Hapi just returned from the summer's big hotel conferences and it was great to see our approach validated by many of the featured speakers at the conference. For example, at the The Hospitality Show in Las Vegas, the CIO of an 8000+ hotel franchise group said that he is all about hosted platforms, APIs, and integrations to service the wide variety of properties in his network. And the CEO of another 1500+ property brand made the point that they are now in a multiple PMS environment due to different requirements by segment and the geopolitical realities of global operations. He said that he is perfectly OK with the property technology stack being different in various regions around the world as long as they can get the data they need back to Corporate and recognize guests appropriately.
Increasingly, hotel companies face the reality that we’re living in a world where a multi-PMS strategy is becoming the norm. This trend is being driven by a number of factors such as:
Cost Reductions and time to market
- Franchising: Brands compete to get owners to sign with them, and if a brand can let the owner keep their current PMS, that's a key benefit and it reduces onboarding time.
- M&A: Since COVID, the pace of hotel transactions have gone way up, and companies don't want to have to perform wholesale system changes when they acquire new properties. It's too expensive and time-consuming to rip and replace a PMS. Even in cases where Corporate would like to mandate a new PMS, they often don't have the in-house IT resources to make it happen quickly, or at all.
Best of Breed and Control
- Geopolitics: Certain PMS systems are more appropriate and functional for certain jurisdictions or regions than others. Brands want to be able to quickly “make change” or "disconnect" for a region or group of hotels if needed for any reason, ranging from stability in a region, or economic conditions, to sale of assets.
- Vendor Management and Leverage: Having multiple approved PMS solutions provides an additional level of control over PMS vendor relationships and enables brands to ensure they get the best terms and service.
Having multiple approved PMSs across a group of hotels has advantages, but it also presents challenges, including getting normalized data back to corporate teams for above-property personalized guest interactions and operational alerts without having to manage multitudes of fragile point-to-point integrations.
This is the issue that Hapi was created to solve. We enable the multi-PMS world via the Hapi Integration Platform, our hospitality cloud data hub. The Platform includes PMS connectors, a canonical hospitality data model, and the ability to provide a normalized data stream out to any consuming system - like an EDW, CRM, CDP, or any other system that needs to be aware of real-time activities at the property level. And with the recent release of Hapi Platform 2.0, we’ve doubled down on scalability and platform functionality.
Companies that use Hapi to manage their multiple PMS data streams are seeing the results. The Chief Architect at one of our global hotel customers recently told me that "with Hapi, I don't need to rewrite my data warehouse code every time we add a new PMS. The data comes through in a predictable and normalized format, no matter what system is on the other side". Another major account IT director stated "Hapi has enabled us to innovate faster and at scale across different PMS versions".
The days of enforcing a single PMS worldwide are gone. Even brands that have a single PMS in a certain region (like Americas or EMEA) or segment (like Luxury) often find they need to allow various PMS options for other regions or for other segments. Hapi makes it easy for hotel brands to "have it all" - please their franchisees and operators who want a choice in PMS, while still delivering real-time, predictable, actionable data to the brand.
If interested in learning more about this topic, I would love to chat. Reach out to me directly.
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