Hotel management software for small hotels and guest houses: from room rack to channel manager

Small hotels often run on a register, a spreadsheet and three OTA extranets. Here is how hotel management software brings the front desk, housekeeping, direct bookings and OTAs into one place.

For a small hotel or guest house, double bookings and unbilled extras are the two most expensive mistakes. Both come from information living in different places. Hotel software puts rooms, guests, charges and bookings in one system.

The room rack

The room rack is the front desk's main screen: every room by floor, coloured by status (vacant clean, vacant dirty, occupied, due out, out of order or blocked). Clicking a room should let you check in, move, or bill it.

Bookings and check-in

Choose dates and guests, see what is free by room type, and find returning guests by name, phone, CNIC or passport. At check-in record ID details, take a deposit and print the registration card to sign.

The guest folio

A running bill for each stay should collect restaurant, laundry, minibar and transport charges, and payments by cash, card, bank, loyalty points or store card. At check-out you see the balance, use the advance, apply a discount or promo code, split payment, or bill a company account.

Night audit

Once a night the system should bill room nights, extra beds and meals for every in-house room, and list arrivals to check in or mark as no-show. Doing this by hand is where revenue slips away.

Housekeeping

Dirty rooms first, a daily cleaning list, out-of-order rooms and a lost and found register, ideally updated from a phone in the corridor. In Hayat, housekeepers update room status in the Hayat Hotel app.

Your own booking website

Direct bookings avoid OTA commission. A booking website should let guests search by dates and occupancy, see prices with tax, use promo codes, and pay nothing, the first night, a deposit or the full amount. Show your cancellation policy, with a free-cancellation window and a late-cancellation fee taken from the advance.

OTAs through a channel manager

A channel manager connects your rooms to OTAs such as Booking.com, Expedia and Agoda. Availability and rates go out automatically and OTA bookings arrive as confirmed reservations, so you stop updating three extranets by hand. Room restrictions such as stop-sell, minimum stay and closed to arrival should apply to the website and the channel manager alike. OTA commission is then posted at check-out on pre-tax room revenue.

Online and kiosk check-in

Guests can complete their details, upload ID photos and sign the house rules on their phone before arrival or at a lobby kiosk. The front desk reviews and assigns the room, and the queue at reception disappears.

The numbers that matter

Occupancy, ADR (average daily rate), RevPAR (revenue per available room), revenue by department, payments by method, booking sources and advances held. These tell you whether to raise rates, push direct bookings or fill weekdays with corporate guests.

See how Hayat's hotel workspace covers all of this at hotel.hayaterp.com, with every charge posted to the accounts.

Read more about Hotel management software in Hayat ERP, or book a demo.

Frequently asked questions