Training Your Hotel Staff On A New PMS Should Take Minutes, Not Days

Summary: Hotel staff training shouldn’t require weeks of shadowing and printed materials. This guide covers what effective hotel staff training and hospitality training for employees involves, from onboarding and communication skills to ongoing property management system (PMS) training. It also discusses why the software itself is often the biggest factor that hoteliers overlook. 

With staff turnover as high as 75% in the industry, a hotel PMS that is intuitive makes training fast and can transform onboarding from a multi-week process into two days. This frees managers to spend more time coaching guest service and sales skills instead of re-teaching software basics to every new hire.

Why Hotel Staff Training is Harder Than It Should Be

Running a hotel effectively requires efficiency, and your guests should always be the priority, which means your staff, internal processes, and guest interactions all must operate smoothly to ensure ongoing success. But hospitality has long struggled with a training problem that other industries don’t face at the same scale: extremely high staff turnover. Non-management hotel employee turnover has been measured as high as 50%, which highlights the importance of how quickly and effectively a hotel can onboard someone new. 

Legacy and even some new-school PMS solutions make this worse. They tend to be difficult and time-consuming to learn, even when they offer cloud-based or mobile versions. Often, these systems require external trainers to come on-site just to get staff comfortable with a system that isn’t intuitive enough to keep up with modern hotel operations. 

In fact, this has become one of the most common complaints among hospitality professionals: hotel staffers are increasingly younger and more tech-savvy, with a strong preference for mobile devices. This generation of workers responds better to technology that prioritizes ease of use over one that requires a manual. 

The right technology reduces the pressures on managers to set aside extra time for extensive system training every time they bring on a new hire. After all, training your staff on your new PMS should take minutes, not days. 

What Hotel Staff Training Should Cover

In the hotel industry, comprehensive hospitality staff training generally covers three categories: 

• Software and systems, such as the PMS, point of sale (POS), and booking tools
• Service and communication skills, including greetings, objection handling, and guest recovery
• Role-specific knowledge like housekeeping procedures, night audit, and revenue management 

Most hotel training programs focus entirely on the first category. They prioritize teaching someone how to check a guest in and treat the other two as an afterthought if they’re covered at all.

That’s a mistake, and it’s one of the best ways a modern hotel PMS changes training. When the system itself requires less teaching, training time can be reallocated toward the skills that differentiate great service from forgettable service. 

How to Train Hotel Staff on PMS Software Efficiently

The next generation of PMS software streamlines processes like front desk demands, rate management, reservations, housekeeping, and financials. This helps increase revenue, reduce costs, improve guest service, and increase staff efficiency, all while connecting to whatever other technology partnerships a hotel has in place, from booking APIs to channel management software.

In today’s hospitality landscape, ease of use is the single strongest predictor of whether a PMS gets adopted internally. A Capterra study found that 74% of field service companies counted functionality or ease of use as a top priority when choosing new software. We believe that hotel PMS is no exception. 

The system in place should either let staff do something they couldn’t before or let them complete a task in less time with less effort. If it doesn’t meet that bar, employees won’t experience it as efficient, no matter how many features it has. 

The impact of PMS efficiency goes beyond onboarding. Frustrating software slows training down, demoralizes staff, and limits the level of guest service staff feel able to provide. 

With a high-performing, intuitive system, staff can spend more time focused on guests instead of fighting with software. Additionally, mobile solutions let them step away from the front desk to interact with guests on a more personal level.

When evaluating a hotel PMS specifically for how trainable it is, look for these hallmarks of usability:

• Intuitive and easy to learn
• Speed
• Quick implementation and setup
• Mobile and cloud access
• Easy integrations
• Reliability without disruptions

How Stayntouch Supports Faster Employee Training 

Training Takes Days, Not Months

Traditional, legacy PMS platforms can take staff up to six months to fully understand. That timeline doesn’t work in an industry where half of non-management staff may turn over within a year. Stayntouch uses the opposite assumption: front desk agents can be fully trained in as little as two days, with individual modules taking as little as 90 minutes to learn. 

That speed is part of our design. We believe that extensive computer training has been a poor substitute for usability in the first place. Rather than compensating for a clunky interface with more hours of instruction, our platform uses a colorful, user-friendly design built around drag-and-drop and select-and-click interactions. As a result, staff spend less time staring at screens and more time engaging with guests.

