An Investigation of Data Management and Property Management Systems in Hotels

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of Property Management Systems (PMS) for data management in hotels. The main objectives are to investigate; the awareness of different PMS software and their functionalities, the key determinants of the choice of a specific system and the effective data integration for decision making. The methodology is quantitative and examines the key dimensions of the PMS systems and their functionality. The method employed here is an online questionnaire which is deployed to property level contacts and completed by 95 hotels mainly in Europe. The findings show that, despite the availability of a range of PMS software and functionalities, the market in Europe continues to be led by a handful of providers. More PMS functionalities are used by the Rooms division whereas Human Resources use the minimal amount of functionality. Data collected is often not used for managing and reporting. The main barrier regarding the exploitation of data within the PMS systems is revealed here as a lack of training. The unique contribution of this paper is in empirically exploring, for the first time, the issues associated with the critical, core technology for the hospitality sector, i.e. the PMS