter your rates and seasons. This is the step people leave until last, and then rush.
4. Create staff users and set what each role may do.
5. Set your booking sources and payment options.
6. Enter test bookings, check a guest in and out, print a bill.
7. Practise a full daily close on test data, at least once, with the person who will do it for real. If you do only one thing early, do this.
8. Produce a test TM30 list from a test foreign guest.
9. Let each staff member do their own tasks with someone watching.
10. On opening day, have one person with nothing else to do except watch the system.

Ten questions to bring to every vendor

1. Show me a booking, check-in, bill and check-out with my room types and rates.
2. How do my OTA bookings arrive, and who sets that up?
3. Can I change a rate, a user and a report myself, today, in the demo?
4. Show me the daily close and the cashier balance by payment method.
5. Show me the log of a change.
6. What is the whole price, on one page?
7. What happens if I stop paying? What happens to my data?
8. Can I export everything?
9. What does it do for Thai immigration reporting, and what does it leave for me to do?
10. Who answers when something is wrong at night, and how fast?

Orca Systems' honest answers, today

The same questions, answered for our own system. Where something is not decided or not built, the answer says so.

Mistakes worth avoiding

• Choosing on the demo. It shows the system at its best, on perfect data.
• Leaving rates until the week of opening. Rates drive everything.
• Paying for modules you will not use in year one. Extras such as energy monitoring and a guest web app can wait until the core system is running well.
• Signing a long contract before you have run a test day.
• Not naming a deputy. Someone will be sick on the night of the first full house.

Before you sign

• I have watched my own day-one tasks done with my own room types and rates.
• I know how my bookings will arrive and who connects them.
• I have seen the daily close and the cashier balance by payment method.
• I have the whole price on one page.
• I know what happens to my data if I stop paying or want to leave.
• I know what the system does for TM30 and what my staff must still do.
• I have a named person and a deputy for the system.

Read the article behind this checklist, or see pricing and book a demo to try your own day-one tasks on ours. A second free check: The Friday Test, nine changes you should be able to make in any hotel system yourself.