Tech Thursday: 23 Award-Winning Hospitality Technology Providers That Drive Growth
Hotels and venues are complex to run, advertise, and market. But the right tools can help improve all aspects of the process. From increasing up-sells to providing high-tech guest experiences, the award-winning hospitality technology providers listed below have all your bases covered. First though, let’s cover why this software is so critical.
What is hospitality integrated technology?
Any digital tool you use to support the daily operations of your hotel or venue counts as hospitality integrated technology. Tasks such as guest data collection, revenue management, and marketing can all be completed with these industry-specific programs.
What types of PMSs are used for hotel operation?
Property Management Systems are a type of hospitality integrated technology that offer comprehensive solutions for hotels and venues. Here are the four main types you can expect to use when categorizing PMSs. Many fall into more than one category but for the most part, you can count on the following distinctions:
- Operations: From checking in guests to booking events, this type of PMS makes day to day tasks both trackable and measurable for any size team.
- Marketing: These usually cover all physical and digital promotional efforts associated with the property.
- Revenue Management: Sales managers rely on this PMS type to monitor profits and budgeting.
- Guest Experience: This customer centric, hospitality integrated technology provides solutions like transactions, front desk communication, and housekeeping requests.
Now that you know what they are, here are the most highly recommended programs to suit your hotel and venue needs.
Explore the 23 Best Hospitality Technology Providers
The programs on this list are prestigious award-winning, industry recognized powerhouses.
The Operations Hospitality Technology Providers
Looking for help with the day to day responsibilities of running a hotel and/or venue? These tools have you covered.
1. Social Tables
What It Is: Social Tables simplifies event planning and setup with the world’s cleanest, easiest-to-use event design solution. The software empowers employees to diagram with to-scale floor plans, and streamline catering operations with visual seating. Your staff can even get additional check-in support from Social Tables for large events. And, enjoy no-stress onboarding for new employees.
Quick Tip: Easily share, print, and collaborate with teammates on always up-to-date diagrams. When you add collaborators they can see diagrams as you move seats around in real-time.
2. ClockPMS
What It Is: ClockPMS’s tool gives you a reservation system, event management solutions, and restaurant & bar POS systems. They also make it easy to check guests in and out using mobile devices. You can even monitor real time housekeeping updates and manage rates, all in one tool.
Quick Tip: The brand has published a quick start guide if you’d like to take a sneak peek at what the transition would look like.
3. ALICE
What It Is: The ALICE platform is most helpful with employee and guest communication, across multiple departments simultaneously, to create better customer service experiences all around. Brands like Samsung appreciate their project implementation features the most, claiming that ALICE is best in the business for this particular area.
Quick Tip: Forbes suggests that this tool is especially useful for providing consistently excellent guest experiences because of its ability to facilitate communication quickly and easily.
4. Quore Cleanings Plus
What It Is: While Quore offers a wide range of PMS solutions, they were most recently recognized for their Cleanings Plus segment of the program. Tailormade to assist housekeeping departments, Quore Cleanings Plus offer real time room updates, inspections, department-wide reporting, and on-demand maintenance request tracking.
Quick Tip: Users say preventative maintenance tasks, rounds and shift tracking, and guest communication is especially easy with this tool.
5. GuestRevu
What It Is: If you care about what your guests think about you, then GuestRevu can help you. Their hospitality tech tool helps you quickly analyze your digital reputation, survey guests, and monitor reviews on leading sites like TripAdvisor. Guests don’t always speak their minds freely when they’re on your property, but when criticism of your brand or building is written online, GuestRevu helps you capture the complaint and immediately work to find a solution.
Quick Tip: Their guide to direct guest feedback has some great pointers no matter how much experience you have in hospitality.
6. HelloShift
What It Is: Text communications are used by almost every industry, so why shouldn’t hospitality professionals use it too? HelloShift lets guests text their hotel. It also works behind the scenes to better empower hotel employees and streamline website chat systems. Not only are these tools highly efficient, they’re also familiar to guests, easier to use, and more efficient for day-to-day operations.
Quick Tip: Check out their best tips for successful guest messaging and chat interactions.
7. Hotel Effectiveness
What It Is: If labor costs are becoming a problem for your team, Hotel Effectiveness can help. It’s a PMS that helps you monitor details like wages paid versus wages owed, overtime (scheduled or unscheduled), and customizable labor guidelines you can use to keep your managers all on the same page about policies.
Quick Tip: Users say they’ve found this tool especially helpful for tracking house keepers’ time and productivity.
8. Beekeeper
What It Is: Beekeeper is a hospitality solution for customer-facing positions. It gives employees a safe and secure way to communicate with one another plus shift calendars, streamlined work off requests, and employee engagement analytics. This centralized hub fully equips your team to always be on point, no matter what staffing changes or guest issues come up.
Quick Tip: Need a little internal communications inspiration? Check out their informative whitepaper on the subject.
The Marketing Hospitality Technology Providers
Marketing is about more than just social media posts and these hospitality specific tools use science and advanced programming to help turn promotional efforts into sales powerhouses.
9. Cvent
What It Is: If supercharging live event attendance, having greater insight into guest engagement, and building new, more efficient sales funnels sounds like your list of goals, you should consider investing in Cvent. Their tools offer robust support with user-friendly features, winning this software more than one industry award in recent years. And Cvent Supplier Network provides a new lead channel to grow your business.
Quick Tip: If you’re looking to host events in other states, cities, or countries, make sure you use Cvent to market it and Cvent’s Destination Guides to plan it.
10. Revinate Marketing
What It Is: Revnite Marketing has three goals for every customer: personalize guest messaging, aggregate customer data into one easy to consume dashboard, and maximize upsell opportunities for existing business. Also, email and in-person marketing tactics are their primary focus.
