Imagine a paperless hotel and visualize the many benefits – outside of being environmentally friendly. One small tweak in your operations, such as going paperless at the front desk and in the back office, can have a profound impact on your bottom line.
More than just a green initiative
The hospitality industry is centuries old. This provides a bounty of information on how to successfully manage a hotel. Introducing new initiatives into your properties can be a tough sell for certain investors/owners.
Paperless billing/accounting may be viewed as an unnecessary shift that’s an aside to the actual guest experience. However, as Del Ross, Chief Revenue Officer at Hotel Effectiveness, explains, “Going green means much more than just being environmentally conscious. You can actually serve a guest a lot more efficiently…I’m all about green because green as in environmental turns into green as in cash.”
No matter what “going green” means to you, there are many benefits to make the transition to paperless hotel accounting for your properties.
Synchronize remote teams
The right paperless hotel document management platforms afford hoteliers the ability to synchronize their property portfolio regardless of location. Rather than creating a long paper- or email-trail to follow in order to document and transfer information, you can save time and resources through cloud-based software.
These applications enable your team to enter and access information in real-time, independent of the schedule and availability of other coworkers.
Be in your guest’s pocket
“If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” isn’t exactly how you delight guests. While a paper billing system has certainly worked for many successful hotels for decades, offering a paperless option can keep you better connected to your guests.
You can’t always predict your guests’ needs. This is where the flexibility of digital billing can help. Allow guests to pay the hotel folio, access receipts and extend stays at their convenience, right from their smartphones.
Cut excess costs
Whether you manage five or 500 properties, relying on a paper-based process for each one of your hotel guests will generate an immense expense. Switching to a paperless hotel process for your front desk and back office could reduce or eliminate these costs:
- Paper (checks, statements, SOPs, annual reports, etc.)
- Ink
- Printer/scanner/fax machines
- Printer/scanner/fax machine maintenance
- FedEx shipments
- Storage and banker’s boxes
Digital files are secure and protected
Mistakes happen. Accidents such as fires and floods can place paper files at risk of being lost or damaged. Secure file storage is an inherent benefit of paperless hotel tech platforms and shouldn’t be overlooked. There are a number of cloud solutions that are highly secure with unlimited storage.
Paperless systems create order
The moment that your front desk associates enter guest information, the right platforms aggregate this data into sortable funnels that managers can access anytime, anywhere. This makes your organization efficient and allows general managers, CFOs and CROs to find both obvious and obscure insights from the data. The insights will further inform your paperless hotel’s budgeting, marketing, and sales initiatives.
With less physical clutter, your front desk will remain organized and presentable to promote efficiency and enhance your guest experience. Your hotel back office operations will be automated and streamlined, allowing staff more time to attend to guests.
Fight back against the perception that going green and operating a paperless hotel has to cost your organization. All it takes is the right paperless system to support your needs. At myDigitalOffice, our Paperless Night Audit has shown to save hotels $3,000 annually on average and 20 acres of trees each year. Give us a call and we’ll help you go green and make green this year.
