In today’s age, where consumers have unlimited options, expectations touch the sky. As a hotel owner or hotel sales manager, you’d know this already.
Let’s say a particular guest prefers a room with a seaside view. This guest is Particular, with a Capital P! How would you keep track of every such guest and every such demand?
With an Excel Sheet? Or a software application that’s only a fancier MS Excel?
Please!
You need a hospitality CRM software.
Top hospitality brands use CRM or customer relationship management software to market their services, acquire and nurture new leads and potential guests, and retain customers over decades.
A hotel CRM software comes with specialized tools specifically designed for hotels, like built-in telephony, 360-degree customer views, loyalty programs, lead management, and so much more.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss:
- what hospitality CRM means
- the benefits of a hospitality CRM software
- the key features of a hospitality CRM software
- the top 9 hospitality CRM software
Keep reading!
Table of Contents
The Benefits of Using a Hospitality CRM Software
First, let’s look at the definition:
A hospitality CRM software offers tools to help hotels understand their guests and improve customer relationships. It also offers tools to store guest data, manage preferences, launch campaigns, and respond to customer queries.
By using CRM for the hospitality industry, hotels can keep in contact with their customers and provide them with personalized attention while they are on the property.
The hospitality industry has seen a resurgence over recent years due to improvements in customer service. Tools like hospitality CRM software allow for more personalization of interactions between hotel staff and guests.
They do this by keeping tabs on guest preferences through past visits or social media posts. The hotel CRM software can also analyze statistics about visitor spending habits.
This way, hotel owners and management individuals are better equipped for memorable customer service.
Let’s look at the key hotel CRM software benefits in a bit more detail now.
Read also: How CRM Software Help Hotels Understand Their Customers Better
Build Customer Relationships
Unlike other industries, communications between your hotel and the customer begin days or even weeks before check-in.
Without a hotel CRM software to manage your customer journey — from the point someone pays a visit to your website and long after they have left — you’ll be left wading in the dark.
A hospitality CRM software helps you offer a tailored and unforgettable experience for your guests.
Centralized Database
Gone are the days when hotels used dozens of software for managing each aspect of their hospitality business.
A hotel is a complex machine with multiple parts, from reception, housekeeping, and chauffeurs, to marketing and customer support teams.
All these parts need to work together to offer guests an experience greater than the sum of its parts. This is why CRMs play an indispensable role for hotels and hospitality establishments.
A hotel CRM software helps all the units access guest information from a centralized database. In essence, it stores ‘guest profiles.’
Improve Customer Loyalty
Satisfied guests are more likely to keep coming back while also recommending the hotel to others. This is especially true for large hotel chains in multiple locations.
As a result, many CRMs in the hospitality industry have features designed specifically to enhance and quantify customer experience.
For example, hospitality CRMs have tools to launch promotional marketing campaigns, manage loyalty programs, and analyze post-stay surveys.
These gestures show that you care for your guests and that you are dedicated to improving their experience.
Read more: What Is Restaurant CRM Software & Which One Suits A Small Business?
Track Sales Tasks
Hotels offer multiple PoS channels for their guests to enhance convenience. Many hotels even offer bookings through third-party brokers and applications.
That’s a lot of stuff to keep track of. Fortunately, a hotel CRM software can help your sales teams keep track of all the processes and offer the tools to drive up revenue.
You also get tools for direct bookings, guest satisfaction metrics, reputation management, rich guest data, and so much more.
Analyze Customers
Hotels can upsell quite beautifully.
Guests have a plethora of needs: Some have babies and need diapers or toys. Some need special services, like wheelchairs. Others are allergic to certain foods.
This is where a hotel CRM software shines. It collects and stores guest data — which you can use to sell personalized packages to guests.
Hotels can use this customer data to launch marketing campaigns to attract potential customers, too.
Read also: How to Attract Modern Patients: 11 Effective Healthcare Marketing Ideas
Key Features of Hospitality CRM Tools
Let’s now look at the key features of hospitality CRM software. Though any generic CRM software will get the job done, a specialized hospitality CRM software has tailor-made tools and features for the hotel industry.
Analysis
A hospitality CRM software offers tools to track room occupancy, goods inventories, supply management, and room service. This is why you need CRMs designed for hospitality businesses, as they include operations management tools and even property management systems.
With a good hotel CRM software, you can collect all the guest data acquired by all these tools, store them in a centralized location, and analyze them.
