Na'im Explains the biggest Mistake people make when first signing in to PMS

Say, I recommend everybody has a really good property management software, channel manager and a booking engine, because there are still so many people that I come into contact with that don't have a booking engine on their website. And it's just the fact I've said this many a time, if you haven't got an access on your website where someone can go online and book, then you are going to get left behind in 20, 19, 20. The way that somebody books a property now has changed so much. The old method of guest finds property sends an email to the property owner asking for availability, waiting for a response and booking. It has gone if people want it on an instance. So if you haven't got the systems and the structure set up specifically when you've got listed on booking.com, airbnb, HomeAway, Expedia, you just open yourself up to double bookings, unhappy guests, and your business will just suffer for it. Okay then, so real good analogy of what a PMS is and a channel manager. And like you say, you have been involved in serviced accommodation for quite a while now and you've got to know through just networking and being in Facebook groups, so many service accommodation owners, what is the one big mistake that you see people make when they first join pms, sign up to a pms, or when they first get started on listing their properties on these softwares? What's the one big mistake that you see the majority of them making?

Gonna sound a bit funny, but I think one of the biggest mistakes is the research that people do. So, you know, everyone wants to be as systematic as possible. So you get in your spreadsheet, you put your features and then you categorize them and you say, I'm gonna call all of them up, I'm gonna have my demos, or I'm gonna go on their website and I'll see how many of these boxes they tick. And I'm going to look at the price and whichever has the best sort of ratio between features and price, that's what I'm going to go for. Now, there's two issues with that approach. I'll first talk about the features issue and then I'm going to talk about the price issue. The issue with the features is that pretty much everyone tries to tick the boxes, okay? And they will tell you that they tick the boxes. The question is, how do they tick the boxes? So a lot of systems out there will tell you they can store secure deposits for you, no problem. Once you start asking more questions, they will tell you they can integrate with various websites. Once you start more questions, asking questions. Maybe it's an icon instead of a full API integration. Well, what does that mean? Well, actually, you could end up getting lots of double bookings. You can't send your prices out and you can't retrieve the bookings. So that's a feature issue. As long as it ticks the box does not mean it's going to get the job done. And the pricing, I've come across a lot of people who try to find basically the cheapest for the features that they can get. Now, the issue with that is that, as I said, not every feature that is ticked is served in the best way possible by every pms. So if you only look at your price and you don't actually start to look at how much admin time you're spending on managing things through that pms, well, you don't have the full equation. So the issue is basically you need to look at how much time it's costing you or someone who you're going to hire to outsource the work to and add that to the cost of the software and any ancillary system that you need to support your pms. So it could be that, you know, Your PMS gets 50% of the job done and is relatively cheap compared to other PMSs. But then once you start looking at the features that they don't have and you start thinking, well, I need to have a separate system that's going to manage my maintenance and then I'll have a separate system for this. And then if you start looking at the amount of time it takes for you to log in and log out and copy information across, then, you know, those cheap prices don't look that cheap anymore.