Five years ago, we developed HotelKey PMS just as an app. It had very basic property and reservations functions. Given we knew very little to start with, we brought in a fresh mindset and created a completely new user experience that eliminated the complexities of deep menu functions and delighted the front desk staff members. Over time, our users and enterprise customers helped us expand the simple front desk app into a leading property management system working with thousands of properties including two enterprises.

Two years ago, we started to work towards our CRS product and took a similar approach. As expected, we noticed extreme complexity in room type management, channel distribution and rate management. We took time to understand all of it - again from our users - and started to design the views and flows that also moved CRS tasks into simple guided workflows. In essence, we brought the same fresh perspective we had in PMS to our CRS product.

In the last one year, we’ve moved more than two hundred properties to our CRS product to automate almost every part of their CRS related tasks. We’re again very thankful to our users, who took time to give us feedback on what was good and what was bad. We took that feedback and kept iterating and now have created a very solid foundation for our CRS product to scale over the next upcoming months and years.

One article cannot justify the CRS features we have developed and deployed to hundreds of properties in the last few years. Using our PMS playbook, we know an incremental approach always works better. Therefore, we plan to use a series of articles over the next few months to explain each and every component of our HotelKey CRS product.