Scheduling
A hotel may have hundreds or even thousands of employees working across different sectors. Managing such a vast workforce is no easy task.
With a hotel CRM software, your HR team can manage various day-to-day tasks, including appointment scheduling, task delegation, and even use workflows to automate hiring and training new staff.
Automation
Hospitality CRMs can generate invoices with your hotel’s logo and branding, create quotes, and help you send branded emails to customers, vendors, and suppliers.
What’s more, you can automate this process, schedule emails, and receive notifications about due dates and completed payments.
Hotels usually have dozens or even hundreds of tasks that has to be completed everyday — automation and workflows can do wonders here.
Management
To provide the best customer service, hotels have to offer multiple ways for customers to communicate.
Many hospitality CRM platforms offer omnichannel support to connect customers through phone, live chat, email, SMS, and even social media.
The hotel CRM software then saves all the communications in the guest database for easy future access by customer service reps.
Read also: 9 Awesome, Proven CRM Techniques To Improve Your Marketing ROI
Customer Engagement
With the likes of Airbnb and OYO dominating the hospitality sphere, it is vital, now more than ever, to put yourself out there and promote your brand.
The best hotel CRMs have the tools to let you do this.
They leverage multichannel marketing broadcasts, social media ads, and a powerful segmentation tool to deliver your content to the right audience at the right time.
Read also: Craft a Winning Restaurant Schedule Template: Best Practices
The Top 9 Hospitality CRM Software
Let’s now look at some of the best hospitality CRM software in the market today. We’ve curated a list and mentioned their features, cons, and pricing.
- EngageBay
- Hubspot
- Freshworks
- GetResponse
- Keap
- ActiveCampaign
- Pipedrive
- Insightly
- LeadSquared
Let’s dive right in!
EngageBay
EngageBay is one of the best hospitality CRM solutions that won’t require you to dish out thousands of dollars for tools you don’t need.
EngageBay’s all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer service platform offer you all the tools you need to promote your hotel, manage housekeeping, launch marketing campaigns, respond to customer inquiries, and get post-stay guest feedback.
EngageBay Features
- Need a landing page for your hotel? EngageBay has got you covered there. You can drag and drop elements to build stunning pages or choose from dozens of pre-built templates. Oh, and you can optimize them for responsiveness.
- You can even A/B test your landing pages and email broadcasts to maximize performance. With this tool, you don’t have to take shots in the dark.
- An omnichannel presence is becoming increasingly vital for hotels, partly due to competition from platforms like Airbnb. With EngageBay’s omnichannel marketing, you can reach out to your customers through phone, chat, SMS, email, and social media.
- Similarly, you can view all your appointments in one place using EngageBay’s 2-way calendar sync.
- Customer service is at the heart of hospitality. EngageBay lets you bring out your A-game through its Service Bay. Issue, track, assign, and solve
- tickets; automate support using canned responses, macros, and autoresponders.
- Need more? Choose from dozens of powerful integrations. Use JustCall to place calls directly from the hotel CRM software; place reCAPTCHA to enhance security; integrate Stripe and offer your guests a complete billing solution.
EngageBay Cons
- No search marketing yet.
- Marketing automation is not offered in the Free and Basic plans.
- Can have more interactive tutorials for advanced tools.
EngageBay Pricing
Have we mentioned that EngageBay is highly affordable?
That said, don’t let the pricing fool you; it is power-packed with all the tools you need to manage your hotel and keep attracting new customers.
Here’s a breakdown of the pricing plans and their features.
Free All-in-One plan: This plan is free forever for up to 15 users, making this one of the best free CRM software for the hotel industry.
- 1,000 branded emails per month
- 500 contacts
- Live Chat
- Help Desk
- CRM
- Landing pages
- Autoresponders
- Email marketing
- 500 MB storage
- 360-degree contact view
- Appointment scheduling
…and so much more.
All-in-One Basic Suite: This plan costs $14.99 per month and includes:
- 3,000 branded emails per month
- 1,000 contacts
- All Free plan features
- Custom deal milestones
- 1 GB of cloud storage
- Conversational inbox
- Lead scoring
- SMS support
- Web pop-ups.
