Smaller Hotels and Hostels Catch Up on Tech With New Wave of Software Makers
Photo Credit: A guest room at the Slo Living hostel in Lyon, France, which uses Cloudbeds services to manage its property. Slo Living hostel
Skift Take
The story of software maker Cloudbeds, named the fastest-growing travel and hospitality company in the U.S., points to a broader trend of smaller hotels adopting new tools to manage their properties.
For years, owners of small hotels and hostels have been signing up for subscriptions to cloud-based software, which generally gives them access to business data from mobile devices and spares them from being tethered to hardware. But it's only recently that these tools have begun to talk to each other in ways that can reduce owner headaches.
Hoteliers without technology teams are often left to their own devices, literally, when it comes to figuring out their software needs.
Many owners of hotels and hostels with about 120 rooms or less use several separate online tools to accept and manage payments, manage their reviews on sites like TripAdvisor, distribute their rates to sites like Trivago or Booking.com, send emails and texts to guests, create and track customer profiles, and track and monitor room occupancy and inventory for check in and check out.
Many software providers enable connections on connections on connections with various systems. The advantage is that you can pl
