Recently updated on February 7th, 2023 at 03:11 pm
Hospitality CRM is quickly becoming a hot topic among hoteliers, and it isn’t hard to see why you’d be looking for the best hotel CRM software to buy.
Hotels and restaurants don’t just rent a room or sell a product. They have a unique set of needs that encompass the entire guest experience before and after booking, throughout their stay in the property, and beyond. This is unlike any other point-of-sale business. It’s, therefore, no wonder why hospitality CRM software is gaining immense traction.
Hospitality CRMs can greatly impact customer experience, meaning more guests and revenue for hotels, restaurants, or Airbnb owners.
What is a hotel CRM?
Hotel CRM software is a specialized tool that comes with unique features specifically tailored for hotels, such as tracking room occupancy and collating guest data during their stay. Think about the needs of the room, meal, and entertainment. No basic CRM software could offer such specialized features that the hospitality industry requires.
Hospitality CRM for hotels aims to facilitate a positive customer experience that keeps guests returning and recommending the hotel to friends.
If you are shopping for the best hospitality CRM platform, we have gone ahead of you to review the top CRM for hotels and the hospitality industry in general.
But before going into all of that, it’s important to know what makes a good hotel CRM software. What key features should you be looking out for? And how exactly does hospitality CRM software benefit you?
Benefits of using a Hotel CRM
From B2B marketing activities to help land big-time corporate events to B2C features to offer potential guests a 5-star experience throughout, hotel CRM is a crucial and profitable tool in the hands of any hospitality brand.
Build customer relationships
Customer relationship management is a crucial aspect of any business, and it’s even more profound in the hotel industry. The relationship between a customer and the hotel starts long before they book and check-in. Good hotel customer relationship management software helps manage the customer’s journey from visiting your website to contacting your sales team, booking, check-in, enjoying their stay, and even after they’ve checked out.
A hotel CRM system allows you to deliver an unforgettable, personalized, 5-star experience that keeps guests coming.
Offer personalized services
The needs of each hotel guest vary. While one may require a certain kind of mattress, some travel alone or with kids, while others have certain food allergies. Perhaps, there’s that one guest who desires a room with a seaside view.
By keeping tabs on each guest’s unique preferences using hospitality CRM software, you can deliver personalized services whenever they visit, which leads to exceptional customer satisfaction. It’s like visiting a friend who knows the best food to prepare. You can also use such information to upsell or create personalized marketing campaigns for potential hotel guests with similar preferences.
Of course, you can keep tabs on these things on an excel sheet, but that would be greatly inconvenient!
Build customer loyalty and revenue
By delivering stellar experiences each time, you win loyal customers who will always rely on your hotel whenever they need lodging. What’s more, it is particularly common to find them recommending your hotel to their acquaintances that are looking for a space.
But that’s not all. The best Hospitality CRMs usually come with tools to launch promotional marketing campaigns and manage loyalty programs. Some also carry out and analyze post-stay surveys.
Sales tracking
There’s so much to keep track of when it comes to a hotel’s sales activities. That’s particularly because there’s no single sales process or terminal: there’s the credit card method, balance on check-in, and guests may even book from third-party bookers. Whatever the medium, hotel CRMs can help your sales team track all the processes’ success.
Preserve a rich guest database
A hotel is an intricate business with various parts, from reception and housekeeping to entertainment and marketing. It won’t help matters if each aspect is held in separate software, as was once the case in the hotel industry.
With a hotel CRM system, you can access the entire guest information from a centralized database.
Boost revenue
All the benefits of hospitality CRM lead to a boost in revenue. A satisfied customer would be more willing to return and even advocate for your hospitality brand. Automated marketing and personalized campaigns can also help drive sales.
Key features of hospitality CRM tools
Below are key features to look out for in a good hospitality CRM software:
Inventory management
Room occupancy and room service are unique aspects of hospitality businesses. Hence, specialized hotel CRM software should be able to track this form of inventory. This requires that the software incorporates operations management tools and property management systems.
