Hotel Front Office Management, 3rd Edition

PMS APPLICATIONS 109Figure 4-6. Main menu of a property management system.1. Reservations2. Yield Management3. Registration4. Room Status5. Posting6. Call Accounting7. Checkout8. Night Audit9. Inquiries/Reports10. Back Office11. Housekeeping12. Food and Beverage13. Maintenance14. Security15. Marketing and Sales16. Personnel17. Electronic Mail18. Time ClockReservationsThe reservations module (refer to Figure 4-7) consists of subsystems that can receiveindividual guest or group data, check a guest’s request against a data bank of availablerooms, and store this information. The guest data are received through a personal phonecall or through another computer in the referral system. All of the possibilities or roomtypes and locations, room rates, and special requests can be matched with the existingroom inventories. This information can be stored for up to 52 weeks (or more) in mostsystems.Information concerning guarantees with credit cards or confirmed reservations is capturedat this time. Details on deposits, blocking, times of arrival and departure, VIP guestlists, projected occupancies and reports on these reservation functions assist the frontoffice manager.The guest who is checking out of the Limited-Service Inn in Dallas, Texas, andwants to make a reservation at the Limited-Service Inn in Chicago for that eveningcan have the reservation confirmed within seconds. The guest information is alreadyavailable in the data bank, and through electronic transmissions, the request is verified(via a check of the existing room inventories held in the data bank for the Limited-ServiceInn in Chicago) by a central computer. Similar procedures are followed byother referral agencies. (Further examples of computerized reservations options areprovided in Chapter 5.)TLFeBOOK