Sleepless nights, poor hygiene, rude staff, and even bedbugs are some of the nasties that can derail a hotel stay. As 97% of people check hotel reviews before they book, every previous guest visit has the potential to elevate or destroy your hospitality brand’s reputation.
This guide discusses how customer relationship management (CRM) is key to providing guests with personal experiences that will make them want to return to your hotel and rave about it online. We introduce the 10 best CRMs for hotels, including monday CRM, to manage every aspect of your guest lifecycle.
Try monday CRMWhat is a CRM for hotels?
A hotel customer relationship management system, or hotel CRM, is a software solution used within the hospitality industry. As a central data repository, it manages all guest interactions to enhance customer satisfaction and drive revenue growth. Typically, you can expect a hotel CRM to include:
- Guest contact details (past, present, and upcoming)
- Reservation information, including room, restaurant or event room bookings
- Customer feedback, including survey data
- Communication features, such as logs of phone conversations, emails, and direct messages
- Marketing integrations, including discounts and special offers
The latest Hotel CRM Software Market report suggests that this type of technology is rapidly gaining popularity. The hotel CRM industry was valued at $68 billion in 2023 but is expected to reach $120.3 billion by 2031, illustrating a compound annual growth rate of 8.49% year on year.
Why do hotels need a CRM?
Hotels wouldn’t survive without a constant flow of customers walking through their grand entrances. Here’s why the best hotels use a CRM to attract new guests and maintain customer loyalty.
CRMs meet guest expectations
At their core, CRMs organize everything. Rather than relying on spreadsheets, email chains, or paper files, a centralized platform stores all the details you need about your guests. By anticipating their questions, responding to their feedback, and creating engaging loyalty programs, you can give them a memorable stay for all the right reasons.
CRMs drive efficiency
A quality CRM includes built-in automation functionality, which enables you to run repetitive routine tasks in the background, freeing up staff to focus on guest-critical work. For example, your CRM might send out an automated pre-arrival email requesting that guests submit details like their passport numbers, dates of birth for all guests, and vehicle license numbers. This step ensures your system already has the essential information logged and saves queues at your check-in desk.
CRMs create revenue
Your CRM is a central hub for everything you know about your guests. You’ll know their party size, the time of year they visited, dining preferences, spa treatments, whether they used your concierge service, and so much more. Use this information to anticipate your guests’ needs and entice them with personalized marketing that increases your direct bookings, and creates higher revenue.
CRMs power decision-making
A CRM with built-in analytics and reporting capabilities can generate meaningful insights to share with stakeholders and aid your strategic decision-making. Imagine you track staff satisfaction levels and notice that a slump correlates with a decline in your guest satisfaction scores. Use this information to deploy a new employee engagement incentive or rotate your customer-facing staff.
CRMs improve communications
Strong communication is the bedrock of a healthy hospitality business. Whether sending internal messages to your staff or external content to your mailing list, successful communication hinges on getting the details right. For example, if you have a promotion running at certain properties, don’t send the announcement to guests who’ve already booked stays there during that period. Instead, you’ll use segmenting to filter out this group and only communicate with eligible subscribers.
10 best CRM for hotels
CRMs for hotels vary considerably—some are tailored specifically for hospitality users, while others serve a broader base of CRM industries. To kickstart your research, we’ve compared the pricing and features of 10 best CRM for hotels in the market:
1. monday CRM
Best for hotels of any size requiring detailed insights into their RevOps.
monday CRM enables your hotel revenue team to drive efficiency at every stage of the customer journey. Our comprehensive platform goes beyond other CRMs to manage the entire guest lifecycle from pre- to post-sales, incorporating payments, account management, and a wealth of other integrations.
monday CRM features
- Contact management to understand your guests’ interactions
- Advanced automation recipes based on triggers, conditions, and actions
- Sales forecasting and analytics to predict future bookings and peak season
- Email features such as AI drafting, templates, and automated responses
monday CRM pricing
- Basic: From $12 per seat/mo, billed annually. Includes unlimited, customizable pipelines, contacts and boards, free templates, unlimited free viewers, and more.
- Standard: From $17 per seat/mo for advanced account and contact management, 2-way Gmail and Outlook integration, activity management, 250 custom monthly CRM automations and integrations, and a dashboard with up to five boards.
