How to choose a hotel management system (PMS): 10 criteria
What to check when choosing hotel software: the booking calendar, sales channels, payments, local requirements, reports and pricing. A practical checklist.
Many hotels start with an Excel sheet, a notebook and a couple of unconnected programs. That works until there are about ten rooms. Then a room gets sold twice, the cash drawer doesn't match the report, and the restaurant bill never reaches the guest's folio. That is when it's time to look at a property management system — a PMS.
There are plenty of systems, and in their ads they all promise the same thing. These ten criteria help you compare them and ask the right questions during a demo.
1. Cloud or installed software
A cloud system runs in the browser: no server to buy, no software to install, no backups to manage. The owner at home, the manager on a phone and the front desk on a PC all see the same data. Installed software depends less on the internet, but updating and securing it is on you.
2. Language and ease of learning
A front desk employee should learn the system in a day. In Uzbekistan that means an interface in Uzbek and Russian, with the everyday buttons in plain sight. Ask the vendor how long it takes to train a new hire.
3. The booking calendar
The heart of a hotel is its room-by-room booking calendar. One glance should show which room is taken when, who is arriving and who is leaving. Check-in and check-out should take a click or two, and every booking should keep a change history: who changed the rate, who cancelled.
4. Sales channels: channel manager and your own site
If your rooms sell on several platforms, updating them by hand leads to mistakes and overbookings. A channel manager pushes availability and rates to every channel automatically. Check which channels are actually connected and how fast sync is — logos on a slide are not a working connection.
A booking module on your own website matters too: a direct booking pays no commission to a platform.
5. Payments, folios and the cashier
Every booking needs a folio: the stay, extra services and the restaurant all on one bill. Taking cash, card and bank transfer, opening and closing cash shifts and reconciling the balance at the end of each shift are the basics of keeping money under control.
Guests in Uzbekistan prefer to pay with Payme, Click and Uzum. Ask directly whether the system supports them, or when it will.
6. Local requirements
Registering foreign guests (E-Mehmon) and issuing fiscal receipts are legal requirements in Uzbekistan. Foreign systems don't know about them. Find out up front how the system helps with these processes and what is automatic versus manual.
7. Roles and permissions
Each employee should see only their own area: housekeeping the rooms to clean, a waiter the restaurant till, an accountant the finances. Being able to configure roles yourself, with a history of every important action, guards against theft and mistakes.
8. Restaurant, kitchen and inventory
If the hotel has a restaurant or bar, a separate POS splits the guest's bill in two. Charging restaurant orders to the room, costing dishes in the kitchen and tracking stock in one system stops money from leaking.
9. Reports
A hotel has three key numbers, and the system should calculate them for you:
- Occupancy — the share of rooms that are sold.
- ADR — the average rate of a sold room.
- RevPAR — revenue per available room (ADR × occupancy).
On top of these you'll want daily arrivals and departures, revenue by payment method, and reports you can export to Excel.
10. Pricing model and data migration
Many systems charge monthly per room. Get it in writing: which modules are included, what an extra module costs and whether paying yearly earns a discount. Importing your rooms and guest database from a file cuts the launch to a few days.
Checklist
- Shortlist 2–3 systems and request a demo from each.
- In the demo, play through a working day: booking, check-in, payment, check-out.
- Ask the ten questions above and note the answers.
- Look at the reports with real numbers.
- Price a full year for your number of rooms.
Smartel is built around these criteria: cloud-based, in Uzbek, Russian and English, with a booking calendar, channel manager and website booking, folios and a cashier, restaurant POS, kitchen and inventory in one system. Payme, Click, Uzum and E-Mehmon integrations are in progress — we show their status openly on our site.