The hospitality industry is growing increasingly competitive, and customer relationship management (CRM) is becoming essential for hotels to maintain their edge. As the hotel sector faces more demand than ever, hoteliers require cutting-edge technology to manage customer interactions and fulfill their expectations efficiently. This blog presents a concise list of the top seven CRM software for hotels and hospitality in 2024 based on overall scores, sharing a detailed overview of each and offering guidance on selecting the best one for your needs.
What is a Hotel CRM System?
A Hotel CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a specially designed software solution for the hospitality industry. Its main goal is to manage and strengthen hotel-guest interactions and relationships. It serves as a central hub where hotels can collect, store, analyze, and leverage guest data to improve customer service, nurture loyalty, and streamline operational efficiencies.
Hotel CRM software collects guest information from various sources such as online bookings, check-in forms, loyalty programs, and customer feedback. All this data is securely stored in a centralized database, forming in-depth guest profiles that encapsulate preferences, stay history, communication patterns, and other significant details, all while adhering to data protection laws like the GDPR. This centralized guest data system assists hotels in optimizing personalized communication, enhancing guest services, planning effective marketing campaigns, and monitoring guest loyalty and rewards programs.
Benefits of Hotel CRM Software
With CRM solutions, hotel managers and owners can significantly enhance their guest communication, automate reminders, and even curate personalized email campaigns. With these benefits, it’s clear that CRM investment in the hospitality sector is more than merely beneficial—it's paramount.
Improving Customer Loyalty with Targeted Strategies
An effective hotel CRM software is instrumental in improving customer loyalty. According to a survey by Software Advice, 86 percent of millennial travelers are not enrolled in a loyalty program, presenting a significant opportunity for hotels to boost their loyalty strategies using a CRM.
CRM systems enable hotels to create and manage diverse loyalty programs, craft special offers and directly target guests based on their preferences and travel habits. Personalized offers not only improve customer satisfaction but also increase the likelihood of repeat bookings, leading to elevated revenues and enhanced customer loyalty. You can also enhance your hotel CRM software with a business intelligence dashboard for deeper customer insights.
Also, hotel CRMs offer insightful guest data analysis, allowing hotels to understand the preferences and behavior of their loyal customers better. This knowledge can be used to innovate and align loyalty rewards with what guests truly value.
Efficiently Managing Inquiries and Activating Faster Responses
With the evolution of communication channels, managing inquiries effectively is one of the significant challenges that hotels face. A revered CRM system unifies various communication modes such as phone, email, text messaging, live chat, and social media into an omnichannel dashboard and aids hotels in handling this task adeptly.
This omnidirectional platform allows teams to manage interaction with customers across multiple channels seamlessly. Hence, fewer representatives can cater to increasing customer queries, leading to enhanced productivity. The CRM platform also provides capabilities for hotel staff to manage customer interactions 24/7, even on the go with mobile applications.
In addition to this, some CRM software offers supplemental call center services that take bookings when hotels are at capacity, offline, or away from their phones. This leads to faster response rates, fewer missed opportunities, and a significant uplift in customer satisfaction.
Building Enhanced Customer Relationships
Building solid customer relationships is at the heart of every successful hotel business. CRM software acts as the vital link between hotels and their guests, helping create and maintain those relationships.
CRM platforms provide 360-degree customer views, which encompass all past interactions, preferences, feedback, and more concerning a guest. This comprehensive data set allows hotels to tailor their communication and service to each individual guest, which improves overall customer experience and establishes long-lasting relationships.
Automated follow-ups, personalized messaging, and notifications about special offers or events are all integral features of a CRM designed to keep the hotel-guest relationship engaged.
Boosting Growth Through Elevated Customer Engagement
With the help of advanced CRM, hotels can identify high-value customers, analyze their preferences, and engage them with personalized and effective marketing campaigns.
With integrated marketing automation features, a hotel CRM can execute campaigns across various channels including emails, social media, and text messages, targeting guests with tailored content and special offers. Such interaction sparks customers' interest and increases their engagement with the hotel.
The Analytics and Reporting features of CRM software also provide detailed insights into customer responsiveness to different campaigns and services. This helps to strategically refine marketing efforts, enhancing both customer engagement and revenue generation.
Top 7 Hotel CRM Software
1. Kohezion
Kohezion, a powerful CRM software solution, is renowned for its customizability and user-friendly interface. Ideally suited for small to medium-sized hotels, it allows for effective management of guest data, room bookings, and other diverse operational tasks.
