Choose a hotel CRM on how well it cleans and merges guest profiles from your PMS, how it records consent, and whether you can build a segment without asking the vendor. Test deliverability with a real send before committing, and price it against repeat business you can attribute rather than against open rates.
A hotel database usually holds the same guest three times: once from an OTA with a masked email, once from a commission and ">direct booking, once from a walk in with a typo. Ask the vendor exactly how profiles are matched and merged, what happens on a conflict, and whether you can review merges before they are applied.
Then ask what fields come across from your PMS. Stay history, room type, spend and channel make useful segments. A CRM that only receives name and email is a mailing list with a longer invoice.
For every contactable guest the system should store whether they consented, when, through which form, and to what. That record is what protects you in an audit and what lets you email confidently. If consent lives in a spreadsheet next to the CRM, it will drift out of date within a season.
Check the unsubscribe path too. It has to be one click, it has to apply immediately across every campaign type, and it must not remove the guest from transactional messages like their own booking confirmation.
Skip the research, talk to someone who has done it 45 minutes with an independent specialist. Free for hotels, no pitch, no commissions. Book a free session →Try it in the demo. Build the segment of guests who stayed twice in the last two years, booked direct, came from one country and have not stayed in twelve months. If that takes a support request, the tool will not be used, because the moment for that campaign passes before the ticket is answered.
The same applies to templates. Marketing that depends on the vendor for every layout change ships one campaign a quarter instead of one a month, and the cost of the licence stays the same either way.
Authenticate your own sending domain before the first campaign, and send a real test to a range of providers. A campaign that lands in spam is worse than no campaign, because it trains the mailbox to bury the next one. Ask the vendor what deliverability support is included and who fixes it when rates drop.
Agree the metric that matters up front: bookings attributed to CRM activity, and how attribution is defined. Open rates have become unreliable with mail privacy features, and no vendor should be defending its value with them.
A PMS stores profiles so it can operate the stay. A CRM cleans, merges and segments them so you can act on them. If you send fewer than a handful of campaigns a year and your database is small, the PMS may be enough. Once you want segmented, automated communication, the gap becomes obvious.
Usually not for marketing. Most OTAs supply a masked address intended for stay related communication, and using it for campaigns breaches their terms and often data protection rules too. The route is to collect consent directly during the stay, which is a front desk process rather than a software one.
Value comes from repeat potential rather than raw size. A city hotel with a business segment that returns several times a year gets more from a few thousand clean profiles than a resort gets from tens of thousands of one time leisure guests.
The pre arrival message, because everyone in the segment has already committed and is receptive. It reduces reception questions, creates a natural place for <a href="/topic/upselling">upselling</a>, and gives you a clean baseline before you start on win back campaigns.
Ask the vendor to import a small sample of your real data, including the messy parts: the same guest under two spellings, an OTA masked address and a corporate booking. How the system resolves those is the single most useful thing you will see.
Usually not. Booking confirmations and pre arrival information are better sent from the system that owns the reservation, so they are never blocked by a marketing unsubscribe. Keep the two streams separate and make sure the CRM respects that boundary.