5 Best CMMS For Hotels In 2024

Not all CMMS for hotels are made equal. Variation in usability, feature offering and price creates an array of options for hoteliers to choose from. This post showcases the core functions that drive CMMS usage in hotels and provides a list of the 5 best CMMS for hotels to check out in 2024.

What is the alternative to a CMMS For Hotels?

Since the beginning, hotels have used pen, paper, and radio to organize and track maintenance activities. Typically, maintenance was more about action than recording data. Centralizing all the data points from work orders, inspections and preventive maintenance was manual and painstaking with little confidence in reliability of insights. Believe it or not, but many hotels still use this outdated workflow for their maintenance teams.

Excel Spreadsheets Digitize but Fail to Centralize and Activate Data

Over the last 20 years, some of those processes have been moved from pen and paper to excel spreadsheets and word documents. This digitization improved many aspects of the maintenance process but still left many issues such as:

• Necessity of Excel training to operate
• Lack of mobile friendly support
• Limited problem solving ability
• Lack of centralized data storage
• Difficulty sharing and collaborating
• Difficulty analyzing data to make decisions
• Slow report organization and extraction

Hotels Must Use Mobile Software to Elevate Maintenance

As mobile usage has grown to be an asset for workers as opposed to a distraction, CMMS solutions improved to solve these pain points. The modern CMMS solution can provide tools to streamline the following services for hotel maintenance teams:

• Process standardization
• Work order requests and management
• Preventive maintenance calendars
• Quality and Safety Inspections
• Team Communication
• Secure data storage for compliance
• Dynamic reporting for decision making

As a result of successful software selection and implementation, hoteliers were able to finally see dramatic improvements in maintenance operations. Here are some of the benefits that are regularly seen with such a change:

• Decrease in time to resolution for work orders
• Decrease in equipment downtime
• Increase in equipment lifespan
• Decrease in compliance and legal risk
• Increase in adherence to brand standards
• Increase in customer satisfaction and positive reviews
• Decrease in training time for new employees
• Decrease in time to answer questions while working
• Increase in team work and accountability
• Increase in workplace safety
• Increase in manager decision making success

The Main Benefits of CMMS For Hotels

A computerized maintenance management system, or CMMS, can be a valuable tool for hotels looking to improve their maintenance operations. A CMMS allows hotels to streamline their maintenance processes and improve efficiency, leading to a number of benefits including cost savings, increased productivity, and enhanced guest satisfaction. In this section, we will explore the various ways in which a CMMS can benefit a hotel's maintenance operations.

😃 Ensure a Safe & Reliable Guest Experience

Ask any GM what their main goal of their role is and I guarantee the most common response is to guarantee a safe and reliable guest experience. Hotels live and die by their ability to satisfy guest needs, and a CMMS plays a large role in that mission.

CMMS for hotels ensure a long-term positive guest experience through creating and sustaining a safe, clean and functional hotel environment. Here are a few ways that this comes to life:

• Preventive maintenance schedules help to identify and resolve asset issues before a breakdown occurs, resulting in undisrupted service for guests
• Standardized cleaning and inspection procedures ensure that all aspects of the guest room are fit for guest occupancy.
• Fast, digital communication allows for increased work order resolution speeds to solve guest issues in a timely manner.

Most importantly, all of this data is tracked, measured and easily accessible for busy managers to keep tabs on daily operations. If there is a facilities issue that causes a negative guest experience, a CMMS is the perfect place to see how that problem came to be and how it can be addressed to prevent issues in the future.

🛠️ Trackable Preventive Maintenance & Work Orders

Creating, communicating and tracking preventive maintenance through binders and paper calendars is chaotic and problematic. It leaves room for pencil whipping and neglected servicing as well as outdated processes and poor data storage.

These days, CMMS software for hotels helps to centralize the PMs for every asset into one digital calendar that can be easily updated, disseminated and tracked for progress and evidence of completed work.  Features such as recurring work orders and multiple location selection allow you to schedule multiple preventive work orders in seconds. The time savings of this process are significant and only scratch the surface of the improved functionality of this digital system.

🔃 Identify, Assign, Correct, Improve

CMMS for hotels centralize data collection so that it can be organized and leveraged in decision making. This allows management to identify risks and take corrective action before an asset failure event occurs.  Improved data collection also allows management to see changes in operational efficiency due to equipment wear. For example, using a CMMS log to record washer fill and empty times can help laundry managers to know if there is an issue with the equipment.

