Guide · PMS data
What guest data a hotel restaurant reservation system needs, and how it works without a PMS
Four things: room number, last name, guest category and the dates of the stay. With them you know who is booking, which price applies and what their stay includes. You can read them from the PMS when you look the guest up, enter them by hand or infer the category from the room number. In all three cases, the restaurant's capacity shouldn't depend on the PMS responding.
Mesatto team · Updated
Why the category and the dates matter
In a hotel, a dinner doesn't have one price: it depends on who asks. One guest category has it included, another pays a fee and an outside visitor pays the full menu. Without the category, the concierge guesses and the mistake shows up on the bill at checkout.
The dates matter just as much. All-inclusive rules are counted per stay: how many à la carte visits it includes, how many nights a restaurant requires. Without arrival and departure there's no way to apply them.
The minimum data
Room number
Ties the reservation to the stay and to the account any charge will go to.
Last name
Confirms the person booking is the guest in that room. With the room number alone, anyone can book in someone else's name.
Guest category
Sets the price and what's included. It's the hardest field to get right by hand.
Arrival and departure
They let you count visits per stay and minimum nights, and prevent bookings for dates when the guest has already left.
Three ways to get them
Query the PMS when you look the guest up
With room number and last name, the reservation system asks the PMS and brings back the stay. It's the most accurate option, as long as the category comes from a field the hotel keeps up to date.
Enter them by hand
The concierge types them once per reservation. It works in any hotel; the risks are typos and the wrong category.
Infer the category from the room
If each category takes known ranges of rooms, the number is enough. It breaks with upgrades, so leave a way to correct it.
What breaks and how to prevent it
Room moves, late checkouts and upgrades leave stale data on reservations already made. Check the day's reservations against arrivals and room moves before each service.
The other risk is the PMS not responding. If the restaurant's capacity lives in the reservation system and not in the PMS, an outage only costs you the lookup: the concierge enters the data by hand and the seating keeps filling under the same rules.
What to ask a vendor before connecting the PMS
- Does it read from the PMS, write to it, or both?
- Which fields does it bring, and which one holds the guest category?
- What happens to a reservation if the PMS doesn't respond?
- Who posts the charge to the room account: the system, the point of sale or the hotel?
- Where are the PMS credentials stored, and who can see them?
What to measure
- How many reservations take their data from the PMS and how many are entered by hand.
- How many reservations change category after they're created.
- How many lookups fail, and at what times.
- How many room charges have to be corrected at checkout.
How Mesatto handles it
PMS data in Mesatto
The PMS as a module: Mesatto reads the guest's data when you look them up and doesn't write to the PMS. Available depending on the plan.
- OPERA Cloud available today; Mews and Cloudbeds coming soon.
- Lookup by room number and last name: name, category, arrival and departure fill in automatically.
- Each hotel picks which PMS field the category comes from and which category it maps to.
- PMS credentials stored encrypted, with a connection test from the dashboard.
- Without a PMS: manual entry or category by room range.
- If the PMS doesn't respond, capacity stays in Mesatto and the reservation is entered by hand.