All-in-One Growth Suite: This popular plan starts at $49.99 a month and offers:
- 25,000 branded emails
- 50,000 contacts
- All Basic plan features
- Marketing automation
- Push notifications
- Free onboarding sessions
- Custom domain
- A dedicated account manager
All-in-One Pro Suite: This plan starts at $79.99 a month and offers advanced tools like:
- 50,000 branded emails
- unlimited contacts
- All Growth plan features
- call scripts and recordings
- Custom reporting
- APIs
- Web analytics
- Phone support
- Proposal analytics
- Web analytics
All the paid plans also get a 20% discount on annual subscriptions and a 40% discount on biennial subscriptions.
Read also: SharpSpring vs Hubspot vs EngageBay — Which CRM Software is the Best?
HubSpot
HubSpot is another one of our favorites. It leverages various tools to keep your hotel running smoothly.
HubSpot Features
- Using HubSpot’s 360-degree customer view, you can get a comprehensive perception of your guests.
- HubSpot’s Service Hub lets you issue tickets, prioritize them, assign them to hotel sales managers, and close them quickly and efficiently.
- The software lets you create email forms quickly, A/B test them to maximize reach and launch email marketing campaigns. Then, once the leads start pouring in, you can segregate your customers, attach tags to them, and even add them to lists.
- HubSpot’s landing page builder is intuitive and powerful. You can drag and drop desired elements to create stunning pages and email forms. Need more control? You can use HubSpot’s A/B testing tool to maximize clickthroughs.
- The software’s on-the-go content optimization offers readily available ideas while drafting content. Boost your SEO ranking with this powerful tool.
Uncover the landscape of HubSpot competitors with our comprehensive guide. Get detailed insights on pros, cons, and pricing.
HubSpot Cons
- One of the most expensive hospitality CRM software
- HubSpot’s standalone products won’t provide the best value for your money
- Limited reporting
- Paid technical support
- No A/B testing on lower-end packages
HubSpot Pricing
- Starter Growth Suite: This plan costs $50 a month and offers email marketing, 25 smart lists, 10 reporting dashboards, deal pipelines, canned scripts, live chat, and mobile forms.
- Professional Growth Suite: This plan starts at $1,343 per month and offers company scoring properties, 1,000 smart lists, salesforce account, A/B testing, custom reporting, snippets, calls, web analytics, eSignatures, and NPS surveys.
- Enterprise Growth Suite: Pricing starts at a whopping $4,200 and includes Events API, webhooks, multitouch revenue attribution, call transcripts, single sign-on, user roles, and slack integration.
Read also: HubSpot Pricing and Comparison with Other Alternatives
Freshworks
Freshworks is yet another great CRM automation platform for hotels. It also has a suite of other products that you can connect to, like FreshDesk and FreshCaller.
Freshworks Features
- You can use Freshworks’ AI-based predictive lead scoring tool to gain high-value customers. With 2-way email sync, you can view your appointments in one place.
- With Freshworks’ hotel CRM and automation, you don’t have to fret about whether your marketing campaigns have a positive impact. The software’s tracking metrics give you a bird’s eye view of open, clickthrough, and bounce rates.
- You can call your guests, suppliers, and even other branches directly from the hospitality CRM software using Freshcaller, add important notes to your calls, and record them.
- Chauffeurs, hospitality workers, and field agents can work on the go through Freshwork’s iOS and Android apps.
Freshworks Cons
- Complicated error logs
- Freshworks’ complex user interface may feel clunky to use at first
Freshworks Pricing
- Growth plan: This plan costs $29 a month and gives you access to a visual sales pipeline, custom reporting, sales sequences, Slack collaboration, Freshdesk integration, and built-in phone and email.
- Pro plan: This plan costs $69 a month and adds conference calls, sales goals, answer bots, conference calling, active marketing journeys, behavioral segmentation, and territory management.
- Enterprise plan: This plan costs $125 a month and adds features like auto-profile enrichment, deal teams, audit logs, sales forecasts, advanced metrics, and a dedicated account manager.
Read also: Freshworks Alternatives: 5 Trustworthy Tools to Consider in 2021
GetResponse
The fourth hospitality CRM system on our list is GetResponse.
GetResponse offers an array of tools for hotels to manage, organize, and automate their workflows.
GetResponse Features
- With GetResponse’s autoresponders, email broadcasts, and scalable workflows, you can launch powerful campaigns to reach potential customers.
- GetResponse’s landing page builder lets you design beautiful landing pages for your hotels. You can even A/B test your page to ensure that each guest finds something they want.
- Additionally, you can keep an eye on your hotel’s sales and marketing performance through GetResponse’s insightful reports and dashboards.
