IT for Accommodation and Tourism: Keep Guests, Bookings, and Payments Moving

A tour group arrives late in the afternoon and the lobby fills up. The front desk screen shows a spinning cursor where the arrivals list should be.

Nobody can confirm who has paid, because the booking system has stopped.

Most IT for accommodation problems in New Zealand look like this. There are only a handful of systems to worry about, and each one can stop you taking money.

A 30 room motel might have six staff and four systems, and a failure in any of the four is visible to a paying customer within minutes.

The money is easy to put a number on. Take an illustrative example: a 40 room motel running at 80 percent occupancy in February, at an average nightly rate of $180. A day when the property cannot confirm or take reservations puts about $5,760 of room revenue in question, before a single review is written.

Getting this right is a smaller job than most owners expect. It comes down to four systems and one internet connection, plus a written plan for the day one of them stops.

What Is IT for Accommodation?

IT for accommodation is the technology a property needs to sell rooms, check guests in, take payment and keep everyone connected during the stay. The list is short: a property management system, a link out to the booking sites, a payment environment, a guest network and the internet connection underneath all of it.

The difficulty is the way accommodation runs. Reception is open when the office is closed, many sites sit well outside a main centre, and the busiest weeks are the ones where nobody has time to fix anything.

The range of properties is wider than the word hotel suggests. MBIE’s Accommodation Data Programme tracks the sector across hotels, motels, backpackers, holiday parks and lodges. Every one of those formats runs the same core software, with a different shape of building around it.

Tourism operators face the same problem set. A jet boat company or a guided walk sells bookings ahead of time and holds deposits and guest contact details, so the booking platform and the payment environment matter as much as they do at a motel.

What systems does a motel or hotel run?

Five, in most properties under 100 rooms. The rest is hardware that supports those five.

• A property management system, or PMS, holding reservations and room status for every guest
• A channel manager keeping availability in step with the booking sites
• A payment terminal or online gateway for deposits taken ahead and balances settled at checkout
• An accounting package that receives the day’s takings without anyone rekeying them
• A guest network covering the rooms and the common areas

Larger properties add network door locks and a self-service kiosk for after-hours arrivals.

How is accommodation IT different from hospitality IT?

The product is a stay of several nights, so the software is built around it. A restaurant opens a bill and settles it two hours later.

A property takes a deposit weeks ahead of arrival, holds a card on file, adds charges across three nights and settles at checkout. That is a much longer chain, with more links to break.

If your property also runs a restaurant or a bar, that side of the business has its own systems. Our post on IT for hospitality covers the food and beverage venue, including the point of sale and the kitchen.

What Is a Property Management System?

A property management system, known in the trade as a PMS, is the software holding every reservation, room status, rate and guest record for the property.

Staff check people in and out of it. Housekeeping works from its room list and the night audit runs inside it.

Most systems sold in New Zealand are cloud hosted and charged per room per month. The property still owns the connection, the devices, the user accounts and the backup of anything held on site.

What happens when the property management system goes down?

Check-in moves to paper and the property loses sight of who has paid. Staff can still take a card payment on the terminal, because that runs on its own path to the bank, but nobody can confirm a rate, allocate a room or release an unpaid booking.

Two causes account for most of it. The internet connection at the property has dropped, or the vendor is having problems of their own.

A dropped connection can be engineered away with a second line. A vendor outage cannot, so the defence there is knowing in advance what the front desk does for the next two hours.

How do the booking sites, payments and accounting stay in sync?

Through a channel manager and a set of integrations that somebody checks once a month. The channel manager sits between the PMS and the online travel agency sites, known as OTAs, and keeps availability and rates matched across them so the same room is never sold twice.

Double bookings on a full Saturday in Queenstown are expensive and public. They come from a channel that stopped syncing days earlier, and nobody notices until the second guest arrives at the desk.

Payments and accounting connect the same way. The day’s takings should reach your accounting package without anyone retyping a figure, and a broken link shows up as a reconciliation that will not balance.

How Do You Keep Card Payments Secure at the Front Desk?

By holding as little card data as possible and keeping the payment terminal off the guest network. Accommodation businesses take cards in more ways than most shops do, including deposits by phone, cards held on file for weeks and charges added after checkout. Two mechanisms remove most of the risk: tokenisation, where your system keeps a meaningless reference in place of the card number, and point-to-point encryption, written as P2PE, where the terminal encrypts the card as it is read.

All of it falls under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, written as PCI DSS, which applies to any business that stores, processes or transmits cardholder data. Our post on IT for retail covers the same obligation from the shop side.

Can the payment terminal share the guest network?

No. The PCI Security Standards Council’s guide for small merchants tells merchants offering free Wi-Fi to customers to use another network for the payment system, and it advises against storing card data at all where a gateway can hold it for you.