With good hotel CRM software, you’ll be able to collect and access rich guest data acquired by these systems in a centralized location.
Marketing automation
Automation is a must-have feature of any hotel CRM. Highly personalized emails must be sent out without all the manual hard work. In addition, the CRM should allow the setting up of triggers to keep in touch with guests during stays and encourage feedback on social media and the hotel website.
Invoice automation
You should also be able to auto-generate quotes and invoices containing your hotel brand logo and send emails to your suppliers. Of course, many hotel operations must be completed daily, which surely helps to automate as many as possible.
Communication management
The best hospitality CRM platforms will generally offer several communication channels for guests to keep in touch with the hotel. This may include telephone calls, live chat, email, and social media. In addition, the omnichannel dashboard makes it easier for fewer reps to handle large query volumes round-the-clock from a mobile app.
Scheduling features
Every hotel chain has many employees, all trained in various roles. Keeping up with them all is no easy task for any HR. Thanks to hotel CRM, HR managers can handle the complex duty of scheduling interviews with staff, delegating tasks, following up, and hiring and training new employees using workflows.
Marketing
With the hospitality competition fueled by Airbnb and OYO, there’s every need to put your hotel brand out there. CRM for hotels comes with just the right sales tools for that. These platforms come with pre-scheduling tools, multichannel marketing broadcasts, and a segmentation feature to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. This streamlines your sales process and positions you to land more bookings.
Top CRM software for hotels and hospitality
The best CRM software for hotels and the hospitality industry include:
- Revinate
- Guestware
- Guestfolio
- For-Sight
- Freshsales
- Salesforce
- Hubspot
- Experience Hotel
- Pipedrive
We highlight their features, drawbacks, as well as pricing.
Revinate
Revinate is a CRM software specially designed for large hotel businesses with multiple locations. With rich email marketing management and guest feedback tools for upselling and market segmentation, this hotel CRM helps you get your personalized campaigns right on target.
Revinate’s data-driven solutions make it one of the best hospitality CRM software to transform guest data into revenue.
Revinate Features
- Revinate has a strong lead management feature; hotel chains can manage and centralize all lead information from a single platform.
- Rich guest profiles that include the total number of stays, total spending, time spent during the stay, booking method, preferences, etc.
- Reputation management features curate reviews from Google and several other platforms to enable you to resolve negative feedback promptly.
- Rich segmentation by gender, geography, birthdays, room type, spending habit, and more
- Marketing campaigns for multiple hotel branch locations with a unified brand message
- Rich performance tracking to understand and compare the customer experience and booking rates among all the hotel branches
- Post-stay survey forms to grab insights into the customer experience
- Revenue reporting
Drawbacks
- Revinate doesn’t yet have telephonic features for receiving, handling, and monitoring phone call inquiries.
- No lead scoring to track potential customers who aren’t yet ready to book
- No event management features
Pricing
- Contact Revinate for pricing. The quote will be influenced by your business size and needs.
Guestware
Guestware is arguably the best hospitality CRM software for small and mid-sized hotel businesses looking to grow through outstanding loyalty programs. Its reservation and loyalty management solutions provide guests with optimized service and experience.
As a hotel CRM designed for SMB hotels, Guestware offers a multi-plan solution that enables you upscale seamlessly as your hotel business grows. In addition, it comes with robust hotel management features that make running the business much easier.
Guestware features
- Automated task assignments allow staff to execute their roles promptly and effectively.
- Data analytics and reporting enable the automatic analysis of guest experience.
- The incident tracking system allows for lightning-fast responses to customer inquiries and complaints.
- A mobile app for property management, such as carrying out room inspections and managing cleaning and maintenance schedules
- Using the guest recognition feature, you can offer personalized services to new and returning customers based on their sign-up info, guest history, and preferences.
- Tiered Scoring and point-based loyalty program, which helps boost your remarketing efforts.
Drawbacks
- You can only get loyalty management and email marketing if you buy the most expensive packages.
