Do You Need a Hospitality Point of Sale System for Your Hotel Restaurant?

Hotels are the ultimate service industry, providing us with a safe and comfortable home away from home. Today, the range of services offered by hotels extends far beyond overnight accommodations to include gift shops, spas, exercise rooms, and indoor swimming pools. But the amenity most hotel visitors value highest is the establishment’s in-house restaurant.

That’s why hotels need a hospitality point of sale system tailor-made to include features that are unique to hotel restaurants, such as support for room charges and room service, banquet and event management, scheduling, and catering services. These and other features of a hospitality POS system for a hotel restaurant have to be seamlessly integrated with other restaurant POS features, such as splitting bills between guests, customer loyalty programs, inventory management, online orders, sales analytics, and employee scheduling and management.

Here’s a rundown of the key features of a hospitality point of sale system, along with tips on how to determine the optimal mix of functions for your hotel restaurant, whether it’s large enough to accommodate a ballroom full of diners or just a simple lobby snack bar kiosk.

Hotels are the ultimate service industry, providing us with a safe and comfortable home away from home. Today, the range of services offered by hotels extends far beyond overnight accommodations to include gift shops, spas, exercise rooms, and indoor swimming pools. But the amenity most hotel visitors value highest is the establishment’s in-house restaurant.

That’s why hotels need a hospitality point of sale system tailor-made to include features that are unique to hotel restaurants, such as support for room charges and room service, banquet and event management, scheduling, and catering services. These and other features of a hospitality POS system for a hotel restaurant have to be seamlessly integrated with other restaurant POS features, such as splitting bills between guests, customer loyalty programs, inventory management, online orders, sales analytics, and employee scheduling and management.

Here’s a rundown of the key features of a hospitality point of sale system, along with tips on how to determine the optimal mix of functions for your hotel restaurant, whether it’s large enough to accommodate a ballroom full of diners or just a simple lobby snack bar kiosk.

Match Your Hospitality POS System With Your Restaurant’s Characteristics

One of the best features of modern cloud-based POS systems is their ability to meet the needs of restaurants of all types and sizes: from pop-ups and food trucks to the finest dining establishments. However, the wide range and variety of POS features for restaurants also makes crafting the ideal POS solution for your hotel eatery more challenging. That’s where the assistance of an established POS vendor helps you determine the approach that will be the perfect complement to your operations now and in the future.

Cloud-based POS systems differ from their traditional client-server counterparts by allowing restaurants to purchase minimal hardware and software while being scalable enough to grow and evolve as your restaurant’s needs change. The shift to cloud-based POS solutions also accommodates several other trends that are reshaping the restaurant industry:

Contactless payments: Customers’ preference for using contactless payment methods such as Near Field Communication (NFC) cards and digital wallets results largely from precautions related to COVID-19, but this trend is expected to continue to grow in the post-pandemic world. Contactless payments have also gotten a boost from consumers’ declining use of cash and their preference for self-service options, such as customer-facing kiosks and restaurant mobile apps.Restaurants’ growing reliance on gift cards: According to studies conducted by Forrester Research, sales of both physical gift cards and electronic gift certificates boomed during the 2020 holiday season. Many restaurants are vigorously promoting their gift cards to make up for revenue lost due to in-person dining restrictions.

Features to Look for in a Hospitality POS System for a Hotel Restaurant

There are many types of restaurants, but they all share important characteristics, such as order processing, inventory management, sales tracking, and employee management. For example, a cloud-based POS system for the hospitality industry makes restaurant employees happier and more productive by putting more power in their hands. 

The restaurant’s custom mobile app running on a smartphone or tablet provides servers, kitchen staff, bartenders, and other employees with up-to-date information about the dishes, like ingredients for people who have food allergies. Employees can collaborate while managing seating arrangements in the dining room and work together on scheduling via any network-connected device.

Servers and other restaurant employees also benefit from the automatic calculations the hospitality POS system offers, making transactions faster and more accurate. The bills support room charges and integrate with other accounting systems of the restaurant’s host hotel. The systems calculate taxes and can be set to apply discounts automatically based on loyalty, product bundles, or other criteria.

Two Key Components of a Hotel Restaurant POS: Integration and Transparency

Keeping the front of the house and the kitchen staff updated on the status of orders, specials, and other work-related matters requires that everyone is on the same page at all times. A cloud-based hospitality POS system presents a unified interface to everyone involved in the management and operations of the restaurant, from the hostess to the sous chef. Integrating all aspects of running a restaurant gives everyone involved a clearer picture of what’s happening at any given time.

Restaurant managers have immediate access to accurate, updated information and analytics that indicate how productive specific areas have been. The data helps the restaurant experiment with new dishes and other menu offerings, such as trying new twists on current dishes. The POS systems prevent the restaurant from running out of popular dishes by managing its inventory in real-time, sending alerts automatically when product counts fall to preset levels.

Most importantly, the hospitality POS systems let restaurants know more about how customers are experiencing their establishment. Consumers now expect the businesses they deal with to come to them by offering online and mobile access to their services. For restaurants, this means engaging with customers through mobile devices that put more power in the hands of employees and restaurant patrons alike. 

By automating routine tasks and empowering employees and customers, hospitality point of sale systems help make hotel restaurants more productive, contributing directly to the business’s bottom line. The integration, visibility, and transparency that talech’s POS systems offer to restaurant managers go a long way towards ensuring happy customers, employees, and accountants.