- Pro: From $28 per seat/mo, for sales forecasting, email tracking and automations, mass emails, sales analytics, 25k monthly CRM automations and integrations, and a dashboard with up to 10 boards.
- Enterprise: A customized quote is available on request. Includes lead scoring, team goals, advanced analytics, account management, enterprise-level security, automation, and integration, multi-level permissions, and more.
2. Pipedrive
Best for hotels looking for a CRM for small business.
Pipedrive is a cloud-based CRM that gives you a visual representation of your customer pipeline. It provides an overview of your upcoming bookings and pinpoints the source of each room booking.
Pipedrive features
- Chat functionality
- Lead sourcing and web forms
- Dashboarding with built-in forecasting insights
Pipedrive pricing
- Essential: From $14 per seat/mo
- Advanced: From $29 per seat/mo
- Professional: From $49 per seat/mo
- Power: From $64 per seat/mo
- Enterprise: From $99 per seat/mo
3. Profitroom
Best for hotels wanting to improve direct bookings.
Profitroom is a 360-degree booking engine with a fully integrated email marketing platform that covers the entire customer journey from first contact to follow-up bookings.
Profitroom features
- AI-powered email creation
- Ready-to-use seasonal marketing campaigns
- Triggered messages based on segmentation
Profitroom pricing
Accurate pricing is available from the vendor on request.
4. Dailypoint
Best for hotels that want to streamline their operations.
Dailypoint is a data management and CRM platform for individual hotels and larger hotel chains. By integrating with other technology systems, such as your point of sale, website, and newsletter software, Dailypoint consolidates all this information to create fully formed guest profiles you can leverage across your operations.
Dailypoint features
- Data Laundry, compatible with GDPR regulations
- Guest loyalty solutions
- Built-in Booking Manager, including guest correspondence feature
Dailypoint pricing
Accurate pricing is available from the vendor on request.
5. Revinate
Best for hotels focused on the guest experience.
Revinate is a guest engagement platform with tools that enhance the customer experience before, during, and after their stay.
Revinate features
- Revinate Ivy is a guest messaging service
- Guest feedback and reviews, all managed from a central platform
- Revinate Marketing to create upsell and upgrade opportunities
Revinate pricing
Accurate pricing is available from the vendor on request.
6. Concilio Labs
Best for hotels requiring intelligent insights.
Concilio Labs is a multi-tool software that helps hoteliers deliver excellent guest experiences.
Concilio Labs features
- Insight Engine a guest intelligence platform
- Experience Engine, which scores every guest touchpoint in real-time
- Key2Away guest app
Concilio Labs pricing
Accurate pricing is available from the vendor on request.
7. SHR Group
Best for large hotels requiring advanced automation.
SHR Group is a technology system for hotels and casinos, including a customer relationship management arm. The platform focuses on automating workflows and accommodating large datasets for your guest profiles.
SHR Group features
- Loyalty program with points system and tiers
- Integrated member portal for direct bookings
- Smart integrations, including merge features to remove duplicate data
SHR Group pricing
Accurate pricing is available from the vendor on request.
8. Experience
Best for multi-hotel chains.
Experience is a CRM solution designed for hotels, restaurants, and other tourism businesses. Whether you want to gain an overview of one or multiple establishments, the CRM database houses all the intel you need to enhance your decision-making.
Experience features
- E-reputation tool to analyze review trends
- Personalized email campaigns based on guest preferences and segmentation
- Customer journey communication from pre to post-stay.
Experience pricing
Experience offers a la carte rather than plan pricing so you only pay for the features you need. A free demo and an accurate quote are available from the vendor on request.
9. Guest Touch
Best for hotels seeking an all-in-one guest experience suite.
Guest Touch is a guest reputation, management, and engagement platform that aims to boost your business visibility and increase profits.
Guest Touch features
- Reputation platform for collecting and analyzing feedback, then displaying the best reviews on your hotel website
- Multi-channel guest messaging platform with SMS and WhatsApp functionality
- Guest journey emails using drag-and-drop features
Guest Touch pricing
- Reputation platform: From $90/mo
- Reputation with managed response: From $99/mo
- Guest messaging platform: From $95/mo
- Guest journey emails: From $60/mo
10. Duve
Best for hotels that need a white-labeling CRM solution.
Duve is a hospitality guest experience platform designed to digitize your customer relationship management.
