GREENOUGH, MT— Out here in the Montana wilderness, resorts need flexible, customizable, intuitive and integrateable point-of-sale systems too. A year prior to a scheduled June 2005 opening, that’s exactly what the general manager of the new Resort at Paws Up in Greenough, MT, began searching for. Today, two months into the resort’s existence, he said it’s clear he made the right choice.
“We have two restaurants that use the system and we have two retail outlets that use it,” explained Bryan Kindred, the gm of the Resort at Paws Up, which he added is the only luxury outdoor adventure resort in Montana. “The POS is an add on component to our PMS, but they are fully integrated, so guest profiles can also be accessed by the restaurants and the retail outlets. For now, this system is proving to do everything we would like it to do currently. As we evolve our business plan and expand our operations, we’ll come up with other things for it to do.”
For now, the POS system is only responsible for the resort’s two retail outlets and two restaurants and integrates with Northwind’s Maestro PMS at the property; the POS product is formally known as Maestro POS. One of the retail outlets sells items for outdoor activities, such as fly fishing rods and sunscreen. The other outlet sells logoed products as well as sundries. Meanwhile, the restaurants include Pomp, a gourmet restaurant serving breakfast, lunch and dinner; and the Tank & Trough Bistro, which is more casual in nature and serves breakfast and lunch, according to Kindred.
Kindred noted that Northwind customized both the PMS and POS system for the resort. As an example of this customization, Kindred pointed out, “One thing we worked out was for when our reservations department would take different types of meal plan information for guests, it was all accessible through the POS. So if a server goes to post a bill to a guest’s account, the POS will flag that the guest is on a meal package. And then the server would then know where to post the bill to. So it ensures proper property routing based on the packages.”
The POS system also features terminals that run on stand-alone touch-screen computers, menu options that can be grouped according to a specific menu and style of food, buttons that can be color-coded and preprogrammed and security-based on a simple password system. Furthermore, the system allows users to print orders at designated kitchen preparation stations, set up customer accounts and use different payment methods for a single bill.
A single bill might actually be a rare thing for guests using the resort’s restaurants. That’s because there are only 21 separate units at the resort that contain two to four bedrooms each. As a result, multiple families could be staying within each cabin or home, which is what the units are called. A total of 86 people can stay at the resort at one time, as they occupy the free-standing homes that are spread throughout the 37,000-acre property.
Because of the expanse of the resort and the fact that some buildings are a mile or more apart, Kindred said it was crucial to have integrated PMS and POS systems. Furthermore, Kindred said that the systems had to be run via a fiber-optic cabling system that could be spread throughout the resort. There is also a wireless network that connects several of the buildings.
Getting Prepared
Following the three-month selection process for the PMS and POS, and nine months before the planned grand opening, Kindred said the resort’s management staff began the process of selecting computers, touch-screen monitors and other equipment that was necessary to run the PMS and POS software. The next step was the Maestro customization process, and then the installation began two months before the grand opening. Northwind then trained the resort’s staff for two weeks and remained on site for the first few days of operations in early June.
“Training has been essential for capitalizing on the system,” Kindred said. “We’ve spent a lot of time on training and trouble shooting, playing with the system and working on different problems we encounter. It’s an ongoing process, but training is absolutely the key. The only challenge we seemed to have with the POS was having training for it going on at the same time we were opening the resort.”
Going forward, Kindred revealed that he would like to expand the resort’s POS system capabilities by adding Maestro Online Table Res, which can be fully integrated with the POS and is designed to maximize restaurant bookings by allowing guests to make restaurant reservations from their homes as well as guesthomes at the property.