PMS
PMS stands for Property Management System. A PMS is the core operating software of a hotel, hostel, serviced apartment or short-term rental business. It holds the reservations, the room or unit inventory, the rates, the guest profiles and the folios (guest bills), and it is the system the front desk, housekeeping and back office work from every day.
Examples include Mews, Cloudbeds, Apaleo and Oracle OPERA Cloud for hotels, and Guesty, Hostaway and Lodgify for short-term rentals.
What a PMS does
- Reservations — creates, modifies and cancels bookings from every source
- Inventory — tracks which rooms or units are available, occupied, dirty or out of order
- Rates — stores rate plans, restrictions and seasonal pricing
- Check-in / check-out — the front-desk workflow, increasingly self-service
- Folios and payments — the guest bill, deposits, pre-authorisations and settlement
- Housekeeping — room status and task assignment
- Reporting — occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, night audit
Why it matters
Everything else in the hotel tech stack connects to the PMS: the channel manager, the booking engine, the revenue management system, door locks, guest messaging and accounting. Choosing or switching a PMS is the single most consequential software decision an operator makes.