- Again, GetResponse’s conversion funnels and paid ads let you enhance your outreach and pull in more customers.
GetResponse Cons
- Lack of third-party website tracking links.
- No free plan; GetResponse only offers a free trial for 30 days.
GetResponse Pricing
GetResponse offers four pricing plans:
- Basic: The Basic plan starts at $15 a month and offers email marketing, autoresponder, a sales funnel, Facebook and Google Ads, and lead funnels.
- Plus: This plan starts at $49 a month and offers automation builder, 5 sales funnels, webinar funnels, and everything from the basic plan.
- Professional: The Professional plan starts at $99 a month and offers web push notifications, on-demand webinars, unlimited automation workflows, and more.
- Max: This plan is made for larger enterprises and is custom-priced.
Read also: 5 GetResponse Alternatives You Should Choose in 2021
Keap
The fifth hospitality CRM software on our list is Keap.
Keap Features
- Keap offers tools to capture potential customers, segment them, organize them in a central location, and send targeted marketing material.
- Keap also offers calendar booking so that so your guests or suppliers can easily schedule appointments. Tools like invoicing and integrated payments make it easy to send bills and receive payments. What’s more, everything’s logged into the hotel CRM.
- Sometimes, you might need more hotel-specific third-party integrations. With Keap, you can choose from over 2,500 integrations, including Eventbrite for event management, property management system, Google forms to create surveys, and Stripe for payments.
- Your housekeeping staff can contact other departments and respond to hotel guests’ queries on the go using Keap’s iOS and Android apps.
Keap Cons
- Newcomers may find it hard to navigate through the software
- Issues in email deliverability in some instances
Keap Pricing
- Lite plan: The Lite plan starts at $79 a month and offers a core CRM dashboard, automation tools, mobile app, payments, B2B management, and quotes. You can store 500 contacts for one user.
- Pro plan: The Pro plan starts at $159 per month and offers a landing page builder, tasks, forms, sales pipelines, invoices, A/B email testing, subscriptions management, and 500 contacts.
- Max plan: The Max plan costs $199 per month for 500 contacts and offers lead scoring, pipeline automation, Shopify integration, automated text messaging, custom user roles, and much more. For 10,000 contacts, you’ll have to pay $399 a month for one user and $30 for every additional user.
- Max Classic: Keap also offers the Max Classic plan for advanced hotel sales needs. You get access to features like opportunity records, lead source tracking, sales round robin, and a dedicated business line. You can get a quote from their website.
Read also: Keap (Infusionsoft) Alternatives: The Top 5 CRM Options to Try
ActiveCampaign
Let’s take a look at ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign is another excellent hospitality CRM software that offers a plethora of tools for hotels — including autoresponders, goal tracking, email broadcasts, customer service tools, and multichannel marketing.
ActiveCampaign Features
- ActiveCampaign offers social media tools to help you market your services to a wider audience, including gen-Z hoteliers. This can also serve as a channel to respond to customer queries and listen to what people are talking about you.
- Tools like autoresponders and automation can help improve your team’s productivity.
- ActiveCampaign’s segmentation, predictive lead scoring, social data enrichment, conditional content, and customer attribution can help you capture and nurture hot leads while filtering out cold leads for re-engagement.
- You also get premium phone support, uptime SLA, and custom URL.
ActiveCampaign Cons
- Not much functionality on email templates
- Building automation is harder on ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign Pricing
- Lite plan: This plan starts at $9 a month and offers 500 contacts, autoresponders, automation, contacts importing, and more.
- Plus plan: For $49 a month, you get 500 contacts, lead scoring, conditional content, task reporting, subscription forms, and contact database sync.
- Professional plan: The plan starts at $129 a month for 500 contacts, custom reporting, social media enrichment, and more.
Read also: ActiveCampaign Alternatives: 5 Similar Tools You Should Use
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a great hospitality CRM software that has advanced sales automation.
With unique features like the AI sales assistant, hotels can breeze through sales tasks as the software offers better automation and workflow tips as it learns about you. What’s more, the AI assistant offers performance notifications, periodic reports, and key metrics.
Pipedrive Features
- You get deal management and customizable pipelines to help you manage hoteliers and leads.
- With meeting schedulers, caller, product catalog, and 2-way sync, your appointments and communications are seamless.
- Deal rotting, custom fields, contacts map, integrations, and group email further provide you with the tools needed to tweak your marketing and sales processes to perfection.