This affects hiring, too. Because our platform is simple enough to pick up quickly, hotels can widen their talent pool and hire based on personality and hospitality instincts rather than prior technical experience, addressing the turnover problem from the recruiting side. 

Hotel PMS Training Resources and Support

Intuitive software still benefits from structured support, and Stayntouch backs it with both in-person and remote implementation options. Even remote deployment, which makes up 85% to 90% of our setups, comes with a dedicated implementation team, comprehensive product documentation, and a full library of self-paced courses to get staff up to speed:

• On-demand knowledge base: Staff have access to the Stayntouch Knowledge Base, hosted on Freshdesk, for self-service learning. Step-by-step job aids, video tutorials, and articles cover everything from mobile check-in to upselling and reporting. 
• Stayntouch Academy: The primary training channel is Stayntouch Academy, an on-demand eLearning platform staff can use from desktop or mobile at their own pace, with course certifications on completion and progress tracking for managers.
• Role-based learning plans: Specialized modules exist for Front Desk, Finance, Housekeeping, Management, Night Audit, and Revenue Management teams, so employees only spend time learning what’s relevant to their job.
• A dedicated training environment: A separate demo environment lets new hires practice creating reservations and processing check-ins without touching live hotel data. Therefore, mistakes during training never require correction. 
• Continuous onboarding support: Academy access is an ongoing resource. Managers can set up new hires and choose relevant courses any time by contacting the Stayntouch Academy team.
• Live Q&A during onboarding: While core training is self-guided, properties can schedule live Q&A sessions with their lead installer after completing modules, giving staff a chance to clarify concepts and go deeper on anything they don’t understand.
• Ongoing webinars and updates: Stayntouch produces regular product enhancement webinars so management and staff can keep their skills current as new features roll out. 

Role-Specific Design

One of the more overlooked ways to manage hotel staff training load is to reduce what each employee needs to learn. Stayntouch assigns role-specific dashboards, so screen clutter is limited to what’s relevant. For instance, housekeeping staffers get a dedicated dashboard showing departures and dirty rooms, with no need to learn front desk reservation screens. 

Shift Hotel Communication Skills Training Toward Sales and Service

Because a mobile-first PMS automates heavy administrative work and frees staff from being buried in screens, hoteliers should treat that as an opportunity to rethink what staff training is for. Instead of training focused solely on how to check a guest in, a modernized front-desk training program should focus on communication and sales skills. Your program should teach staff to act as brand ambassadors. 

That typically includes:

• In-depth tours of the hotel, including room upgrades and amenities, so staff know what they’re selling
• Upselling processes, procedures, and best practices
• Specific scripts for greetings and handling guest objections or qualifying questions
• Empowering staff with the authority to negotiate or offer slight discounts to secure an upsell

This is the practical payoff of fast PMS training: every hour a new hire doesn’t spend learning which button checks a guest in is an hour that can go toward learning how to sell the room upgrade, handle an objection gracefully, or how to tell if a guest needs a little extra attention. 

With Stayntouch behind you, your staff onboarding goes faster, and you can focus your attention on improving your guest experience, which translates into returning guests and increased revenue. Request a demo today to see the difference for yourself. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Hotel PMS Staff Training

How long should it take to train hotel staff on a new PMS?

With a modern, intuitive cloud PMS, front desk agents can typically be fully trained in as little as two days, with individual training modules taking around 90 minutes each. Legacy systems can take new staff up to six months to learn.

What should be included in hospitality staff training?

Effective hospitality training for employees should cover the technology they’ll use daily (PMS, POS, and booking tools), guest communication and sales skills (greetings, upselling, objection handling), and role-specific knowledge for their department. 

How can hotels reduce staff turnover through better training?

Faster training lowers the cost and friction of onboarding. This has an enormous impact on an industry where non-management turnover can reach 50%. It also expands who a hotel can hire. When the software is simple and easy to learn, hotels can prioritize candidates with strong hospitality instincts over ones with prior technical experience. 

Does hotel staff training end after onboarding?

It shouldn’t. Ongoing training, through on-demand courses, refresher modules, and webinars, helps staff stay current as software and hotel operations evolve.