The Time Has Come For Hotel Sales and Catering Software To Innovate

Sales and catering software for hotels has been around for over 3 decades now. When the software first appeared it was mind-blowing and really changed how banquets were booked at hotels (“booked” is a leftover word from the days when you entered events in an actual book called the “function diary”) With this software event salespeople, could put the event information in a computer (actually, a mainframe that was access through a terminal server in the hotel basement). It was clunky and confusing at first but it pre-dated email and was actually OK to use once you got the hang of it.

Over the last thirty years, more and more features were added to the software. You could (sort of) use it on a laptop (you still had to access the terminal server through a modem), you could put the event information onto Microsoft Word and improvement were made to the interface. All the new features that were added quickly became “feature creep” and the software became bloated, expensive, hard to support, and complicated. Soon, the only people who could afford sales and catering software were large hotels and hotel groups. Limited service, boutique, and independent hotels were left behind and stayed with a manual paper and pen solution.

Fast forward to today and not much has changed with sales and catering software. You still have to access the software through a VPN to a server that sits in the basement of the hotel. There is so much feature creep that the software has a bazillion little icons in it that make no sense and cause more confusion than help. The structure of the software is still from the ’90s with folders hierarchy from an older outdated Microsoft operating systems. Twenty years from when it was first introduced, sales and catering managers still have to download the event information to Word.  Similar to the old function diary of years past, the current sales and catering software that is out in the market place is old, outdated and causing hotels to lose sales and revenue.

At Tripleseat we are on a mission to help hotels, just like we have helped restaurants move their group and event business into this decade. We have taken everything that is good about sales and catering software and moved into onto the web with a user interface that is easy to understand. We have also made the ability to capture and respond to RFPs super fast and easy. Everything we have learned from working with restaurants and their needs we have developed for hotels. Simply put, Tripleseat is the new generation of sales and catering for hotels.