The hotel business lives on small details: the check-in date, the number of guests, breakfasts, children, pets. One lost booking request is enough — and a regular guest you spent years winning over goes to a competitor. We set out to remove that fragile link and built a solution that takes bookings, condition approvals and invoices onto itself. Here is what came out of it.
The cost of a mistake in the hotel business
The hotel trade, like any other, has its own specifics. One of them is the cost of a mistake. A professionally built service whose whole purpose is to win and keep a client sometimes comes to nothing because of a single lapse by a single person. The outcome is simple: the client is lost and goes to a competitor.
The most frustrating part is that a lack of professionalism usually has nothing to do with it. During ordinary seasonal peaks, even professional and friendly staff who are tired and stretched thin make elementary "oversights". People are people — but patience and understanding are far from given to every guest. It is even more frustrating when a regular client leaves, one you have invested a lot of time and effort in: a single accidental miscalculation cancels out the work of many people and hits the profit and the reputation the hotel built up over years.
There is no perfect solution, but something can be done
Booking rooms at a hotel is a classic customer-service task. In essence it is not complicated, but it has a huge number of points to agree on: client preferences change, so do arrival and departure dates, and much more. Most importantly, every guest needs personal attention, and all their wishes and the specifics of the order have to be recorded so the hotel manager can get their bearings quickly.
As a result, that manager has to make a great many decisions dissolved in an even greater number of routine procedural actions — and all of it under the pressure of seasonal peaks. The result is costs of every possible kind, right down to simply losing a booking request.
What our solution can do
- Removes the "human factor" problem entirely: a mistake is impossible, the system controls everything.
- Solves the communication problem — only one manager is involved in the process.
- Lowers the skill requirements for staff: all the work comes down to the simplest possible actions, mostly pressing the right buttons.
- Simplifies and speeds up settlements as much as possible. Having accounting issue an invoice was never a fast process, whereas in the system it happens very quickly.
- Allows for further development — including a chatbot that takes bookings and payments around the clock, and more.
- Delivers an enormous effect from the rollout — for all the relative simplicity of the business process and the more than modest costs.
- Universal: it suits both large hotels and small ones, including hotel chains.
How it works in the system and in real life
Automation built on a corporate CRM system is easy and inexpensive when the task is set up correctly. Below is the full path of a request: from the form on the hotel's website to a confirmed and paid booking.
- A request from the website. Guests submit completed request forms on the hotel's website — with no calls and no "manual" correspondence.
- Recording the parameters. Every parameter of the request is recorded in the system: the number of guests, check-in and check-out dates, meals, accommodation terms, special requirements (children, pets) and so on.
- Agreeing the terms. Next comes the process of agreeing all those terms — often anything but fast. The client wants to see the final price depending on the number of rooms, days, nights, breakfasts, lunches and a host of other parameters.
- Automatic calculation. Where this previously required repeated point-by-point back-and-forth with the hotel manager, now the system immediately offers the client the available options and calculates the price automatically.
- Two buttons for the manager. While the terms are being agreed, the manager performs extremely simple and clear actions — pressing "Confirm booking" and "Issue accommodation invoice".
- An email to the guest. The client receives an email with the fullest possible information: pay for the stay online, add the hotel to maps and get directions to it, the event is added to App Wallet, and so on.
- Changes without manual rewriting. If the booking terms change, the invoice is generated anew automatically, and the client instantly receives detailed documentation on the new terms.
Payment, documents and the client's history
Once the terms are agreed, the guest can pay for the stay straight away — either partly (a deposit) or in full. From there the system takes on everything that usually gets scattered across notebooks, mailboxes and the staff's memory.
- Every action taken while working with the client is recorded by the system.
- The manager's phone conversations with the client are recorded automatically — which makes it easy to settle any disputed points.
- All the information on a client is stored in the system: every guest has a complete "file" with instant access for the hotel owner, the general manager and other authorised people.
Our conclusions
Simple and cost-effective
Automating booking and guest registration on a CRM basis is the fastest, simplest, extremely effective and highly cost-effective solution for hotels of every type.
The effect outweighs the cost
The results of the rollout — saved staff time and labour, full accounting and control — are incomparable with what the automation itself costs.
A turnkey solution
You get a product that is ready to work: it can be installed and put to use within a matter of hours.
Room to grow
The business process can be developed further — for example, by adding a chatbot that takes bookings and payments around the clock.
A ready-made solution that launches in hours
We are ready to supply the completed work as a ready-made solution — it can be installed and put to use within an hour. This is one of those rare cases where a small investment in CRM achieves significant savings of business resources: a single core process brought under the system's control noticeably changes the way the whole hotel works.
We are always open to a constructive conversation — especially on the eve of the holiday season.
Want the same solution, or something similar
ANIART studio has long and successfully specialised in custom development for CRM systems and corporate portals across different areas of business. We will prepare a consultation on what a CRM rollout would look like specifically in your business: we go through your booking, accounting and communication processes and show which of them can be handed over to the system right now.
