What Is Open API and Why Does Your Hotel Need It?

The hospitality industry is constantly evolving due to the ebbs and flows of new technologies. Not only can these new technologies significantly improve your hotel operations, but guests now expect your hotel to provide a modern and streamlined experience.

Implementing new technologies is crucial, but it’s just as important to connect your tech stack for more cohesive and efficient operations. 

An open API allows you to do that and more.

Below, we’ll discuss what an open API is, how you can utilize one to connect your hotel management technologies, and how it can transform your hotel into a premier destination.

What Is Open API?

An application programming interface that is made publicly accessible to software developers is known as an open API or public API. An open API operates as a messenger of data between applications, software, and programs and can allow multiple systems to communicate with one another.

How Does an Open API Help Hotels?

An open application programming interface (API) enables you to bridge your technologies together, allowing you to optimize tasks, improve ROI, streamline management across multiple hotels, and provide a better experience for your guests. An open API property management system (PMS) can provide even more freedom across properties.

While a PMS should serve as the foundation of your hotel management technology, hotels also have access to a variety of additional software for different departmental needs, such as revenue management, housekeeping, booking, marketing, channel management, and much more. It can often be challenging to connect these systems so that they consistently share information and integrate with one another.

With an open API, you ensure your systems all communicate and integrate seamlessly into your staff’s operations. Some examples of how an open API can help your hotel connect important systems are:

• Connecting a PMS to upsell software
• Connecting a PMS to BI software
• Connecting a PMS to a CRM

If your hotel uses multiple applications, software, and/or programs, it can seem impossible for you to optimize all of them and your hotel operations without the assistance of an open API. This can prevent you from getting the most out of your hotel software and hinder the ROI from your technologies.

Benefits of Open API for Hotels

A PMS with an open API can streamline operations by centralizing them in one location and provide benefits for business processes such as:

Optimized Operations

Open APIs can automate communication and connectivity between systems, allowing your staff to focus on more urgent hands-on tasks.

You can use an open API to automate:

• Updating customer information
• Gathering important data from several places or transferring it to various locations
• Transferring data from one system to another

With an open API, you can automate tedious tasks, such as updating customer information or moving data between systems across multiple hotels. Additionally, you can simplify complicated processes while connecting numerous applications via an open API to utilize the essential features of your tech stack’s software. This entails investing little time in easier tasks and more effort in the organization's long-term goals.

Seamless and Cost-efficient Integration

When using a PMS with an open API platform, software can be utilized with other software or is connected to other products in your hotel’s tech stack for complete data flexibility and management. Open APIs can also be shared freely online and allow the owner to provide hoteliers with global access for continuous development. Not only does this grant you more freedom to tailor your open API PMS and integrations to your unique needs, but it’s also a more cost-effective way to scale your business. 

Open APIs streamline and facilitate integration, enabling various software to adapt to your specific business processes. Your business can then scale according to your hotel operations, using the minimal number of resources necessary to make your hotel successful.

Additionally, open APIs are more cost effective since they can reduce or eliminate the need for in-house development of solutions or features. A PMS that uses an open API, for example, already has many of the necessary solutions available, saving you time and money from creating them from scratch.

Cross-Platform Business Intelligence

Whether within your PMS or another platform, a business intelligence (BI) tool can yield significant insights into your operations. For example, a BI tool within a hotel PMS can combine data from the front desk and your hotel’s performance to yield actionable insights to transform your marketing strategy.

The right BI tool within a PMS that has an open API allows you to take advantage of fully integrated AI/ML capabilities, governance and data management, and much more. Since an open API PMS allows you to connect all your external tools, a BI tool can then provide comprehensive cross-platform business intelligence by pulling your pooled information from your PMS. By pulling all the information your PMS gets from your other platforms and tools, a BI tool can help you make quick, data-driven decisions and maximize the efficacy of your marketing efforts.

Upgrading Your Hotel Technology for Streamlined Operations 

A PMS with an open API connects necessary hotel technologies across multiple properties to create the most optimized operations, making it a crucial component for upgrading your hotel. But knowledge of what an open API can do for your hotel is just one step in turning your property into a premier destination.

Learn more about hotel technology solutions, trends, advancements, and much more in our Hospitality Technology guide to enhance your property.