How to avoid painful integration projects when acquiring new hotels

While the plethora of mega mergers, smaller mergers and niche groupings conspiring to make consolidation the new norm in the hotel industry, the potential for further M&A activity remains. Driven by a "go big or go bust" sentiment, it seems expansion is never far from the top of the agenda for the majority of hotel owners. With ongoing pressures to increase customer loyalty, reduce margins and stay ahead of the competition, those businesses pursuing mergers and acquisitions need to make the entire process as quick and efficient as possible. Integration is key if growing businesses are to deliver consistent service and value, getting new organisational structures up and running so it’s business as usual as soon as possible. Where technology has been put to good use here ensuring the smooth integration of front-end functions such as bookings and check-ins, where hotels are often lacking is in their back office functionality, neglecting to put the right technology in place to ensure that the multiple vital back-office processes and procedures that underpin the entire business are consolidated quickly and smoothly. For optimum levels of integration efficiency, scalable, flexible systems are needed, systems which enable hotels to pursue their expansion goals without any major integration headaches. With the right tools in place, new hotels can be integrated into the business quickly and efficiently, while providing new depths of insight into the entire organisation for improved performance across the board. With a centralised system for financials, one which is sufficiently flexible and scalable to seamlessly integrate new additions to the business, hotel businesses can capture and manage key financial information across multiple sites and locations with a single, cohesive system. This approach simplifies potentially complex reporting structures, automatically consolidating reporting centrally, bringing on new hotels quickly and easily without having to spend time consolidating data from across different sites and business functions. Ultimately, this gives increased control over your bottom line, however big your business, with a real-time view of performance at the click of a mouse It’s not just raw data that’s reported back to the business either, with in-built analytics providing real-time actionable insight, delivered to the right people at the right time via easy to interpret dashboards. This in-depth insight enables better, more robust decisions, making it easier to compare and contrast performance and providing greater confidence in the numbers. The available information underpins fast, effective decision-making, with the ability to monitor business performance in real-time creating an agile business, able to respond quickly and effectively to changing business conditions. Crucially in this climate of increased M&A activity, it’s important to choose a system which is sufficiently scalable, and capable of stepping up to integrate new entities with existing operations for a smooth transition. And, in our global economy, this scalability includes expansion overseas, easily handling transfers between not only subsidiaries and HQ, but between different countries and territories too. An in-built ability to comply with a whole host of different regulatory and legal requirements makes things easier still, and means one less thing to take care of. It’s only by optimising crucial back office processes such as finance that hotel businesses can successfully embrace growth, streamlining systems and procedures while uncovering in-depth actionable insight for enhanced decision-making. With modern, intuitive, scalable financial solutions in place, hotel businesses can fulfil their growth potential, expanding their offering while increasing performance and improving customer service levels. In such a competitive industry, those who neglect their back office processes could soon come unstuck, overtaken by those businesses with the foresight to recognise the importance of establishing solid foundations when it comes to pursuing strategic growth. Those who act now will steal a definite march on the competition, with seamless expansion well within their reach.