Before diving into the recovery phase, let’s recap some key points from Parts 1 and 2:
- Your contingency plan must be specific to your property: It should account for different types and durations of outages. For example, a planned maintenance window for one system is a different set of challenges than losing the data center to a fire or flood event.
- The characteristic of the failed system matters: Managing through an outage of a premise-based system is a different problem from surmounting a cloud system outage.
- Outages are not limited to system failures: Electrical power problems, internet access issues and the like all constitute potentially crippling downtime events.
TAKEAWAY:
Your various operating departments must create, maintain, and own the contingency operations plan. Teams such as Front Office, Housekeeping, Reservations and Accounting are responsible for executing the plan, so it’s essential that they’re involved in its creation and testing. The IT Department’s role, if present, is to restore normal system operations — not to execute the operational contingency plan.
RECOVERY PHASE
The first step in recovery from a property management system (PMS) down condition of unspecified cause or duration is to secure the most recent back-up lists. These reports provide essential information, including:
- Who’s currently checked-in, who’s arriving, and who’s departing
- Outstanding balances owed
- Available rooms for arriving guests
- Additional critical data is often contained within the backup
These most recent contingency reports are like gold and need to be treated as such. Don’t let anyone discard them. You’re quite likely going to need them in the recovery phase.
The general recovery strategy involves using tools and processes you leveraged during the downtime to manually update and synchronize the
affected system(s).
KEY PRINCIPLE:
Don’t let the pursuit of perfection delay a return to normal operations. Time spent chasing a minor, less-than-material discrepancy in total revenue will cost more in the long run. When appropriate, be willing to say, “Close enough, let’s move on.”
When the PMS is restored, the recovery process may vary depending on how much data is retained:
- If the system contains data up to the moment of the outage, recovery tasks are simpler.
- If the system only contains data as of the previous night audit, you’ll have to make manual updates to synchronize it with backup reports.
In the latter scenario, the recovery process typically involves:
- Running a night audit to establish a baseline.
- Manually entering all checkouts, check-ins, and postings what occurred between the last night audit and the outage.
- Updating all guest rooms to their present status.
- Cross-referencing updated back-up lists with original reports for accuracy.
Remember, the level of acceptable discrepancy will vary with the property’s size and segment. For instance, a $100 variance in room revenue may be negligible for a large convention hotel, but significant for a small boutique hotel.
Tools introduced in Part 2, such as room ledgers used to track who checks in and out of a given room when, as well as housekeeping status updates, remain essential. Use these to manually process check-ins and checkouts. You can cross-reference them against the registration cards and charge slips organized by room number during the outage. For outages lasting multiple days, complete the recovery process one day at a time:
- Input day one data.
- Run a night audit.
- Repeat until the system is fully updated.
By following these steps, you increase the likelihood of hearing “Nice recovery!” once the dust settles! Thorough preparation in the planning phase is the key to a seamless recovery.
