The Prostay Blog

Hotel Technology & Innovation

Oracle OPERA PMS Alternative: The 2026 Switching Guide

The OPERA 5 to OPERA Cloud migration is forcing thousands of hotels into a decision they did not plan to make: absorb a heavier Oracle contract, or use the disruption to reconsider the platform entirely. This guide covers when leaving OPERA genuinely pays off, when staying is the right call, what a migration to a unified platform actually involves, and the questions to settle before you commit either way.

Jul 21, 2026 · 14 min read

Hotel Operations Optimization

Hotel Breakfast: Formats, Pricing and Profit

Breakfast is the most reviewed meal in hospitality: a filter on every booking site, a scored category on review platforms, and the last thing most guests experience before checkout. This guide treats it as a product: choosing the format your volume actually supports, pricing it as an included rate or an add-on, controlling food cost and waste, the menu items guests really remember, and selling breakfast at every step of the booking journey.

Jul 19, 2026 · 15 min read

Revenue Management

Hotel Weddings: How to Turn Your Property Into a Booked-Out Wedding Venue

A single wedding can be worth more than a month of transient room nights: venue fee, catering for a hundred, a sold-out room block, spa and breakfast spend, and a couple who returns every anniversary for the rest of their lives. Yet most hotels treat weddings as an occasional disruption rather than a business line, quoting from a stale PDF and hoping the banquet team copes. This guide covers the full machine: what makes a property genuinely wedding-ready, how to design packages that sell themselves, pricing structures from venue fees to minimum spends, room blocks that capture the travelling guest list, the BEO discipline that keeps the day flawless, and the marketing that turns one good wedding into a pipeline of them.

Jul 17, 2026 · 15 min read

Hospitality Industry

Pet-Friendly Hotels: The Complete Playbook for Policies, Fees and Bookings

Around half of the guests walking through your lobby own a pet, and a growing share refuses to travel without it. Pet-friendly is no longer a quirky amenity; it is a filterable search criterion on every OTA and a deal-breaker for a segment that stays longer, travels in the shoulder season and rebooks with unusual loyalty. This guide covers the whole machine: how to design a policy that protects the property, what to charge and how, which rooms to designate, the housekeeping protocols that keep allergic guests safe, the legal line between pets and service animals, and the marketing that turns a checkbox into a revenue stream.

Jul 16, 2026 · 15 min read

Digital Marketing

Hotel Photography: The Complete Guide to Photos That Sell Rooms

Guests decide with their eyes long before they read a word of your description. This guide covers the full craft of hotel photography: the shot list every property needs, how to prepare rooms so they photograph the way they feel, when to hire a professional and when a phone will do, the photo requirements of the major OTAs, and the image SEO that makes your photography work on your own website. Practical, specific and written for hoteliers, not photographers.

Jul 14, 2026 · 16 min read

Product Updates

Introducing Prostay Instant Site: Your Hotel Website, Live This Afternoon

Today we are launching Prostay Instant Site, a website builder made specifically for hotels and built directly into the Prostay platform. Pick one of six designed templates, arrange your pages from ready-made blocks, connect your own domain and publish, with your real rooms, rates and availability wired straight into the booking engine. No agency, no plugins, no commission. Here is what it does, why we built it, and how to get your property online this afternoon.

Jul 13, 2026 · 14 min read

Hotel Operations Optimization

Hotel Energy Management: Cut the Bill Without Guests Noticing

After payroll, the utility bill is the biggest cost most hotels can actually control, and the strangest thing about it is where the money goes: heating empty rooms, cooling empty floors, lighting corridors nobody walks at four a.m. Guests never see the waste, which is why nobody fights it. Here is how to cut a fifth or more of your energy spend with the occupancy data you already have, before spending a euro on new equipment.

Jul 12, 2026 · 16 min read

Hospitality Industry

Hotel Spa and Wellness: Turning an Amenity Into a Profit Centre

Wellness is where hotel guests are putting their money: spa treatments, sleep programs, saunas, day passes. Yet most hotel spas quietly lose money, staffed all day for a trickle of bookings, priced by copying the neighbours and disconnected from the systems the rest of the property runs on. The difference between a spa that drains and a spa that earns is not the marble, it is the operating discipline. Here is how to run wellness as a business.

Jul 12, 2026 · 16 min read

Hotel Operations Optimization

Hotel Guest Journey Mapping: See Your Property the Way Guests Do

A guest experiences your hotel as one continuous story, from the first search to the review they write a week after checkout. Your property experiences that same guest as six disconnected episodes owned by six different people. Journey mapping is the discipline of drawing the whole story in one place, finding the moments where it breaks, and fixing them in order of what they cost you. Here is how to do it in an afternoon, with the data you already have.

Jul 10, 2026 · 16 min read

Hotel Operations Optimization

Hotel Staff Scheduling: How to Stop Copying Last Week's Mistakes

Payroll is the largest controllable cost in any hotel, and the weekly schedule is where it is actually decided. Yet most properties build that schedule by copying last week and moving names around, which staffs for a hotel that no longer exists. Here is how to schedule from your occupancy forecast instead, department by department, and why the same discipline that cuts labor cost also cuts the turnover that keeps making it worse.

Jul 10, 2026 · 16 min read

Revenue Management

How to Increase Hotel Occupancy Without Giving the Rooms Away

Every empty room expires at midnight, which is why occupancy is the number hoteliers lose sleep over. But low occupancy is a symptom, not a disease: the property nobody finds, the site nobody books, the rate nobody accepts and the market nobody visits are four different problems wearing the same face. Discounting fixes only one of them and damages the rest. Here is how to diagnose yours, and the levers that work on each.

Jul 8, 2026 · 16 min read