- No event management feature
- The dashboard isn’t very aesthetically pleasing
Pricing
- Guestware Select starts at $112/50 rooms/month, billed annually
- Guestware Suite plan starts at $200/50 rooms, billed annually.
- For Guestware Plus, you must contact the team for a custom quote.
URL: https://guestware.com/Product/CRM_Loyalty
Guestfolio
This hospitality CRM software intelligently combines guest data with automated email marketing. It also gives hotel managers a 360-degree view of their customers, helping them to boost revenue through personalized marketing and upselling. In short, it’s the perfect CRM to build your hotel brand while driving revenue.
Features
- 360-degree customer view gives you a comprehensive perception of each guest
- Email automation allows you to impose your brand in the minds of existing and potential customers and gather post-stay feedback.
- It’s a complete hotel CRM software having a trip planner that shows interesting local activities and in-hotel amenities to first-timers and tourists.
- Guestfolio spots a Mobile Concierge app that enables guests to browse and book local activities before check-in and during their stay
- Guestfolio hospitality CRM is a Cendyn product that integrates with other Cendyn platforms for sales, marketing, and accounting.
- It allows you to segment customers so you can tailor your marketing accordingly.
Drawbacks
- Some features, such as customer segmentation, require a steep learning curve.
- The email design tool gets glitchy sometimes
Pricing
Guestfolio doesn’t disclose pricing on the website, so you’d have to contact support for a quote.
URL: https://www.innquest.com/hotel-crm-cloud/
For-Sight
For-Sight is a specialized and data-driven hotel CRM software that allows you to build strong customer relationships with guests by showing interest in their unique preferences. It captures guest information and encourages guests to give feedback, which you can use to improve customer experience.
For-Sight features
- For-Sight offers a data-driven system that properly understands your guests, leading to better upselling and personalized marketing.
- It captures customer data from different sources like PMS and Reputation Management systems.
- The software boasts an omnichannel marketing feature that helps create campaign segments, intelligently distributes them, and provides reporting and analytics from engagements.
- Offers features to help with onboarding and training sessions.
Drawbacks
- No features to support loyalty programs
- Handling customer support issues is a problem as there’s no specialized tool for that.
- Email campaign management feels too rigid
Pricing
- Contact For-Sight for a custom quote.
URL: https://for-sight.com/solutions/crm/
Freshsales
Freshsales is arguably the best hospitality CRM for guest and marketing management, although it isn’t specifically designed for the hospitality industry. It has robust tools for building, implementing, and automating email marketing campaigns. It’s also great for managing email subscribers, making it an incredible tool for hospitality businesses requiring returning customers, such as hotels, restaurants, bars, and travel agencies.
Features
- Traditional CRM features include appointment scheduling, contact management, task assignments, and sales automation.
- Telephony and email modules to bring all guest-hotel interactions into one place
- It monitors leads’ activities, such as the web pages they click on, to determine potential guests likely to convert.
- Robust reporting and analytics to support marketing and sales efforts
- Freshsales integrates with the Freshworks ecosystem and other products like Zapier and MailChimp to boost functionality.
- A mobile app to handle check-in and check-out, automatic call logging, Uber, and notifications
- Self-help and access to a dedicated account manager
Drawbacks
Freshsales is not specialized for hospitality and hotel businesses, so it doesn’t come with industry-specific features like bookings and event management. However, you can easily integrate with the appropriate third-party app like Eventbrite.
No project management tools
So many features that it may become overwhelming at first.
Pricing
- There’s a 21-day free trial period. The free trial is great for determining if the software works well for you.
- Freshsales offers a free plan with limited functionality
- Growth plan costs $18/user/month
- Pro plan costs $39/user/month
- Enterprise plan costs $69/user/month
URL: https://www.freshworks.com/crm/sales/
Salesforce
Salesforce comes with numerous features usable by any business, including the hotel industry. It’s widely known in the hospitality marketplace as one of the most dominant CRM platforms. Many hotel owners seem satisfied with the personalized attention the software enables them to provide their guests.