Kohezion offers an intuitive data management system that enables hoteliers to easily track guest interactions, acquisition channels, booking history, and more. Its advanced analytics feature provides insightful reports to understand customer behavior better and frame marketing strategies accordingly.
To improve customer satisfaction, Kohezion provides tools for personalized communication and efficient handling of guest inquiries. It also allows integration with other business tools, thus providing a comprehensive solution for various operational tasks.
While pricing details for Kohezion vary, the CRM software is recognized for its scalability, making it a forward-thinking investment for hotels planning to grow their business. Although a free version is unavailable, a free trial is available to explore its diverse features. It has a solid rating of 4.14/5 based on users' reviews.
2. Monday
Monday.com is a leading CRM system for hotels due to its visually appealing and modern UI, high capacity for customization, and in-app automation. This CRM tool beautifully tunes in with hotel operations, helping hotels of all sizes streamline their processes and better serve their guests.
Its notable features include guest management, reservations management, and advanced marketing tools. With this host of features, Monday.com helps hotel staff deliver impactful personalized experiences, hence advancing guest satisfaction and fueling revenue growth.
Monday.com's user-friendly interface paired with its seamless integration capabilities enables efficient management of daily tasks. This robust software allows hoteliers to create boards and columns aligning with their workflows to ensure the system is tailored to meet industry needs.
Monday.com's starting price is $10.00 per month and stands out with a rating of 4.7 over 380 reviews. It offers both a free version and a free trial for potential users to explore and experience the benefits of this premier hotel CRM software.
3. Salesforce
Dominating the CRM market, Salesforce offers an array of powerful tools for the hospitality industry. Known for seamlessly integrating with existing systems, Salesforce enhances the hotel's capability to provide personalized customer service and carefully curated experiences for its guests.
Its robust suite of features includes advanced data analytics, providing an insightful understanding of the customers’ needs and behavior. This helps hotels optimize their marketing strategies. Plus, the customizable dashboards and reports serve as valuable tools for monitoring and managing marketing campaigns.
One of Salesforce's stronger features is its AI-powered automation that aims to boost guest loyalty. Its robust integration feature allows hotels to easily merge data from varied channels, offering a holistic view of guest interactions.
The Salesforce booking system provides a self-service platform that allows guests to book spaces, and rooms, and even schedule events online. This not only saves staff time but also improves customer experience and loyalty.
Salesforce's Sales Cloud software provides a comprehensive view of customers that empowers hotel sales reps to engage in the most efficient manner with the guests. It also offers a dedicated app for continuous property maintenance tracking on Android and iOS tablets.
Pricing options and offers may vary, and a free trial is available for potential clients. With its impressive features, Salesforce has a rating of 4.4 out of 5.
4. HubSpot
As one of our favorites in the lineup, HubSpot is a revered CRM software brimming with several tools to aid in the smooth administration of your hotel. The service's comprehensive 360-degree customer view provides an all-encompassing perspective of your guests, which aids in enhancing customer satisfaction.
HubSpot's Service Hub facilitates efficient ticket issuance, prioritization, and fast closure, which improves operational efficiency. Moreover, it provides an intuitive and robust landing page builder that lets you create stunning pages with an A/B testing feature for optimizing the user experience.
In terms of email marketing, HubSpot shines. You can quickly create email forms, A/B test them to maximize reach and launch email marketing campaigns. Following the inflow of leads, you can categorize your customers and even add tags to them.
Unveiling a remarkable content optimization feature, HubSpot offers readily available suggestions to boost your SEO ranking while creating content. Plus, its 'on-the-go' character delivers excellent mobility for hoteliers.
However, one must bear in mind some of the cons of HubSpot, including its expensive pricing and limited reporting. HubSpot's standalone products might not offer the best value for money, and technical support is paid. The A/B testing feature is absent in the lower-end packages.
The pricing for HubSpot varies with different tiers, including the Starter Growth Suite, Professional Growth Suite, and Enterprise Growth Suite, and starts from $50 a month up to an impressive $4,200.
Considering its vast array of features and comprehensive customer management, HubSpot holds a commendable position among CRM software for hotels, achieving an overall rating of 4.3 out of 5.
5. Freshsales
Freshsales, a cloud-based CRM solution, is an excellent option for hotels of all sizes. Its AI-powered capabilities significantly enhance contact management and deal scoring, allowing hotels to focus on leads with a high likelihood of conversion, thereby optimizing staff efforts and improving the chances of successful deals.
