How the Cloud Is Shaking Up Hotel Property Management Tech: New Skift Research
Skift Take
Technological advancements have allowed for new entrants into the property management systems space to offer a viable alternative to incumbent legacy systems. Those systems might be scrambling for now, but they'll catch up. All this can only be a good thing for the PMS and hotel tech space in the long run.
Simply put, the property management system (PMS) landscape is a tale of two halves. Legacy systems, those that have been around since the early 1980s, were built for on-premise mainframes and physical infrastructure in hotels. Conversely, new entrants over the past years have been able to build using the latest cloud-based infrastructure. Legacy systems are now working hard to roll out cloud-based products and convert their customers onto these systems.
Cloud computing has had a major impact on the PMS sector, as it set in motion a number of developments and brought to the forefront issues that have plagued the sector for decades.
Integrations to the PMS is one area that has seen anything from despair to anger among hoteliers and integration partners. Many tech companies need information that is stored in the PMS, requiring to connect (i.e. integrate) with the PMS for access. This has long been an arduous process and still has many shortcomings today. Different technological advancements, however, have made it somewhat easier to do this and have given new entrants an opportunity to shake up the sector.
In The Hotel Property Management Systems Landscape 2020, we discuss the history, current state, and future outlook of the PMS sector, as well as main topics like integrations, marketplaces, and middleware layers. For this report we interviewed over 30 industry experts and surveyed a f