Duve features
- White label guest app
- Online check-in
- Duve AI agents for automated messaging across platforms like WhatsApp, SMS, and Airbnb
Duve pricing
- Basic: From $6 room/mo
- Pro: From $7.50 room/mo
- Premium: From $10 room/mo
- Enterprise: Pricing available on request
Essential features to look for in a CRM for hotels
The makeup of your customer relationship management systems differ based on their market positioning and pricing. However, you can expect the best CRM software to share some of the following features in common:
Profile management
Your hotel CRM software is a centralized database for your guest profile information, including their contact details, feedback, and any special requests.
Marketing segmentation
Using the profile information above, your CRM should allow you to segment contacts into different marketing groups based on criteria such as demographics, booking history, spending behavior, or anything else relevant to your communications. From here, you can send personalized offers and recommendations to maximize their experience of your hotel brand.
Automation
Automate repetitive workflows by using a CRM that completes these tasks on autopilot. For example, you might set up an automatic notification to prompt your concierge team when a guest checks into their hotel room.
Integrations
A quality hotel CRM should integrate with the rest of your tech stack, including point of sale, revenue management, and customer feedback platforms. When everything is in sync, information should flow seamlessly from one system to another, with no extra input on your part.
Analytics and reporting
The ability to pull data, run a report, and make sense of mountains of guest intel is crucial to the CRM experience. Whether it’s analyzing your guests’ average spend per night or the conversion rate of a particular marketing campaign, your hotel CRM can give you visuals and data insights at your fingertips.
Meet monday CRM: the versatile choice for any hotel
monday CRM can improve your hotel’s reputation, increase bookings, and provide your guests with an experience they can’t wait to repeat. Here are the features that make monday CRM indispensable to your hospitality business:
Contact management: Obtain a 360-degree view of your guests, including all their past interactions with your brand, and any upcoming bookings in the pipeline.
Email features: Craft content that resonates with your guests using templated sequences, mass personalization, and smart AI. With built-in tracking, you’ll understand the open rate of your messages and receive alerts when guests respond to a message. Customizable signatures and seamless integration with third-party email tools like Outlook and Gmail are also available.
Sales forecasting and analytics: Provide sales teams with real-time tracking and reporting to deliver granular insights into the status of your bookings pipeline, including forecasts for the season ahead.
Visual pipelines: Our deal management feature allows you to use drag-and-drop functionality to mock up your bookings pipeline. With this high-level overview, you’ll easily understand if you need to invest in marketing to attract potential customers during quieter periods or deploy more resources to serve a booked-out hotel.
Entity boards: Pre-built boards give you a head start on gaining pipeline insights at different stages of the booking process. Each board connects to the next, enabling updates to be reflected throughout the entire board system sequence.
Advanced automation: Reduce the daily admin involved in running a hotel by using slick automation recipes that run behind the scenes. You’ll set a trigger, condition, and action; for example, when your Housekeeping staff updates the room status to clean and ready and the guest’s check-in time is within the next two hours, you can send an automated SMS or email message to the guest informing them that their room is ready.
Charlie MacGregor, Founder and CEO of The Student Hotel, describes why our platform was the clear choice for his rapidly growing business with ~30 hotels.
“Within five minutes, I understood where the bottlenecks were. monday enabled me to decide where I want to focus my attention and prioritize, and that’s really when I fell in love with it as a platform. Now we’ve committed to having monday as the backbone of our organization, I have an overview I can trust. Productivity has gone up, we’re really able to work as a team and be alerted at the right moment, either that things are progressing or things are highlighted that need attention.”
Ready to see how monday CRM could enhance your hotel operations? Take a free 14-day trial today.
Try monday CRMFAQs
Do hotel managers do customer relations?
Hotel managers are essential for maintaining positive customer relations and ensuring guest satisfaction, including handling any complaints or issues during their stay. However, every staff member interacting with your former, current, or future guests may also shape their experience and impact their perception of your hotel brand.
How do hotels use CRM?
Hotels can use their customer relationship management systems to gather and store guest data, use it in their ongoing marketing efforts, and personalize the guest experience.
What are the 3 types of CRM?
The three main types of CRM are collaborative, operational, and analytical. Collaborative CRMs enable team communication, operational CRMs automate and improve internal processes, and analytical CRMs provide insights and data analysis for strategic decision-making.