A PMS (Property Management System) is the operational core of a hotel. It manages reservations and the room grid, check-in and checkout, guest folios and payments, housekeeping status, the night audit and the reports on occupancy, ADR and revenue. Most other systems (channel manager, booking engine, POS, revenue tools) connect to it.
Legacy PMS platforms were built for large chains, installed on site and priced accordingly. Cloud systems now cover the same core for independent hotels and groups of any size, with lower cost and far less setup.
In practice: judge a PMS less by the length of its feature list than by how well it fits your daily operations: how fast the desk can check a guest in, how clean the folio and night audit are, and whether the reports answer the questions you actually ask.
Simple hotel property management software for independent hotels, chains and groups.
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