As a hotel general manager, you’re likely always on the lookout for ways to streamline operations, boost revenue, and enhance the guest experience. There are some really innovative hotel software solutions out there that could help with these goals. From cloud-based property management systems to AI-powered chatbots, these tools have the potential to transform how you run your property.

To help you explore what might work best for your needs, we’ve gathered a list of noteworthy hotel management software across various categories—like revenue management,  and reputation management. We’ll highlight the key features and offer some tips for each tool to assist you in evaluating your options.

Let's dive in.

Property management systems (PMS)

Your property management software (PMS) is the backbone of your hotel. It handles core functions like front desk operations, reservations, housekeeping, and billing. 

As you consider the below options, consider ease of use and customer support. Property management solutions tend to offer many features that can be overwhelming for hoteliers. Ask these providers for demos and details about their Help Desk to gauge whether their hotel management system will be usable. 

1. Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud 

This comprehensive PMS manages all aspects of hotel operations. Its mobile app and user-friendly interface help front office and back office staff access information and complete tasks from anywhere.

Automate checkins, checkouts, room assignments, and payment processing to ease your front office's workload. You can also use OPERA to check real-time housekeeping updates so you always know which rooms are ready for guests.

Use the system’s insights to maximize your hotel's revenue. For example, you can update room rates based on OPERA’s metrics, such as occupancy and average daily rate reporting.

Top selling points

• Offers more features than most PMSs
• A familiar, widely-used industry tool

Pro tip 

Take advantage of OPERA's mobility to offer a more convenient guest experience. Your staff can complete requests and access data from any device—PC, phone, tablet—so guests don’t need to come to the front desk every time they have an issue. 

2. Cloudbeds  

This all-in-one platform offers a PMS for easy room reservation management and a booking engine that lets you accept direct bookings and upgrades from your website. The system’s channel manager lets you distribute your inventory across online travel agencies (OTAs), while its revenue management tool provides pricing recommendations to help you maximize revenue.

Top selling points

• Offers flexibility in picking and choosing the tools you want in the Cloudbeds suite
• Has an intuitive UX

Pro tip 

Maximize your hotel’s occupancy with Cloudbed’s automations. For example, the system can automatically increase or decrease rates based on competitive pricing factors and expire group rate allotments if guests don't confirm their offer within set time frames. 

Revenue management software 

Revenue management is all about selling the right room to the right guest at the right time for the right price. While you can figure out rates manually, revenue management software (RMS) simplifies the process. It automatically analyzes real-time market data to set dynamic pricing rates and maximize your hotel’s profitability. 

1. Duetto’s GameChanger

Duetto offers a suite of cloud-based pricing, forecasting, and reporting applications. Its tool GameChanger is especially powerful for pulling predictive insights about rate management. 

Through its 100+ integrations with PMSs and other systems, GameChanger can make pricing recommendations based on real-time data. These insights, combined with its custom pricing rules feature and automatic pricing updates, enable hotels to maximize their revenue. 

Top selling points

• Lets you set custom pricing rules
• Allows you to push pricing changes automatically based on real-time information 
• Provides pricing recommendations up to five years in the future
• Hotels that use GameChanger increase their RevPAR by 6.5% on average.
• It was named the #1 revenue management platform in the 2024 HotelTechAwards. 

Pro tip 

Be sure to use Duetto's "Open Pricing" methodology. Rather than putting inventory into static rate categories (BAR levels), Duetto’s FindMyRate feature allows you to price all room types independently based on individual guests’ characteristics, capturing more revenue in the process.

Guest data platforms

This category of tools is a must-have for hotels that want to build 1:1 relationships with guests. It consolidates customer data so hotel businesses can easily personalize their guest experience and drive loyalty from the platform. 

1. Revinate Guests

Revinate offers a suite of guest data and engagement solutions that are purpose-built for the hotel industry. Its guest data platform aggregates data from your hotel’s tech stack to create rich guest profiles, including insights like: 

• Average length of stay
• Frequency of stays 
• Average spend
• Messaging sentiment
• Cart abandonment rate

With this information, Revinate users can easily form audience segments for targeted marketing campaigns and loyalty reward offers. The platform also reports on arrivals and departures for all guests to help users optimize their reservation offers. 

