Opera history, performance, and cultural significance

OPERA is but one type of a PMS, or property management system, available to hospitality management. Businesses and managers use property management systems to improve efficiency and facilitate improved record keeping and tracking. OPERA is a property management system commonly utilized in the hospitality industry hotels, including hotel chains, to handles reservations, customer information, accounts receivable and other accounting issues, housekeeping, guest interface systems, and maintenance records, among other issues and concerns.

Despite these capabilities, and the benefits that may be immediately visible to the casual observer, the choice to purchase and implement a property management system is one often fraught with complexity for hospitality decision-makers, as such systems are expensive, and oftentimes require additional employee training, an undertaking that in itself requires an investment of time and money. Thus it is necessary for a manager to objectively evaluate OPERA and determine what such a system can provide an individual hotel or resort before deciding whether such a substantial investment is warranted in the particular situation.

While fully adaptable to a particular hotel's needs, the OPERA system is characterized by a host of key features. These include reservations; rate management; profiles; front desk; back office interface; room management; cashiering; accounts receivable; commissions; reporting; full configurability; hospitality system interface; and, finally, a global perspective, including multi-currency and multi-lingual capabilities (Micros 2011).

OPERA seamlessly coordinates with the reservation system while also collecting, and tracking, information about telephone use, customer charges at the hotel's restaurants, gift shops, bars, lounges, room service, in-room movie rentals and mini bar use, and housekeeping charges, among other use of hotel services (eG Innovations 2012). This capability provides a more accurate, and comprehensive, accounting of guest utilization of hotel amenities.

Such integration, in addition to providing an easier, enhanced, and more seamless hotel experience for the guest, also provides the hotel manager and executives with more detailed information about guest use and hotel revenue. This enables the influential decision-makers to make better informed decisions concerning the business. Trends will become more readily apparent to management, allowing such developments to be capitalized on as they emerge; this reduces the likelihood that opportunities will be missed. This could translate into increased revenues for the hotel; better information can be leveraged to increase profitability, as a greater focus can be placed on those areas of the business that are most likely to result in greater economic returns for the hotel.

This enhanced and more easily accessible information can also translate into greater customer loyalty. OPERA provides the ability to track customers across multiple visits, keeping record of customer preferences and the like. This allows the creation of a customer profile that may then be used to anticipate the desires of repeat guests and provide enhanced levels of customer service to this valuable group. As such systems can be customized to address the specific needs of a particular hotel or resort, a hotel's management may design tools to enable more effective targeting of particular customer demographics, again offering the potential for greater returns; this can prove especially valuable within the context of group sales and event services, two potentially valuable streams of income.