How HMS software and door locks work together

The locks and the software are usually bought together and thought about separately, which is where most of the trouble starts. The lock is the part guests touch; the software is the part your staff touch forty times a day.

What the desk actually does

At check-in the desk needs one thing to happen reliably: a card, for the right room, valid for the right nights. Everything else the system does is in service of that one action, and it is the action to watch during a demonstration.

• Issue a card against a booking, without retyping the room or the dates.
• Issue a second card for the same room, for a couple arriving separately.
• Extend a stay without the guest returning to the desk for a new card where the system supports it.
• Cancel a card that has been lost, and know that the old one no longer opens the door.

The mistakes that surface three months later

1. Room numbering in the software that does not match the numbering on the doors. It works until somebody renumbers a floor.
2. Every member of staff sharing one login, which turns the audit trail into a single name and makes it worthless.
3. Housekeeping cards cut with no time limit, because it was quicker on the day.
4. Nobody owning the master card list, so by year two nobody can say how many exist.

The second one is the expensive one. An audit trail exists to answer 'who opened this door and when', and it cannot answer that if the answer is always 'reception'.

What to ask during a demonstration

1. 1Show me a check-in, start to finish, on the machine the desk will actually use.
2. 2Show me what happens when a guest says their card has stopped working.
3. 3Show me the audit for one door, for yesterday.
4. 4Show me what the desk can still do if the internet is down.

Ask for the fourth one specifically. A desk that cannot issue a key during an outage is a desk that cannot check anybody in, and a hotel's worst hour is not the hour to discover that.