A stay is not a relationship.
The property management system remembers a folio. The point of sale remembers a cover. The online travel agent remembers the guest and has no intention of telling you. Meanwhile the sales office is running a genuine enterprise pipeline — groups, weddings, corporate accounts, conferences — out of a shared inbox and a whiteboard. Both halves deserve a system.
The OTA owns the guest you served.
Someone stays four nights, eats in the restaurant twice, books the spa and leaves happy. The booking channel keeps the email address, the PMS keeps a masked one, the POS keeps a card token and the loyalty programme never met them. On the next trip they are a new guest, acquired again, at commission.
Direct is a system, not a discount.
Hospitality — direct and groupsOne guest record, and a sales office that forecasts.
One guest across PMS, POS and booking engine
Stay history from Opera, Mews or Cloudbeds, covers from Toast, SevenRooms or OpenTable, and booking engine data resolved into one contact with consent recorded per channel — so the fifth visit is recognised as the fifth while the guest is still in the building.
Group and event sales, instrumented
Cvent and Tripleseat enquiries, site visits, tentative blocks and definite contracts as dated stages carrying room nights, F&B value and the space held. The sales office forecasts a number rather than a feeling, and the general manager can see the gap in March.
The banquet order boundary
The BEO stays in Delphi or Tripleseat where operations reads it. The CRM holds the account, the relationship, the rebooking date and the value across years. Neither system is asked to impersonate the other, which is why both survive.
Corporate accounts and the RFP cycle
Negotiated rate agreements, production against commitment, and the annual RFP date sitting on the account — so the renegotiation is prepared with last year's actual room nights, months before the incumbent's rate loads.
Direct booking, honestly measured
Attribution carried from campaign to confirmed reservation, with OTA and direct told apart, so spend is judged against room nights and net rate instead of sessions. The cost of a direct booking becomes comparable to the commission it replaced.
Service recovery with a clock on it
Complaints, comps and review sentiment logged against the guest and routed to a duty manager while the guest is still on property. The apology that lands during the stay is a different business outcome from the one written under a public review.
Walk the property, then build.
Walk the property
Front desk, reservations, the sales office, restaurant and events. Every point where a guest is typed in, and every point where the same guest becomes a second record nobody will ever merge.
Define guest, account, group
A guest, a company account, a group block and a social event are four different things with four different lifecycles. Naming them properly is what keeps the reporting honest a year later.
Build to the PMS, not around it
Rates, availability and folios stay in the PMS. The CRM takes the relationship, the pipeline and the marketing consent, reading stay and spend history on a schedule with the mapping written down.
Hand it to the sales office
Training for the director of sales, the events team and the front desk, reports the weekly revenue meeting actually opens, and a quarter beside them through one full booking cycle.
Two properties, two databases, one guest.
A group opens a second hotel and the second property gets its own everything — its own PMS instance, its own mailing list, its own sales office. The guest who stays at both is two people. The corporate account is negotiated twice, at two different rates, by two people who have never spoken. Portfolio thinking has to be designed in at the second property, because by the fifth it is a migration.
Tell us what a repeat guest is worth.
Tell us what you are running
What the system does today, where it breaks, and when it has to work. An engineer reads it — you get an answer inside one business day, not a sequence.