Administrative automation, with personal touch

Protel, long a widely used property management system in the hotel industry, streamlines and optimises the day-to-day operations of hotels. The exclusive distributor for Belgium and Luxembourg is Focus Hospitality of Wilrijk. The company also distributes Planet Payment and RevControl Revenue Management payment systems, a market analysis and pricing tool.

Protel provides a range of tools essential for effectively managing hotel operations, such as reservation management, check-in and check-out processes, room management, invoicing and reporting. This system also integrates seamlessly with other systems, making it a central hub for all hotel operations. "We notice in the industry the ever-increasing drive towards administrative automation," insists Céline Snauwaert, Hospitality Consultant. "Not to say it's really taking off. With Protel, we are responding to this perfectly."

The Protel PMS system can easily integrate and manage reservations from various sources such as direct bookings, OTAs and walk-ins. This reduces the risk of overbooking and ensures a smoother booking process. The system provides real-time updates on the status of rooms, allowing staff to react quickly to changes. This leads to more efficient room allocation and improves the guest experience. Protel PMS automates billing processes, saving time and increasing accuracy. The system can also be interfaced with accounting software, streamlining financial administration.

Hotel managers can generate detailed reports on occupancy rates, revenues, guest preferences and other operational data. These insights are crucial for strategic decision-making. By automating routine tasks, the hotel team can focus more on guest service. Protel PMS also offers functionalities such as personalised guest profiles, allowing hotels to offer a more tailored experience.

Céline: "At Focus Hospitality, we pride ourselves on always being the local point of contact with personal guidance and advice. We are there for clients in their own language and are happy to provide tailor-made advice and support, whether face-to-face, by phone or by e-mail. This way, we quickly know what is going on in the sector. As a result, we usually combine our PMS system with Planet Payment, automated payment processing seamlessly integrated into Protel. This system offers the hotel a secure way to process payments, reservations, credit card payments, etc. In this way, we substantially reduce the error rate in the back office."

Dynamic pricing is also gaining importance. "We then have the combination of Protel and RevControl for that. RevControl Revenue Management does a full analysis of the market and how the competitors' pricing is. Using that data, as well as historical data and forecasts and events, the programme then makes proposals to rates. Those proposals can either be accepted fully automatically or after user intervention. As a hotel, you obviously get a very big competitive advantage from that. Before, you called a hotel, asked what the price for a room was and you always got the same answer. Whether it was week or weekend, whether the hotel was nearly full or not, whether it was special days in the region, ... The price remained almost identical. But the larger hotels have been applying dynamic pricing for a long time, a bit like in the airline industry. RevControl makes this available to the entire sector. So now even family-run, independent hotels can benefit from better pricing. And thus generate more revenue," concludes Céline Snauwaert.