Top selling points

• Collects granular data to form precise guest profiles
• Helps hotels act on this information with targeting and loyalty program features
• Allows hotels to see guest data at a glance with its dashboard feature
• Makes it easy for hotels to organize data and segment guests with an intuitive UI

Pro tip 

Use Revinate’s detailed guest profiles to identify upsell opportunities. For example, the platform recommends identifying guests with the highest average daily rate (ADR) and offering them popular perks—like breakfast or advanced parking discounts. Integrate this guest data platform with your marketing tool to automate these promotions. 

2. Amadeus’ Guest Management System

This guest experience tool is both a CRM and a marketing platform, allowing hotels to act on their audience data insights easily. Amadeus gathers guest information into profiles using its integrations and GuestView 360 BI reporting tool. From there, it offers templates for targeted communication—like emails and Messenger chats—based on your guest data. Amadeus also provides reporting features to help you understand your personalized marketing performance and upsell opportunities. 

Top selling points 

• Offers guest analytics and marketing tools in one platform 
• Enables hotels to boost revenue with upsells (on average, 21% of guests that see Amadeus Guest Management System offers upgrade)
• Simplifies personalized communication with its email template library for all types of messages

Pro tip 

Instead of limiting yourself to one or two marketing channels, publish campaigns across multiple touchpoints using Amadeus for maximum impact. Flemings Hotel, for example, used Amadeus' guest management system to pinpoint travelers who'd appreciate a Black Friday loyalty program offer. With that audience identified, Flemings used the platform to promote the deal across email, their homepage, and its booking engine. The company reaped an astounding 98% return on ad spend within just two weeks by taking a multi-pronged approach with Amadeus.  

Central reservation systems (CRS) and booking engines 

Your online booking engine (OBE) allows guests to book rooms directly on your hotel website, while a CRS is a broader tool for managing online and offline reservations. Here are a few standout options that are easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, and offer a seamless reservation system for guests. 

1. Selfbook 

Selfbook’s booking platform includes a suite of tools: 

• Selfbook Direct enables hotels to create one-step checkout flows on their website that are compatible with digital wallets. 
• Selfbook Express lets hotels with custom booking engines add digital wallets and Buy Now Pay Later options to their checkout flows. 
• Selfbook Stations allows hotels to review bookings and payment data, such as direct revenue and a percentage breakdown of payment sources. 

This booking engine platform offers many integrations, from AZDS and Sabre to American Express and Apple Pay, so it can enable payments and easily pull relevant data. Selfbook securely handles this information by meeting PCI DSS, GDPR, and ADA compliance requirements and including two-factor authentication and payment validation features. 

Top selling points

• Covers every aspect of bookings and payments with its suite of tools 
• Has a simple, easy-to-navigate interface
• Encourages upsells with booking flow designs
• Protects guest transactions with top security features

Pro tip 

Many guests prefer to use digital wallets, so be sure to add this payment option to your checkout flow with Selfbook. The Standard London hotel started offering digital wallet payments with Selfbook. After adopting the platform, it found that nearly 50% of their guests used this payment method.

2. Sabre’s SynXis 

Sabre’s SynXis CRS allows hotels to manage their pricing, inventory, and availability across various distribution channels—including OTAs, call centers, booking engines, and GDSs.

The cloud-based system is easy to use yet offers a wide range of features beyond traditional reservation management. For example, SynXis provides users with six “studios” for specific needs, like gift card sales and voice agent services. The platform also lets users customize SynXis with over 600 Sabre connections and 100 APIs. 

Sabre also provides expert support to help hotels transition to SynXis smoothly. Thanks to its extensive hospitality experience, the company offers excellent training and tools. 

Top selling points

• Provides a user-friendly, secure platform
• Offers flexibility and customization with 100+ APIs and 600+ Sabre connections
• Provides expert support and training for easy implementation

Pro tip

Take advantage of SynXis CRS's flexible calendar search feature to provide guests with a more intuitive and efficient booking experience. Hyatt uses this feature so guests can easily see when special promotions are available and when loyalty program members can redeem points for the highest value. 

3. RevRaise by AZDS

RevRaise works on top of the booking engine SynXis CRS. It allows hotels to customize their booking experience, so they can make the process simpler and more engaging for guests. For example, hotels using RevRaise can condense booking into just three steps and increase their site’s load times.

Top selling points

• Allows guests to book without leaving a hotel’s website
• Enables hotels to customize their booking page’s design and speed up their load times
• Takes hotels less than an hour to set up RevRaise

Pro tip

Track conversions before and after using RevRaise to show your C-suite the value of the platform. Because the tool keeps guests on hotel websites and speeds up the booking process, businesses that use RevRaise on average see significant conversion rate increases—specifically, a 47% increase in desktop conversions and 80% jump in mobile conversions. 

