StayNTouch and AWS: Powering the Guest-Centric Cloud PMS

At StayNTouch, we produce a mobile, guest-centric hotel property management system (PMS) hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We believe that technology should amplify the human experience, not burden it. Similarly, great hotel technology should empower staff to provide an exceptional guest experience. Our role as a PMS provider is to enable hoteliers to deliver on their unique vision of the guest experience.

The PMS sits at the heart of a hotel’s technological ecosystem. It can consolidate guest and stay data from numerous sources, and then push that information out to other systems in the hotel’s tech stack. StayNTouch sees the central position of the PMS as an opportunity to enhance every aspect of the guest journey—from welcome to departure. But even this central position requires a foundation: By providing a server architecture that is fast, reliable, and easily scalable, AWS is facilitating the technological innovation that is reimagining guest-centric hospitality.

Introducing a Mobile, Guest-Centric PMS

By transforming the PMS from a static, desktop-based system to a mobile, cloud-based platform that can run on any device, StayNouch has reimagined the relationship between the hotel and its guests. Hoteliers now have the freedom to break away from the front desk and meet their guests wherever they are, aided by a tablet that puts the entire hotel at their fingertips. Similarly, guests are now free to skip the line to the front desk and personalize their own welcome experience, either by checking in through their smartphone, a strategically placed kiosk, or through a friendly hotelier.

This transition to mobility can have ripple effects for staff and guests alike. StayNTouch Cloud PMS can streamline a hotel’s operations with mobile communication, instant room status updates, and advanced automation. It offers a colorful, intuitive user interface that lets staff complete their tasks while keeping their focus off their screens and onto their guests. It can drive ancillary revenue while personalizing the guest journey by sending targeted automated offers for room upgrades, amenities, and monetized early check-in/late checkout. And with an hourly/day use rate structure, it can even reimagine the hotel lobby, transforming it from a glorified waiting room into a multifunctional, guest-centric space for socializing, co-working, and dining.

AWS: Delivering the Performance to Power a Hyper-Personalized Guest Journey

Reimagining the guest experience is one thing, delivering it is another. Creating a fully integrated, seamless, and hyper-personalized guest journey requires a technological foundation that can provide superior performance and flawless reliability.

Amazon Web Services provides this foundation.

To give you an idea of the scale of a typical hotel’s data usage, the average PMS must compute approximately 3,000,000 data transactions per day, with an additional 3,750,000 transactions attributed to third-party integrations. Any momentary lag or disruption of this immense data flow can turn what could have been a “wow” moment for the guest into a potentially negative review. Fortunately, AWS is specifically designed to handle such large volumes of data. It can process PMS transactions in under 100 ms and integration transactions in under 10 ms一or in layman’s terms, virtually instantaneously.

AWS Provides Reliability and Data Security for Peace of Mind

The PMS can be viewed as the heart of a hotel’s tech ecosystem. If the heart stops beating, all of the hotel’s operations come to a standstill. This is why flawless server reliability is so crucial. AWS guarantees no scheduled downtime for server maintenance and during the previous year, delivered 99.966% uptime for StayNTouch. This high level of uptime is possible because AWS offers multiple redundant Availability Zones to ensure their servers are always operational, even during a physical disaster. AWS even has contingencies in the rare event that all Availability Zones in a Region go down, including automatic environment failovers, daily remote database snapshots, and redundant data instances in each environment cluster.

If the PMS is the heart of a hotel’s tech stack, a hotel’s data is its lifeblood. That’s why StayNTouch provides best-in-class data security, including regular penetration testing, data-at-rest encryption, HTTPS encryption in transit, field-level encryption for critical data, VPN and firewall protection, active security monitoring, and AWS security-configuration compliance. AWS provides the critical security infrastructure to buttress these defenses, by providing each large hotel chain with their own hotel environment, which is isolated from other environments.

AWS Enables StayNTouch to Scale with Our Clients’ Business

One of the major advantages of running a SaaS-based PMS platform on AWS is that our software can naturally scale with our clients’ business. Instead of charging users for “proprietary” upgrades, our agile product development roadmap delivers automatic upgrades every three weeks, at no cost to our clients. StayNTouch also allows customers to launch new properties with ease. The only additional required infrastructure are internet-capable tablets and devices. We also offer comprehensive multi-property management, including guest profile management, central configuration, CRO, rate management and multi-property reporting, which makes it easy to expand with our clients’ growing portfolio.

AWS promotes elasticity and automatic scaling. Hotels typically have busy hours (check-in, checkout, end of day) where data usage increases dramatically. AWS allows StayNTouch to automatically scale infrastructure components according to a customer’s load, performance, and availability. This way, system performance and the end user experience are maintained regardless of the actual usage volumes, while infrastructure costs for StayNTouch are kept at optimal levels.

A Fast, Reliable SaaS-Based PMS Greatly Reduces TCO

Many companies spend over 75% of their IT budgets just to maintain current software and infrastructure. This is especially true for traditional on-premises PMS systems that require customers to maintain costly on-site servers and pay for expensive “premium” software upgrades and integrations.

Legacy PMS providers have attempted to rectify this by offering “cloud-based” versions of their on-premises systems. These “cloud” PMS platforms are typically hosted on dedicated servers一not AWS or cloud-native一and suffer from performance and reliability issues. Ironically, this new “cloud” setup only compounds the legacy provider’s existing customer service issues, because many support functions are outsourced to third-party server providers. The result is ultimately higher maintenance costs and longer system downtime for the consumer.

Running a SaaS-based PMS on AWS is different. The fast, reliable AWS server architecture allows StayNTouch to implement free automatic software upgrades, with no scheduled system downtime or server maintenance costs.

Powering the Future of Hotel Technology

The demands on hotel technology will only increase as the hospitality industry moves into the post-pandemic era. Although the recovery continues, hotels are still facing persistent labor shortages and will have to invest in technology that allows them to deliver exceptional service with a limited staff. Contactless check-in, which was seen as a luxury before the pandemic, is now rightly viewed as a necessity in a health-conscious, post-pandemic travel market.

Meanwhile, AWS is at the forefront of advances in AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) that make possible an increasingly hyper-personalized and on-demand guest experience.

To succeed in this new environment, hotels need a PMS that increases operational efficiency, empowers staff, and enhances the guest experience. AWS makes this possible by providing a cloud foundation that is fast, reliable, and easily scalable.

Learn more about how AWS is helping transform the travel and hospitality industry.