Is there a gap between your property management system and your point of sale system? There is if the two aren’t tightly integrated, sharing charges, information and data with each other. That integration gap is one of the surest way to make mistakes, lose revenue, and create unsatisfying guest experiences. When your F&B venues and operations have to manually report sales (including manually exporting data) into the PMS, it opens a lot of cracks for things to slip through.
The answer isn’t to be more careful walking over those cracks. It’s to be more connected and close them completely.
Which is precisely what Maitre’D does.
What We Offer Your Hotel
Works with Most PMS Solutions
Maitre’D integrates with every major PMS across 16 revenue categories.
Integrates Across the Property
Those categories include the restaurant, bar, room service, banquet, conference room, and many others. When a transaction is completed,
there are no manual steps involved with ensuring that the amount—the correct and detailed amount—is reported to the PMS so it can be charged
at checkout.
Directly Charge to Rooms…
Handling charges—including tips—without PMS integration opens a lot of opportunities for error. Any time you manually transfer or re-enter an
F&B charge to add it to the room charges, you risk mistakes, because a bill is lost or forgotten, the server’s handwriting is illegible, data entry
errors are made, or for a number of other reasons.
… Including Room Service
Room service charges are equally at risk and for the same reasons. There’s more to the room service charge however: tips and especially
tray charges aren’t always clearly accounted for on the final bill which can cause confusion and frustration at checkout.
With Maitre’D integrated with your PMS, the chances of these errors happening—for either in-venue or in-room charges—sink from likely to
improbable. When you enter the order into Maitre’D, it’s also automatically entered in the PMS at the same time.
Instant Credit Check
Of course, there are times when you don’t want the guest charging to the room in the first place. For instance, a corporate account might pay
for the room and parking, but meals and drinks are paid by the guest directly. (The same is true for cash only and guests with complimentary
rooms). Those same accounts may specify that guests can charge restaurant meals to the room but not room service or bar tabs.
With Maitre’D integrated with your PMS, the ability to charge, venue by venue and location by location, is automatically established, and each
venue within the hotel is notified whether room charges are allowed.
With the right formatting in your POS based on the data from the PMS, you can print a bill that does or doesn’t show a spot for the guests to
enter their room numbers.
No Mistakes at Checkout
There are two kinds of mistakes you can make when guests check out: mistakes in your favor or mistakes in their favor. In both cases, you lose. If
the bill doesn’t include something because it fell through the cracks, you lose revenue. If the bill contains an item that the guest rejects because
it’s wrong, you lose brand value in the guest’s eyes.
With Maitre’D integrated with your PMS, those kinds of mistakes can’t happen. Since there is no manual entry of F&B charges, there are no
human errors that can occur. Since the entire check—not just the total amount—is sent to the PMS, the guest can examine each and every item
at checkout. That includes being able to separate the cost of food, drinks, tray charges and tips. And the guests see the complete information for
each of those charges—down to the way they asked for their steak to be cooked.
Automatic Splits
That detail is critical for you and your guests. Guests and corporate account holders get annoyed if they can’t see the details of every
expense on the checkout bill. Unfortunately, with manual processes guests and corporate account managers can see the line-item-by-lineitem
for their room, but their F&B spend is simply presented as a single total. That means they can’t track their food, drink and tip expenses with
any accuracy, unless they’ve saved the bill.
With Maitre’D integrated with your PMS, all that detail is automatically included in the guest folio, and is printed out at checkout. That speeds
up checkout at the front desk and makes automatic (and less expensive) checkout more common since there are few if any questions to answer
about the charges. This is just as helpful for corporate accounts, which are often scrutinized through a very fastidious process.
More Attractive to Corporate Accounts
Satisfying the needs of those corporate accounts is helped as well. When a company uses a hotel regularly—either as an event venue or
as a hotel-of-choice for visiting employees and guests—they’re drawn to those properties that make their accounting processes easier.
A disconnected process puts the burden on the guest to save receipts: for tax reasons, per diem submissions, and so on. It’s also a burden on
the guest’s corporate accounting team if they have to slog through all the copies of separate receipts for each meal, drink and more.
With Maitre’D integrated with your PMS, everything is in one place, in one format: on the final bill at checkout. Nothing needs to be saved,
and nothing can be lost: you have a record of it all. If your PMS allows it, as an additional service, you can make the information available to
your corporate customers digitally as well. That means you can sort and categorize it to serve the needs of corporate accounts, and to facilitate
your own strategic planning.
More Data in Both Directions
Those Room/F&B splits aren’t valuable just for your guests when they review their bill. They deliver a lot of value to you too as you work
through strategic ways to improve revenue and customer satisfaction in your property. The more data you have to analyze, the better your
analysis will be.
With Maitre’D integrated with your PMS, you gain a fuller understanding of how, when and where people eat and drink. Matching those patterns
with the data that comes in from rooms, rentals and more delivers substantial guidance as you fine tune menus, target promotions by guest
demographics, create more popular specials and alter happy hours to increase patronage.
Better Analysis and Reporting
The manual—or semi manual—processes involved with bringing data from the POS and the PMS can’t deliver the kind of granular insight into
your operation that you need to stay competitive. All your information is either purely anecdotal, or the result of some kind of spreadsheet-based
workaround that is too clumsy and difficult to create useful reports that can drive strategy.
With Maitre’D integrated with your PMS, all the knowledge stored in your POS is instantly available to the PMS, and ready to be integrated into
your most complex and strategic analyses. That kind of data sharing helps with staff schedules, inventory optimization, promotion targeting
and much more.
More Satisfied Customers
That’s the real bottom line. When you eliminate manual steps, you eliminate manual errors before the guest arrives, during the stay with you, at check out and afterwards as well. When you have all the information at your fingertips, checkout is a smooth and simple process. And when you can share the data between your POS and PMS, you have a competitive and strategic advantage in the marketplace.