Reputation Management & Review Analytics 

Reviews are one of the main factors guests consider when booking hotels, making this software essential. Use this type of tool to track and respond to guest reviews across OTAs, social media, and your website. 

1. Revinate Reputation 

Along with its earlier-mentioned guest data platform, Revinate offers a Guest Feedback tool. This software aggregates reviews from 100+ booking channels—including Google, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor—into a single dashboard, so you can easily monitor your reputation across the web and respond to reviews from one place.

Revinate's survey and sentiment analysis tools help you understand how guests feel about specific aspects of your hotel experience so you can identify and address pain points. Its competitive benchmarking feature, which shows how your reviews stack up against other hotels, can also help you identify areas for improvement.

Top selling points

• Aggregates reviews from 100+ sources
• Provides sentiment analysis on guest feedback
• Allows management responses from a single dashboard
• Offers competitive benchmarking tools
• Auto-creates cases for negative reviews

Pro tip 

Send surveys with Revinate while guests stay at your property, not just before and after their trips. This in-stay feedback will give you and your team a chance to fix issues for guests proactively, so they’re likely to leave positive reviews once their trips are over. 

AI-powered messaging 

More and more hotels are using AI-powered chatbots and virtual agents to provide instant, 24/7 guest service. These tools can answer common questions, process requests, and even make personalized recommendations, all without human intervention. 

1. Akia 

This virtual front desk agent uses conversational AI to provide real-time guest assistance via text messaging. Trained on your hotel's specific data, Akia can answer FAQs, process housekeeping requests, and even facilitate room service orders.

Top selling points

• Provides 24/7 guest assistance via text messaging (guests don’t need to download an app)
• Integrates with PMS to sync guest data
• Simplifies messaging flow creation with drag-and-drop template interface (no developer experience required)

Pro tip 

Use Akia’s automated text messaging to promote add-on packages to guests before and during their trip. Cedar Lakes Estate switched from emailing these promotions to showcasing its perks with Akia’s automated messaging, and the property generated an extra $20K per month in upsells. 

Bonus: Weather Guarantee Platforms

We’re a bit biased, but we’d argue a Weather Guarantee platform is a part of any great hotel tech stack. This tool delights guests by giving them peace of mind and flexibility while earning your hotel ancillary revenue at zero cost and effort. It's a small investment on the guest's part that can lead to big improvements in satisfaction and loyalty. And as a plus, Guarantees don’t cost your hotel anything or require any operational effort. 

Sensible Weather

Sensible Weather is a leading weather guarantee platform that integrates with your booking engine to offer guests weather protection at checkout. If a guest purchases a guarantee and experiences bad weather during their stay, they automatically receive a reimbursement without having to file any claims.

Here's how it works:

1. Guests see the weather guarantee offer during the booking process and can choose to add it to their reservation for an extra fee.
2. Sensible Weather checks daily forecasts every morning during guests’ trips. If bad weather is predicted (based on predefined conditions like hours of rain), Sensible Weather automatically notifies the guest in the morning and processes their reimbursement.
3. The guest automatically receives the reimbursement directly via their original payment method, whether that’s a credit card or a digital wallet. They can use the reimbursement however they like, whether that's saving the money or enjoying their hotel's indoor amenities. 

On the hotel side, you don’t have to do any extra work or spend money to offer these Weather Guarantees. Sensible Weather handles all customer questions about Guarantees and pays out every reimbursement. As a plus, hotels receive a percentage of revenue from each Weather Guarantee sale. 

Top selling points

• Increases guest satisfaction and loyalty
• Integrates seamlessly with major booking engines
• Fully automated reimbursement process for guests
• Customizable weather conditions and reimbursement amounts
• Generates ancillary revenue for the hotel

Pro tip

Clearly communicate the benefits of weather guarantees to guests in your booking flow. Use compelling visuals and messaging to highlight how the guarantee provides peace of mind and flexibility. You can also train your front desk staff to explain the program to guests who have questions. Sensible offers a toolkit for marketing Guarantees to guests. 

Upgrade Your Hotel's Tech Stack to Wow Guests & Boost Revenue

The right hotel software can be a game-changer, speeding up operations and personalizing the guest experience. Focus on tools that drive the most impact by automating tasks, unlocking guest insights, and creating new revenue streams.

Ready to upgrade your hotel's tech stack? Contact sales today to see Sensible’s platform in action.