A shared network is the most common gap we find in a motel. The guest Wi-Fi and the payment terminal both ended up on the same router as the office computer, added one at a time over the years.

How that separation gets built is covered in our post on guest WiFi. The requirement itself is short: reception and the rooms belong on different networks.

What guest information are you responsible for protecting?

Names, contact details, passport or licence numbers, vehicle registrations, accessibility and dietary notes, and any card held on file. Under information privacy principle 5, an agency holding personal information must protect it with security safeguards that are reasonable in the circumstances against loss, unauthorised access and other misuse.

The duty extends to your suppliers. The same principle requires an agency to do everything reasonably in its power to prevent unauthorised use when information is handed to a service provider, which covers your cloud PMS vendor and your channel manager.

Serious breaches have to be reported. Section 118 of the Privacy Act 2020 makes it an offence for an agency to fail to notify the Commissioner of a notifiable privacy breach without reasonable excuse, and the fine on conviction runs to $10,000.

The fine is the smaller cost in that scenario. A month of reviews about a data breach at your property does more damage to next season’s occupancy than the fine does.

Does Guest Wi-Fi Affect Reviews and Bookings?

Yes. Wi-Fi is a scored amenity on every major booking site, and complaints about it appear in the reviews that future guests read before they book.

A motel holding a 9.1 rating with a run of comments about the internet in the back units has a marketing problem written by its own customers.

What do guests expect from Wi-Fi in a room?

Enough speed to stream video on two devices at once, from a network they join once on arrival. A family of four staying a week will bring seven or eight devices and a tour bus will bring forty.

Coverage in the far cabins and along the driveway is the part owners underspend on. Past that, guest Wi-Fi is limited by the connection feeding it.

Is one internet connection enough for guests and the front desk?

For a small property, yes, as long as it is sized for guest load and reception has priority on it. Above about 30 rooms, or at any property where a failed check-in is unacceptable, a second connection with automatic failover becomes the cheaper option.

Sizing and failover are covered in our post on business internet. What matters here is that your guests and your revenue share one pipe, and the guests will fill it every evening between eight and ten.

How Do You Set Up and Remove Seasonal Staff Accounts?

With a written checklist that runs the same way at both ends of every season. Accommodation is one of the few industries where a third of the workforce arrives in November and leaves in April, and each needs a working account on day one.

New accounts get made quickly, because somebody is standing at the desk waiting for one. Closing them is the half that gets forgotten, and accounts can sit open for months after the person has gone.

None of this is anyone’s fault. In a business where the owner is also the relief receptionist in January, account admin is the task that slides.

1. Before the season. Agree the roles and what each one needs, so an account can be created from a template in five minutes.
2. Day one. Create the account, apply the role’s access, enrol multi-factor authentication and record the finish date against the account.
3. During the season. Give shared front-desk devices individual logins so the night audit shows who did what.
4. Last shift. Disable the account on the day the person finishes, keep the mailbox for the handover period and remove the PMS user.
5. End of season. Run a list of every active account against the current staff list and close what is left over.

What goes wrong when seasonal accounts are left open?

A property ends the season with more logins than staff, and every one of them is a working way into the booking system and the guest records. Most sit with people who left on good terms and forgot the password years ago.

Credential stuffing does the rest, a trade term for attackers taking passwords leaked from one website and trying them in bulk somewhere else. Old accounts tend to reuse a password that has already turned up in a breach. An attacker holding a valid login walks into your PMS without tripping anything.

One stolen set of PMS credentials exposes the arrivals list and the contact details for every guest booked in the next six months.

How Much Does IT Cost for a Motel or Hotel in New Zealand?

Budget $600 to $1,800 a month for a property of 20 to 60 rooms, with the guest network as a separate one-off build. The cost of IT for accommodation splits that way at almost every property.

Motel IT support at that level covers helpdesk, backup, monitoring and the systems keeping reception running. The network build is a capital item lasting about seven years.

Those ranges are what we see quoted in the South Island market. They move with the footprint of the site far more than with the room count, because a holiday park of four hectares costs more to cover than a 60 room hotel on three floors.

Put that monthly spend next to the $5,760 from the illustrative motel earlier. One prevented day of lost bookings pays for most of a year of support.

Why do IT quotes for accommodation vary so much?

Because the guest network is the variable and no two providers scope it the same way. One quote covers the reception building, another covers every cabin and the campground, and the gap between them is twenty access points and a trenching bill.

Ask each quote to state how many access points it includes, where they go, who owns the cabling and what the front desk does when the internet drops.

How Do You Choose an IT Provider for an Accommodation Business?

Look for a provider that has supported a property before and will name the PMS platforms it has worked with. IT for accommodation is a narrow field, and there are only a handful of platforms to know.