Primarily known for its customization options, Freshsales lets users tailor dashboards, reports, and workflows as per their preferences. Its built-in phone API enables easy contact with leads over chat, email, or phone. These features, along with its capability to manage contacts, accounts, and deals, make Freshsales a comprehensive CRM solution.
One of Freshsales' standout features is its predictive deal insights which empower hotels with intelligent sales insights. This helps maximize efficiency and identifies the most promising deals to close. However, it's worth noting that there have been some issues reported with customer support and availability on the free plan, and support is only open on weekdays.
Freshsales comes with a variety of plans accommodating various needs, starting at $15 per month. It also offers a free version, as well as a 21-day free trial, making it a budget-friendly option for many hotels. Based on user reviews, Freshsales holds a solid 4.5-star rating.
6. Zoho
Zoho CRM offers hotels a robust solution that particularly benefits from seamless integration with other Zoho tools and third-party applications like Mailchimp, Google Analytics, and QuickBooks. Its user-friendly interface and intuitive design make it a highly accessible tool, even for newcomers.
Providing a broad range of features, Zoho CRM excels in sales automation, offering lead generation through website forms, social media, and email, as well as lead scoring and workflow automation. Robust analytics and reporting capabilities, meanwhile, allow users to run pre-built and custom reports and visualize data through charts.
Zoho CRM's AI tool, Zia, delivers predictive analysis, data search, and anomaly detection features, great assets for hotels that truly want to leverage their data. It also provides mobile apps on Android and iOS, enabling quick access to contacts, deals, leads, and notes, and the ability to make calls directly from the app.
While it offers a 15-day free trial, the starting monthly price is around $14, which goes up to $168 on an annual plan. The AI features are predominantly available with top-tier plans, making Zoho CRM a cost-effective CRM choice for larger hotels that need extensive features. Its powerful capabilities earn it a high user rating.
7. NetSuite Oracle
NetSuite Oracle offers an excellent CRM plus ERP solution for the hospitality industry, providing a complete and comprehensive system that integrates client information with back-office systems. Oracle NetSuite is well-suited for large hotel chains with its extensive capability to manage the entire customer journey.
The CRM platform is highly accessible due to its user-friendly interface and straightforward navigation. The Home dashboard neatly summarizes pending tasks, meetings, and key performance indicators, providing a clear and concise overview of your business operations.
NetSuite brings an impressive range of features to the table, including advanced sales forecasting tools, upsell recommendations, commission management, and even a mobile app for uninterrupted productivity. The ability to track and manage partner-related sales and marketing efforts proves to be a great asset, enriching partner relationship management.
Additionally, NetSuite's commendable customer service and immediate assistance from sales reps set it apart, bolstering its rank among the top CRMs for hotels. Although it doesn't offer a free version, Oracle does provide customized pricing plans as per hotel size and specific operational needs.
With an extensive list of features and simplicity of use, Oracle NetSuite is a top-tier CRM solution for hotels aiming for seamless integration of CRM and ERP functionalities.
Key Features To Consider When Choosing a Hospitality CRM
Hotel CRM provides data analysis, campaign automation, and guest feedback processing and enables effective marketing. The CRM ensures enhanced guest experience, fosters loyalty and repeat bookings, facilitates efficient operations, and provides real-time guest data. The best CRM equips staff with essential tools and ensures hotel success.
Analysing Customer Information
When selecting a CRM for your hotel, a fundamental feature to look for is the ability to analyze customer information effectively. The CRM allows for accurate data collection from various channels (e.g., direct bookings, OTAs), forming comprehensive profiles for each guest, and synthesizing this wealth of data to generate actionable insights.
The ability to draw analytics from guest stay history, demographic data, preferences, previous interactions, behaviors, and spending patterns helps hoteliers spot market trends and understand exactly what their customers want. This allows for precise targeting of marketing efforts and personalized offers, ultimately improving guest satisfaction and retention rates.
Beyond offering simple data collection, a premium CRM delivers valuable reports and visual data for quick decision-making. Hotels can leverage these data insights to craft strategies for highly targeted marketing campaigns and service customization, driving growth and competitiveness in a fast-paced market.