Quick Tip: Their email marketing is one of the highest rated functions of the tool.
11. Koddi
What It Is: Engage with your travel partners on this collaborative hospitality tech tool. Koddi’s award-winning program helps users systemize marketing campaigns with help from in-depth analytics, transparent reports, and internet-wide bid levers.
Quick Tip: Koddi can even help you plan your next Google Ad campaign.
12. Oaky
What It Is: Okay is, first and foremost, an upselling software for hotels. Their features aim to provide targeted offers to guests at every touchpoint. From email template creation to pre check-in suggestions, Oaky is powered by your targeted upsells, providing a lot of different ways to organically enforce your sales message. You can even create groups within the program and run several campaigns at once.
Quick Tip: Besides direct guest marketing, Oaky is one of the few (or possibly only) platforms that offers upsell email capabilities for Booking.com and Expedia.
13. LaaSie
What It Is: Provide timely incentives guests will actually love with LaaSie (formerly Stay Wanderful). This AI-powered customer rewards system relies on instant gratification to spur your target market into action, triggering direct offers to user behavior in real time. And because 74% of hotel guests react positively to hotel loyalty programs, this one is definitely worth a second look.
Quick Tip: LaaSie customers rave about the service they receive from the support team, which shouldn’t be a surprise given that the LaaSie program allows them to provide that same experience to their hotel clients.
The Revenue Management Hospitality Technology Providers
From keeping track of profits to finding new revenue sources to finding the most competitive prices, these highly rated programs are a revenue manager’s new best friends.
14. Social Tables Sales & Catering CRM
What It Is: Social Tables offers a hotel sales and catering CRM that can be used at every level of your organization to work with clients and vendors, make or track bookings, and organize group sales efforts all in one place. You can even use it to discover the parts of your business that are most successful, and apply those learnings to other departments and locations.
Quick Tip: If you’re interested in expanding group sales, this tool should be at the top of your list.
15. MyAllocator
What It Is: Myallocator is a channel manager, keeping tabs on everything going on digitally and at your various properties. When a new reservation is made on a third party travel site or by an agency, users are sent push notifications so records can be updated in real time. With literally hundreds of travel booking sites available these days, this is one tool multi-property brands will probably use every day.
Quick Tip: If you’re still on the fence, check out their setup guide to get a feel for what it’d be like to start using their software.
16. Rate360
What It Is: Ever wanted to compare your hotel rate against all of your competitors? Rate360 can help with that. Their platform helps you investigate the going price for rooms in real time, allowing users to maximize their revenue strategy on the fly.
Quick Tip: You may have heard about this hospitality tech provider before but what you may not know is that their platform got a major upgrade last year, one that hosts both meta and real-time shopping.
17. Travel Tripper
What It Is: The way Travel Tripper sees it, hotels only have one chance to make a first impression. And if they want it to count, they have to be prepared with direct revenue strategies led by online booking tools and digital properties. In addition to their CRS, booking engine, and website platform, Travel Tripper also has a full service agency.
Quick Tip: Hotels in Asia are currently fighting rate disparity but Travel Tripper has helped more than one brand stay strong.
18. Atomize
What It Is: Every room type has an optimal price at every moment and Atomize has set out to uncover what that number is for all their users. Price setting, demand forecasting, group booking estimates, and more is all covered by this mobile-friendly, cloud-based solution.
Quick Tip: Users applaud its mobile-first design features which are great for teams that are always on the go.
19. HotellQ
What It Is: This hospitality technology provider has proven to be the marriage of actionable insights from real world data and comprehensive revenue management. Whether your property count is one or one hundred, HotelIQ aims to help users identify specific areas of performance, break down the strengths and weaknesses of said area, and offer up straightforward answers.
Quick Tip: Customers especially love their cross-filtering capabilities because they claim it helps provide a deeper, more thorough analysis.
20. M3
What It Is: M3 is a hotel accounting tool that services small, medium, and large brands. Users say they love the platform’s industry specific approach and long-term, relationship building business practices. They also allow program customization for things like logo representation all the way to essential functionality.
Quick Tip: A fun fact about M3 is that they’re the only tool on this list (or, at the very least, the only one that points it out in their marketing) that was built by actual hoteliers.
21. Get Into More
What It Is: Host a lot of meetings and events? Get Into More will help you sort out the revenue side of things with their KPI dashboard, demand calendar, and lead time analyzer. They also offer individual meeting room analytics and forecasting as well as a thorough demand pace analysis.
Quick Tip: Almost every review for Get Into More includes the words or phrases efficient, easy to use, and visual.
The Guest Experience Hospitality Technology Providers
Impress your customers every time they interact with your brand before, during, and even after their stay.
22. Whistle
What It Is: Want to streamline task management and front line operations? Then Whistle can help you out. This tool uses multi-channel guest messaging to communicate with customers before, during and after their stay. It also has plenty of interdepartmental tools that your employees can use to chat, translate, schedule guest services, and automate communication.
Quick Tip: It’s rated #1 in its category by the Hotel Tech Report.
23. Crave Interactive
What It Is: Crave Interactive works to engage guests both on and offline with rentable tablets, kiosks, and hotel mobile apps. These tools are designed to make the guest’s experience more comfortable while also calling attention to the property’s many amenities and upgrades. Each custom branded touchpoint works to automate common activities like room service ordering, entertainment reservations, and anything else guests might need.
Quick Tip: They also help hotels offer 24/7 video service for real-time, multilingual communications with guests.
Now you know the hospitality integrated technology you need to achieve your goals!
If you liked this post, you’ll love our hotel software guide. Plus, see tips for helping your sales team get the most out of your new CRM and some easy ways to reduce operating costs without sacrificing customer experience.