But not all risks are equal and hoteliers have limited resources and time each day. With a CMMS, management can prioritize the work to be done so that the most important work is always completed on time. By seeing what work cannot be completed in time, managers can make better staffing decisions to better suit their facility needs.

💲Understand Cost and Improve Projections

Cost management is a large reason why a CMMS for hotels is so important. Managers have better maintenance cost understanding with the ability to build parts and cost tracking logs and view work through interactive dashboards and reports. By pinpointing hours and money spent on each work order, hotel business owners can further introduce process improvements and prioritize work.

With a better understanding of maintenance costs and the reliability of assets through effective preventive maintenance, managers can be confident in their cost projections for the upcoming year. This allows for better strategic decision making and less guessing on the decisions that impact the bottom line.

📈 Data that is Secure and Actionable

Paper and excel sheets are not secure and backed up in a way that provides relief to stressed out management teams. The best solution is the cloud based data storage found in a CMMS for hotels. This allows for every task, every checklist step, every comment on an asset to be securely stored and accessed when needed. With a CMMS, you will be able to filter and search to find the information that you need quickly and easily. Exporting reports in both PDF and Excel formats is a breeze, so that you never have to count paper or write an Excel formula ever again.

This is crucial when it comes to legal and compliance risk. Not having a secure, time stamped data trail for work that directly impacts guest safety and health is a huge risk for managers. Instead, a CMMS offers reliable storage that allows managers to pinpoint the actions, or lack thereof, that led to a guest complaint.

How to Avoid “Shiny Object Syndrome” of CMMS Features

With any software, 80% of the value comes from 20% of the features. The biggest advice for selecting a CMMS for hotels is to know what you need and what is just a shiny object that adds little value to the maintenance team operation. The most complex and powerful software is not always the best for the job. Often, excessive features and ability creates confusion for frontline workers which leads to poor data collection unless additional training sessions are conducted.

Shiny Object Syndrome is when shoppers are so distracted by the “bells and whistles” that they fail to properly evaluate the core functionality that should drive the decision. To prevent yourself from falling into that trap, make a list of the core problems you are looking to solve and compare only those features first. Start a few free trials and test these functions with your budget and team technical expertise in mind. This will help you to identify the 20% of features that you need so that you can make strategic decisions regarding cost and implementation risk of the solution. Only when you have narrowed down the field of solutions in this manner should you explore additional functionality that would be nice to have.

5 Best CMMS For Hotels To Use In 2024

‍1.  Xenia

Xenia is the most budget and frontline friendly CMMS for hotels to try in 2024. Xenia was designed for the hotel industry and has many aspects of hotel specific software, but has since built maintenance functionality powerful enough to serve multiple industries. Xenia now provides the essential CMMS functionality for an affordable price to help hoteliers tackle inspections, work orders, preventive maintenance, process standardization, asset logs and more.

Xenia’s tools are flexible to streamline guest requests, lost and found, concierge requests, food and beverage inspections and operations, emergency procedure management and more. With Xenia, hotel managers have full access to a robust template builder and a public template library with checklists, SOPs, inspections, forms, logs, surveys and meeting agendas that can be used immediately or customized to fit each operation.

All templates can be attached to work orders to be scheduled, assigned, completed and tracked in a secure, cloud based system.  On the mobile app, hotel frontline technicians and staff can see and complete all tasks, attach photos, complete checklists and logs, and loop in teammates as needed with integrated chat.

Xenia makes everything from hotel housekeeping to preventive maintenance and work order management easy with scheduled and recurring tasks. They are visible in a built in calendar and are easily filtered and organized based on category, priority, assignee, status and more.

Key Features:

• Work order management
• Preventive maintenance calendars
• Safety and Quality Inspections
• Meter and Operation Logs
• Housekeeping management
• Public toolbox library with checklists, inspections, SOPs, Logs and more
• Custom template builder
• Location customization for task assignment to rooms and public areas
• Create custom teams for work assignments and reporting
• Task features such as photo attachments, priority, start and due time
• Calendar view and recurring work orders for easy preventive maintenance
• Integrated chats for teamwork and accountability
• Easy data analysis and report exports

Pricing

• Xenia’s paid plan starts at $15 per month, per user on a monthly subscription
• Annual paid plan is further discounted to $10 per user per month
• Free plan also available for evaluation purposes

‍2. MaintainX

For a more powerful, albeit more expensive, CMMS for hotels, managers should look at MaintainX. As with most CMMS options on the market, this product is targeting a budget of $40-$70+ per user per month. Basic and Essential plans are great for testing but usage limitations of the plan are very low, and you will likely hit a paywall very quickly.