- You also get advanced user permissions, visual dashboards, two-factor authentication, and workflow automation.
Pipedrive Cons
- No live reports
- No A/B testing feature
Pipedrive Pricing
With Pipedrive, you get four different plans:
- Essential Growth plan: This plan starts at $12.50 and offers lead management, product catalog, leads inbox, calendar view, email inbox, and more.
- Advanced Growth plan: This plan costs $24.90 per month per user and offers 2-way email sync, email open and click tracking, a meeting scheduler, and caller.
- Professional Growth plan: This popular plan costs $49.90 per month for each user and offers email scheduling, sales assistant, API access, and webhooks.
- Enterprise Growth plan: This plan costs $99 per user per month and offers advanced features including smart contact data, subscription revenue reports, team goals, unlimited advanced user permissions, SSO login, 2FA, unlimited visual dashboards, and 100 workflow automation.
Read also: Pipedrive Alternatives: 6 Drawbacks of Pipedrive CRM Explained
Insightly
Insightly, being a unified marketing, sales, and project management software, is a well-suited platform for the hotel industry. You can also capture, manage, and nurture your leads using the unified CRM database.
Insightly Features
- Insightly hospitality offers a host of campaign tools essential for hotels to put their names out in the open.
- You get journey builder — a tool to help hotel marketers to design, populate, and launch personalized campaigns swiftly.
- Advanced reporting and analytics offer real-time information to help you gauge your team’s performance.
- You can also offer industry-leading customer support through Insightly’s relationship linking feature.
- Insightly also lets you build custom applications through workflow automation, interactive dashboards, and complex validation.
Insightly Cons
- No advanced features for contact management
- Less than average technical support for advanced features.
Insightly Pricing
Insightly offers three pricing plans:
- Plus plan: This plan starts at $29 a month and offers lead management, up to 10 hosted landing pages, calendar sync, dynamic list segmentation, project management tools, and more.
- Professional plan: This plan starts at $49 a month and offers configurable reports, lead assignment and routing, 50 hosted forms, and business intelligence dashboards.
- Enterprise plan: The Enterprise plan starts at $99 a month per user and includes advanced tools like SSO, custom apps, up to 20 analytics tracking domains, unlimited roles, and real-time insight cards.
Read also: Insightly Alternative: Better & Trustworthy Tools To Consider
LeadSquared
LeadSquared’s marketing, field force, and sales automation software is great for hotel management, as it offers a host of tools like lead prioritizing algorithms, lead qualifications, triggers, and more.
LeadSquared Features
- LeadSquared’s field force automation offers geo-tracking, offline functionality, multi-lingual support, and more for on-field hotel agents.
- You also get a host of action trackers and triggers that can be paired with user behavior analysis. This can then be used to send out relevant content, personalize campaigns, and offer tailor-made customer support.
- LeadSquared’s customer portal, zip code-based distribution, and field-level security is a boon for larger hotel establishments with multiple locations.
LeadSquared Cons
- No built-in calling system or integration
- More expensive compared to competitors
LeadSquared Pricing
We’ve broken down the annual prices and features of LeadSquared’s plans:
- Lite plan: This plan starts at $25 per month and offers geo-tracking, smart views, lead tracking, custom fields, and lead scoring.
- Pro plan: The pro plan starts at $50 a month and includes account management, sales notifications, email personalization, and lead distribution.
- Super plan: The Super plan starts at $100 a month and includes sales automation, zip code-based distribution, and field-level security, and customer portal.
- Ultimate plan: For enterprises requiring customized packages, LeadSquared offers the Ultimate plan at custom pricing.
Read also: Automotive CRM For Your Dealership: A Quick Guide (+ 5 Best Software)
Conclusion
If there’s one thing that hotels need to master, it’s customer experience.
Fortunately, there are excellent hospitality CRM systems to help hotels offer the ultimate guest experience.
Most customers travel to escape their mundane reality: traffic jams, hours-long workday, and the pressures of everyday life. Offering your customers a seamless experience will make them your loyal guests.
Ultimately, investing in a great CRM software can help you offer that ‘magical’ experience your guests are so desperately seeking.
This is where EngageBay comes in. It offers all the tools you need to deliver exceptional guest satisfaction, packed into one comprehensive platform.
The sweetest thing about EngageBay is that it costs less than $1 a day. That’s less than the cost of all the complimentary coffee you’re giving away!
👉Empower your travel agency with the best CRM software – learn more in our expert guide! 💪