Accommodation is also an easy business to support badly. Your busiest weeks are exactly when a provider has to answer inside the hour, and a Saturday in January is a poor time to discover that your support contract runs Monday to Friday.

Ask for response times in writing, and ask what happens on a Sunday night. Half of accommodation happens after hours.

What should you ask a provider before signing?

• Which property management systems have you supported, and can we call one of those clients?
• What is your response time for a front desk that cannot check anyone in?
• Do you cover weekends and public holidays at the same rate?
• Who talks to our PMS vendor when the fault sits at their end?
• What happens to guest data when we replace a computer at reception?

What should you do this week?

Write down what the front desk does for two hours without the booking system. If nobody in the business can answer that, it is the first gap to close, and closing it costs nothing.

Then check how many active accounts exist against how many people work here, and whether the payment terminal sits on the same network as your guests.

Both take an afternoon, and between them they give a provider enough to quote against.

Keep the Front Desk Running Through Every Season
Exodesk has supported South Island businesses since 1989 and works with organisations across Canterbury, Otago and Southland from offices in Christchurch and Dunedin. We look after the systems behind reception, keep the guest network clear of the payment environment, and answer the phone on the weekends your property is full. Our managed IT services cover the support and monitoring behind all of it under one agreement.

Contact us today to discuss how we can help your business or connect with us on LinkedIn to stay updated with more insights.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a channel manager?
A channel manager is software sitting between a property’s booking system and the online travel agencies, keeping room availability and rates matched across every site the property sells on. It stops the same room being sold twice when two bookings arrive at once through different channels. Most property management systems either include one or connect to a third-party channel manager by subscription.
Can a motel run without an on-site IT person?
Yes. Almost no property under 100 rooms employs IT staff, and the work is handled by an external provider on a monthly agreement with remote access to the systems. What matters in that agreement is the response time, because a front desk that cannot check guests in needs an answer in minutes.
How do you keep a booking system running during a power cut?
Put the router and the front desk computer on an uninterruptible power supply so reception survives the twenty to forty minutes that most outages last. For anything longer, a cloud-hosted property management system can be reached from a phone on mobile data, as long as staff know the login and have practised it. Printing the day’s arrivals list each morning is the fallback that works with no power at all.
Is guest information covered by the Privacy Act?
Yes. Guest names, contact details, identification documents and stay notes are personal information under the Privacy Act 2020, and the duty to keep that information safe applies whether it sits on a computer at reception or with a cloud booking platform hosted overseas.
How much should a 30 room motel budget for IT each month?
A 30 room motel with six to eight staff should plan on roughly $700 to $1,200 a month for managed support and backup. The guest network sits outside that figure. It is usually a one-off build of $4,000 to $18,000, depending on how far the property spreads. Failover internet adds $80 to $250 a month at properties where a failed check-in cannot be tolerated.
What is the difference between IT for accommodation and IT for hospitality?
IT for accommodation is built around the stay. It centres on the property management system, the links out to booking channels and the guest network across the rooms, and it deals in deposits taken weeks ahead of arrival. Hospitality IT deals with the meal and the venue, where the point of sale and the kitchen are the systems that matter. A hotel with a restaurant runs both sets.
Do holiday parks and campgrounds have the same IT needs as hotels?
Mostly yes, with one large difference. A holiday park spread across several hectares needs far more network hardware to reach every cabin and powered site than a hotel of the same room count on three floors. Guest expectations differ too, because campers bring more devices and spend longer in the common areas. The booking and payment requirements are identical.
How long does it take to set up a seasonal staff account?
Under ten minutes once role templates exist, and closer to an hour when each account is built from scratch. Agreeing those templates before the season starts is the work that saves the time.
Who provides IT support for motels in Queenstown and Canterbury?
Exodesk supports accommodation and tourism businesses across Canterbury, Otago and Southland from offices in Christchurch and Dunedin, and has operated in the South Island since 1989. Support for property systems is delivered remotely with on-site visits where the work needs hands, which suits properties sitting well outside a main centre.
What happens if guest card details are stolen from our booking system?
The business has to assess whether the breach is likely to cause serious harm and, where it is, notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the guests affected. Your bank and card processor also have to be told. They will ask what payment data you were holding and why you were holding it. Properties using a payment gateway that keeps no card numbers of their own have far less to report.
Does the property management system vendor handle our IT support?
No. A PMS vendor supports its own software and the data inside it, and its help desk will not touch your internet connection, your computers, your network or your user accounts. Someone has to own everything outside the application, and at most properties that someone is an external IT provider.
Where should an accommodation business start with its IT?
Start with the front desk failure plan, because it costs nothing and exposes every other gap. Write down what staff do for two hours without the booking system, then check whether the payment terminal shares a network with guests and how many staff accounts are still active. Those three checks take an afternoon and give a provider enough to quote against.