Although not specially designed for hotels, Salesforce provides you with hospitality CRM features when you choose “Travel Transportation & Hospitality” as your industry.
Features
- Hotel CRM features include real-time social listening to let hotel managers discover what guests say about them online post-stay.
- A data-driven approach towards gaining insights about the customer experience throughout the sales lifecycle and during their stay can facilitate upselling.
- This hospitality CRM software allows you to build branded mobile apps through which guests can book, check-in, and make requests.
- Its case management features allow support reps to promptly handle guests’ complaints and requests.
- Salesforce offers several products, such as Customer 360, Slack, Sales, Marketing, and Commerce, to help you scale up anytime.
Drawbacks
- Not specially designed for the hotel industry, and hence no hotel-specific CRM tools
- The plans are numerous, each with separate tools for different industries, so it becomes challenging to select a suitable one with the right set of features minus what you don’t need.
- A steep learning curve as the features are quite a handful, howbeit robust
Pricing
- There are different plans and prices according to your chosen industry and product. However, Salesforce pricing generally starts at $25//user/month (for the Essentials plan), billed annually.
URL: https://www.salesforce.com
Hubspot
Hubspot is an incredible CRM tool for hospitality businesses. It has several built-in features, such as SEO content optimization, that will help boost your hotel’s marketing efforts.
Hubspot features
- A service hub where you can issue tickets, assign them to hotel sales managers, and close them as soon as they’re completed.
- The content optimization feature offers ideas to help you draft content effortlessly.
- In-built SEO to boost your hotel’s online presence.
- This hospitality CRM software comes with a 360-degree customer view comprising the guest’s contact information, past visits, spending history, and interactions at every touch-point throughout the customer journey. Know your guest data.
- Allows you to create email forms and do A/B tests before launching the email marketing campaign.
- Allows you to segregate customers and tag them.
- Hubspot has an intuitive landing page builder, making it the best option if you’re looking for an all-in-one hospitality CRM and content management platform.
- It has a live chat, and you can call customers directly on the platform using VoIP software.
- You can use automated workflow to organize events and specify to whom to send invitations and thank-you emails.
Drawbacks
- Hubspot is a big name in the CRM industry and, therefore, one of the most expensive hospitality CRM software.
- Reporting isn’t robust.
- Not the best value for money for small and mid-sized hotels as advanced features are only available on the most expensive plans.
Pricing
- Starter plan starts at $45/month/1,000 marketing contacts
- Professional plan starts at $800/month/2,000 marketing contacts.
- Enterprise plan starts at $3,600/month/10,000 marketing contacts.
- All plans are billed annually.
Experience Hotel
Experience Hotel is a hotel CRM software that aims to build customer loyalty by providing staff with the tools to offer a 5-star experience to every guest. A true hospitality software that helps you boost revenue.
Features
- The software allows you to carry out non-obtrusive surveys during the guest’s stay, so you perceive and resolve their discomfort long before they become complaints.
- Rich segmentation tools let you create and target marketing campaigns to potential guests based on interests, nationality, location, etc.
- Concierge features allow you to upsell by offering services like spa treatments, room upgrades, and restaurant deals.
- The software helps you prevent third-party bookings by providing easy-to-use, direct booking tools, thereby boosting your revenue.
Drawbacks
- Marketing automation is somewhat limited
- Property management system integration is weak
Pricing
- Guest relation pack: monthly fee of 95€ + 1€ per room
- All-in-one CRM hotel pack: monthly fee of 165€ + 1€ per room
- Email campaign & revenue pack: monthly fee of 95€ + 1€ per room.
URL: https://www.experience-hotel.com
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is one of the best hospitality CRM software housing an AI assistant and advanced sales automation. With the AI sales assistant, sales activities become a breeze for hotel marketers as the machine learns about your habit and offers helpful tips and insights.
Features
- Scheduling capabilities for appointments and communications
- The software lets you tweak your marketing and sales using custom fields, contacts maps, and group emails.