Automating Manual Tasks
One of the salient advantages of a CRM system is task automation. Hotels are bustling environments with dozens of tasks to oversee every day. Managing bookings, invoicing, updating guest records, and sending out emails - these tasks can quickly become overwhelming and time-consuming when performed manually. An effective CRM system helps with automating these tasks to reduce administrative burden and improve efficiency.
For instance, CRM can automatically send out transactional emails confirming booking details, invoices, and even personalized follow-ups asking for feedback or offering special promotions. Machine-driven task delegation eliminates human error and ensures that none of the smaller, yet crucial tasks slip through the cracks.
A good CRM also offers process workflow automation, making it particularly helpful for HR functions like hiring and training new staff. CRM system automatically schedules tasks, assigns staff, sends task reminders and significantly reduces the time spent on routine administrative tasks.
Scheduling Follow-Ups to Enhance Employee Productivity
A well-designed CRM system automates and schedules necessary follow-ups and significantly enhances employee productivity. Such a feature is particularly beneficial for the sales team in your hotel, allowing them to keep track of potential leads and reminding them to follow up. This not only increases the chances of converting potential leads but also ensures existing clients feel valued, fostering long-term relationships.
Scheduled follow-ups can also be employed in other areas such as post-stay services. You can program the CRM to send automated follow-up emails after a guest's stay, asking for feedback or offering special promotions for future stays.
Tracking Sales Performance
Another critical feature to consider while choosing a hospitality CRM system is the capability to track sales performance. Advanced CRM solutions offer detailed sales forecasting tools, dashboard widgets, and customizable reports to keep tabs on how sales are progressing toward established goals.
CRM systems analyze booking data, order values, new leads, conversion rates, and other sales metrics and provide comprehensive insights into the performance of the sales team. They also help identify prevalent trends, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and areas needing improvement.
Also, tracking sales interaction data like emails, calls, and meetings can help hotel managers understand the amount and quality of engagement each sales representative has with guests, leading to more effective coaching and team optimization.
Scalability: Growing Along with Your Needs
Scalability is a fundamental factor to assess when selecting a CRM tool for hotels. The CRM software is equipped to grow along with your business needs as your hotel expands. It seamlessly accommodates increasing volumes of guest data, additional properties, and rising customer interactions across multiple locations.
When evaluating the scalability of CRM software, consider its ability to meet the demands of increasing users and data volumes, its capability to generate complex reports as the business grows more intricate, and its integration potential with other systems for expanding operations.
Using a CRM system that cannot scale as your business grows could lead to inefficiencies, data silos, and potential customer dissatisfaction in the long run. As such, choosing a CRM software that's scalable with your hotel's growth and expansion plans is a strategic investment and one of the crucial considerations while selecting a CRM system.
Customization: Making it Your Own
Customization is key when selecting CRM software for your hotel because every business has its unique workflows, guest service standards, and requirements. A customizable CRM software aligns with your hotel's brand identity and specific operations.
The level of customization could range from simple aesthetic changes, like incorporating your hotel’s logo and color scheme, to more intricate customizations, such as modifying data fields, creating custom modules, and developing unique automation rules.
For example, CRM software offering customization can allow you to tailor the interface and the dashboards, alter the data fields according to your guest data, and generate personalized reports that align with your managerial needs.
Also, the ability to define user roles and permissions in a CRM ensures efficient access management and security control. A CRM's potential to adapt to the changing needs of your hotel, based on guest preferences or evolving market trends, is fundamental to achieving long-term success with a CRM system.
Data Security: Keeping Your Information Safe
As a hotelier, you are entrusted with a vast trove of sensitive customer information, and ensuring its security is non-negotiable. Therefore, select a CRM system that guarantees robust and reliable data protection.
Industry-leading CRM systems provide strong security protocols, data encryption, and sophisticated access controls. They comply with relevant data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other local norms.
Backups and recovery plans, secure cloud hosting, protection against external threats (like malware), and user access controls are fundamental aspects to look for in a secure CRM system.
Transparency about data security practices is also important, so prospective users are fully informed about how their data is handled and protected.
Investing in a CRM system with strong data security protocols is not only good for your reputation but is also essential to comply with laws and protect your hotel business from potential legal issues and significant financial losses.
Create a Flexible Hotel CRM System with Kohezion
Choosing a suitable CRM for your hotel is a stringent task that requires foresight and a precise understanding of your hotel's requirements. With a diverse range of CRM options at your disposal, identifying the one that fits your operational needs and budget can be overwhelming.
