The document discusses the importance of property management systems (PMS) in modern hotels. It notes that as the hotel industry has become more competitive, maintaining quality and motivated staff is challenging. PMS software helps address this by automating repetitive tasks to reduce employee boredom and workload. The software acts as a centralized system, recording all employee actions for accountability. While upfront costs and training may be barriers, PMS is now considered essential for hotels to streamline operations and maximize profits in a technology-driven industry.

1. Hotel Property Management System: concept notes
If somebodysays today that computers are important, then it will be the
greatest understatement of the century!
Computers are not just important; they have becomethe foundation, the
network, the structure, and the lifeline of modern civil society.
Hotels are an essential part of the modernbusiness world. Therefore, the
connection betweencomputers and the hotel industry becomesvery clear.
As a student of a professionalhotel management course, you shall need to
dig a bit deeperto fully grasp the power of computers and how it simplifies
and drives complexoperations, as well as maximizing revenue and profits.
Let us first establisha link between what you have studied till the first year
and what is going to be your first chapter in the second year. 1st year
learning introduced you to the beginning of tourism, hospitality, and its
connections with factors like transport, money (as a medium of
exchange), government (supportwith security and safety) and modern
companies sending its executives around the world in search of new and
more profitable markets. You also understood that these executives are
allowed to stay in the bestof luxury accommodations in order to improve
their productivity and preserve their physical health. You also understood
that the stresses of the modern life, hectic work schedule, make it
necessaryfor the managers and business leaders to take a break from the
routine life. Once again, these breaks are taken at a luxurious Resort. you
learnt about Hotel organization, the differentdepartments carrying out
differentresponsibilitiesand completing a big range of tasks. How these
differenttasks are interrelated and interdependent, making interaction
between individuals and teams unavoidable. And you learnt about the
guest cycle of modern Hotel operations.
We will connectthe link of the PropertyManagement System with the
guest cycle to make the purpose of having computers in the hotel very
clear and obvious.
We understood through the guest cycle that mostof the hotel tasks
repeat. Any personoccupying any postat the entry level positions has to
keep doing the same task again and again. This repetitive routine makes
a work monotonous and tiresome after spending about 2 to 3 years. When
the work becomes boring, it is natural for human beings to start to avoid
them. This avoidance of work results in poor quality work and leads to
guest dissatisfaction. A dissatisfied guest, in this age of all forwarding
social media, is a very dangerous threat to the reputation of any business
in the market. History has proved that human beings do not like being

2. controlled for too long and bored employees canonly be pushed to a
limited extent. Managers therefore have a very difficultresponsibility.
Maintaining the quality of work with de-motivated, dissatisfied staff is
tough. I encourage you to study the concepts of Human Resource
Management to understand the topic better.
In a highly competitive industry like hotels, restaurants etc.
Compromising on the quality of the work is just not acceptable. Very soon
we would be driven out of the market. The answer to de-motivated staff is
the conceptof automation and artificial intelligence. Simply speaking, we
replace the efforts of human beings with machines, robots, computers,
artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology, whenever it is possible.
When it is not possible to replace human beings altogether, we add to their
capacity with the help of technologyas listed above.
Property Management System, which is a specially designed computer
software suite, helps the employees to do their tasks with minimum effort,
time and stress.
Allow me to explain the word suite here.
you all we have studied Suite rooms in first year. A suite room contains
more than one room. similarly p m s also includes more than 1 software.
These software are prepared by differentvendors and then connected to
each other with the help of API. Here is a link to a video which explains API
in a very simple manner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7wmiS2mSXY
If you can understand why a hotel gets divided into many departments,
then the departmentgets broken down into sections. Each sectionmay
contain more than one job position, each job fulfilling a different
requirement, either of the external guest or the internal guest. Then it is not
difficultto understand the organization of a Property Management System.
Departments become modules. Sections in the departmentit becomes
sub-models. Each sub module further has many sections, each
corresponding to the task performedby one job positionor an employee.
The physical world gets converted into a virtual world.
The PMS has great security features to prevent frauds, errors, thefts
and sabotage. Every employee has a unique login ID and personally
selected password.Every action they perform inside of the software gets
recorded and can be used as evidence against an employee should there
be any suspicious entries, manipulations, copying of data and deleting
data.

3. PMS is essentialfor hotels and is now well understood.The only
limiting factors that may prevent a hotel from automating its operations are
the money available for purchase and the skill level of the current
employees.
The next thing that is important is the brand. I have only worked on a
single brand of Hotel PMS which is I D S fortune. so I cannot really
compare the two brands of Hotel PMS. But I have definitely worked on
multiple digital audio workstations, but once again only the free versions.
What I have noticed is that the paid software contains more features and is
easy to work with. The most expensive PMS brand that I know of is Opera
by Micros, a German company.
Finally I would like to conclude with a short paragraph on the operating
system to be used. Today, for personal computers there are three main
operating systems;
Apple iOS
MicrosoftWindows
Linux
I would encourage my students to learn more about the Linux operating
system. It is a revolution that challenged the dominance of the big 2
brands; Apple and Microsoft.
We shall have more of such short simple notes to help you in appreciating
the functioning of a modern hotel better so that one day you would happily
become apart of it and be proud of yourself. Good luck!
Presented by; Praveen Jha
Senior lecturer,
Institute Of Hotel Management, Hajipur ( Patna), Bihar.