- Workflow automation
- Allows you to give certain users access to specific resources by implementing user permission
- Customizable pipelines for hotel personnel and lead management
Drawbacks
- No real-time reporting
- Limited marketing functionalities
- Lacks high-level integrations
- The add-ons for lead generation and live chat are pretty expensive
Pricing
- Essential: starts at $15/month per user
- Advanced: starts at $29/month/user
- Professional: starts at 59/month/user
- Enterprise: starts at$119/month/user
URL: https://www.pipedrive.com
CRM Hotels & Hospitality Software FAQs
Why is CRM important for hotels?
CRM helps hotels in meeting their guests’ requirements. Since each guest has unique preferences, such as meals and window view, hotel CRM helps to keep track of those preferences to enable the team to deliver personalized and exceptional service when the next guest checks in. This consequently amounts to a greater reputation and increased revenue for the hotel. CRM also helps with supply management and property management.
Why is customer relationship important in hospitality?
Customer relationship is the backbone of any business. For hospitality businesses like hotels, this goes up a notch. That’s because hotels, restaurants, and travel agencies aren’t exactly fixing a broken pipe or selling an adorable dress.
Hospitality is woven around comfort. It’s like having an esteemed guest in your home; you want to do everything possible to make them comfortable. And that includes catering to their personal needs concerning food, sleep, hygiene, entertainment, etc.
Without customer relationships, sales teams would be in the dark regarding their guests’ preferences. That amounts to poor customer experience and a potential decline in sales.
Customer relationships through software enable hospitality businesses to be as hospitable as possible when serving their guests and corporate clients, leading to more guest satisfaction and a boost in sales.
Why use hospitality CRM software instead of generic CRM?
As mentioned, the needs of a hotel business are quite different from other industries; hence hardly will any basic CRM be sufficient.
Hospitality CRM software helps hospitality businesses keep in contact with their customers and provide them with personalized services before and after check-in. Any hotel, restaurant, or travel agency can leverage the industry-specific data, automation, intelligent segmentation, and marketing features of a specialized hospitality CRM to improve personalized interactions with their guests from the first touch-point of the customer journey.
What should I look for in a hospitality CRM solution?
The features to look out for in a hospitality CRM solution include those that can help you maintain a good and seamless relationship with your guests. That may include fast communication features, automated email marketing, and managing guest history. Nevertheless, always go for hospitality CRM software that spots the features that are a priority to you.
How to choose the right hotel CRM vendor
There are many hotel CRM providers in the hospitality industry, but not all may be right for you. Think about it; does the software have functionalities that potentially boost your efficiency? Of course, you spend a lot of time customizing your email templates and running campaigns. So you want to be sure whatever CRM vendor you choose adds value to your operations before you click the sign-up button.
Compare your current CTR and conversions to the hospitality CRM marketing campaign results.
It’s best to work with software vendors who support compliance, are abreast of new privacy laws, and prioritize innovation.
Is it necessary for every hotel to have CRM software?
It’s in a hotel’s best interest to have hospitality CRM software. Without that, they’ll face a tough challenge learning about their guests and offering them the best-personalized experience possible.
Of course, hotels can do things manually, but not as efficiently as when they have the right tools at their disposal. Any hotel business looking to boost customer experience and revenue may find CRM software a worthy investment.
Conclusion
If there’s anything a hospitality business should be excellent at, it’s customer experience. Travelers and tourists check in to have a relaxing and stress-free time away from their everyday lives. They are particularly interested in customer service than in any other business. So the little you could do is to make life a little easier for them.
Thankfully, hotel CRM addresses this need.
Hotel CRM goes beyond marketing automation and boosting sales; it’s an end-to-end solution to the entire hospitality business processes. It’s just the right tool that brings you a little closer to your unique customer.
Whether you’re a hotel franchise owner or an independent hotel manager, you’ll find a hospitality CRM the most valuable tool at your disposal.
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