That being said, MaintainX is an easy to use platform on desktop and mobile that offers all the core maintenance functionality that hoteliers love about Xenia, but includes additional advanced features such as dedicated modules for assets, parts, vendors, meters and purchase orders. MaintainX also has more advanced data analytics dashboards.

While MaintainX can be used for housekeeping, guest requests, lost and found or other frontline workflows, it is not designed to be used this way. This, combined with the added complexity of advanced maintenance features may lead to confusion or difficulty with non-maintenance teams. One other issue with hotel teams is that checklists and SOPs must be assigned to tasks to be used on MaintainX, while Xenia allows self start.

Key Features:

• Work order management
• Work Order Requests
• Preventive maintenance calendars
• Safety and Quality Inspections
• Asset and parts management
• Vendor Management
• Purchase Orders
• In App Checklist Builder
• Data analytics and reporting

‍Pricing:

• Starting at $0, Basic plan is available for evaluation purpose
• $10 ($8.83 Annual) per user per month for Essential Package
• $39 ($32.50 Annual) per user per month for Premium Package
• Enterprise: call to ask

3. Quore

Quore is a cloud-based hotel operations services management tool developed to provide solutions for guest services, engineering, communication, housekeeping and operations. Although Quore is not self described as a CMMS, their features offer similar value to hoteliers.

For example, Quore can be used to submit and complete work orders on the go. You can record and keep track of daily meter readings and inventory. You can also build preventive maintenance calendars and conduct walk through inspections.

From a maintenance point of view, Xenia and MaintainX outperform Quore, but Quore has a few distinct hotel features that may make it the right fit for you. Quore is built for hotels and is used by teams across the country with great reviews. In addition to maintenance features, Quore can help manage housekeeping, provide guest SMS, lost and found, as well as CapEx management.

Key Features:

• Work order management
• Preventive maintenance calendars
• Safety and Quality Inspections
• Meter and Operation Logs
• Housekeeping management
• Budgeting and CapEx tools
• Dashboards and reports

Pricing:

• Get a 30-day free trial for evaluation purposes
• No public pricing: reports show paid plan starts at a $300 flat subscription

4. Alice

When it comes to stand alone hotel operations software, Alice is the favorite and direct competitor to Quore. It tends to be more expensive and offers a similar feature set with improved maintenance functionality vs Quore. The user interface, although powerful, can be very confusing for first time users, thus there is typically a paid onboarding process.

On paper, Alice is the best of this list to handle Front of the House tasks such as guest messaging, package delivery, concierge, as well as lost and found as their guest chat function outperforms Quore (Xenia and MaintainX only offer internal messaging). Alice also has the most integrations built on this list. If it is a deal breaker to send data back and forth to your PMS, Alice may be the best choice for you.

In 2022, Alice was acquired by Actabl, and is now the operations arm of an integrated hotel management suite that features brands such as ProfitSword, Hotel Effectiveness, and Transcendent. This is an interesting package for many hoteliers, and if they are able to get over the learning curve, can underwrite a powerful digitization of the business.

Key Features:

• Work order management
• Preventive maintenance calendars
• Safety and Quality Inspections
• Checklists and SOPs
• Concierge and package delivery support
• Guest messaging
• Cost Tracking
• Data dashboards and reports

Pricing:

• No public pricing: Most users report monthly cost between $500-$1500

5. Hotelkit

Hotelkit is a hotel operations management platform built to streamline housekeeping and collaboration across hospitality teams. Their software provides communication, collaboration, maintenance and service optimization tools on desktop and mobile.

For maintenance, Hotelkit can handle work orders, checklist creation, inspections, and PM calendars. For HR, hotelkit can provide news, announcements, handover support, chats, a training handbook and polls.

Like Alice, Hotelkit has integrations built for PMS data sharing to automate task assignment for items such as room cleanings or inspections. Hotelkit was developed and is headquartered in Austria and primarily appeals to a European market.

‍Key Features:

• Work order management
• Safety and Quality Inspections
• Checklists and SOPs
• Calendar for Preventive maintenance and meetings
• News and announcements feed
• Customizable training handbook
• Data reports and dashboards

Pricing:

• Hotelkit offers a 30 day free trial program to new users
• No public pricing:  Pricing information is available on contact

There you have it; our list of CMMS for hotels. In case, your favorite software isn’t mentioned on the list, feel free to reach out to us. We look forward to hearing from you.