However, keeping your goals at the forefront and understanding how each CRM can help you achieve those objectives is the key. Whether it's enhancing customer relations, boosting employee efficiency, expanding the business, or improving data security, aligning the CRM features with your business objectives can lead to the selection of the ideal CRM solutions.
Kohezion is an ideal hotel CRM software that centralizes guest information, streamlining operations from marketing to customer service. Its advanced features help enhance guest experiences, increase efficiency in management tasks, and ultimately lead to higher revenue and improved turnover rates. It's a comprehensive solution for the hospitality industry.
Consider the chosen CRM as an investment that can transform your business, offering a more streamlined workflow, personalized customer experiences, and increased savings in the long run. With the right CRM system, you can efficiently manage your hotel's growth and stay ahead of the competition in the dynamic hospitality sector.
Start building with a free account
Frequently Asked Questions
A hotel and hospitality CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a software solution specifically designed to meet the unique needs of the hospitality industry. It serves as a central hub for gathering, storing, and analyzing guest data to improve customer service, nurture guest loyalty, and streamline operational efficiencies.
This software assists in managing guest interactions across all communication channels, creating comprehensive guest profiles with preference information, and personalizing communication and marketing efforts. From managing reservations to monitoring customer feedback and crafting marketing campaigns, a hotel and hospitality CRM system ensures guests receive the right message at the right time to enhance their experience and build enduring relationships.
Hotels need a CRM system for several reasons:
- Personalized Guest Experience: CRM systems carry comprehensive guest profiles that can help hotels provide personalized services and tailor-made offers, enhancing guest satisfaction and loyalty.
- Improved Efficiency: The automation features of a CRM system can help streamline operations, automate repetitive tasks, and increase employee productivity.
- Marketing and Sales Support: CRM solutions can leverage gathered guest data to target marketing efforts more effectively, track sales performance, and predict future trends.
- Data Analysis: Advanced analytics that CRMs provide can translate the gathered guest data into actionable insights, helping hotels make informed decisions.
- Customer Retention: CRM systems track customer preferences and past feedback, and help hotels devise personalized retention strategies to discourage customers from switching to competitors.
- Increased Revenue: The features of CRM systems, such as upselling and cross-selling, can significantly boost revenue and maximize profit.
- Guest Feedback Management: CRM solutions offer effective tools to solicit, track, and respond to guest feedback, helping to continuously improve service standards.
The cost of a hospitality CRM can vary significantly depending on several factors, including the features and functionality required, the number of users, and the specific CRM provider. Prices can range from under $100 per month to several thousand dollars per month for larger organizations.
Many CRM providers also offer cheaper or even free versions of their software, albeit often with limited features. On the other hand, premium and enterprise-level CRMs, boasting advanced features such as artificial intelligence and detailed analytics, can bring the cost up significantly. It's important to choose a CRM based on your hotel's specific needs and budget constraints. Consider the total cost of ownership, including system implementation, training, software updates, and maintenance, not just the upfront cost.
As per our research, HubSpot CRM is widely recognized as one of the best free CRM options for hotels. Their free plan caters to fundamental CRM needs, offering essential features that can help manage customer relationships effectively.
Key features included in the free plan are contact management, deal tracking, email templates, live chat, and basic reporting. HubSpot CRM puts user-friendliness at the forefront, presenting a clean, intuitive interface that makes it easy to start with a CRM system at no cost.
Although the free version has some limitations, it still serves as a powerful introduction to CRM for many hotels, especially smaller ones or those just starting. As needs and budgets grow, users can explore HubSpot's extensive range of scalable premium features and plans.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and PMS (Property Management System) are both crucial software tools used in the hospitality industry, but they serve different core functions.
A CRM system focuses on managing customer relationships. It collects and analyzes guest data, including preferences, booking history, and feedback, to provide personalized service and communication. CRM software assists in nurturing customer loyalty, conducting targeted marketing campaigns, and generating detailed analytics for strategizing and decision-making.
On the other hand, a PMS is more operationally focused. It handles hotel operational tasks such as managing reservations, assigning rooms, controlling inventory, managing rates, invoicing, and coordinating housekeeping tasks. A PMS primarily helps streamline everyday operations and improve the efficiency of a hotel's operational workflow.
Both systems can often integrate with each other, creating a unified solution that covers guest relationship management and operational tasks. They work together to provide a holistic view of a guest's journey, improving operational proficiency, enhancing the guest experience, and ultimately boosting hotel performance.
