An SPMS (Ship Property Management System), sometimes called the Shipboard Property Management System, is a specialized version of a traditional hotel PMS that is a highly complex system designed specifically for the cruise industry. Whereas a hotel PMS only has to manage the rooms and billing of a stationary building, an SPMS must manage the operations, security, border compliance, and onboard commerce of a self-contained, constantly moving city that frequently loses its internet connection.
You can’t use ordinary hotel software to run a 5,000-passenger cruise ship. The operational requirements of a ship are fundamentally different from those of a land-based resort, which is why the SPMS (Ship Property Management System) has modules that simply do not exist in traditional hospitality tech:
The biggest technological difference between a modern hotel PMS and an SPMS is architecture.
Today, most hotel PMSs are cloud-native: they run on remote servers (like AWS). If the internet goes down in the hotel, the system stops working.
A cruise ship is connected to satellite internet (VSAT), which may go down in severe weather or remote fjords. Therefore, an SPMS cannot be fully cloud-based. It must have heavy, localized servers physically sitting in the belly of the ship, which gives the crew the ability to check in guests, process payments, and operate the gangway in an entirely offline mode.
While the ship operates independently, it needs to constantly talk to the cruise line’s corporate headquarters (Shoreside).
The Ship Property Management System (SPMS) deals with a crucial data sync known as the Manifest. Before the ship reaches a new country, the SPMS packages all the passenger passport data, visa information, and crew information and transmits this manifest shoreside to be cleared by local Customs and Border Protection (CBP) authorities before the ship even docks.
The market has been dominated in the past by a handful of major players, the most notable of which is Oracle Hospitality Cruise (formerly known as Micros Fidelio Cruise). Because the barrier to entry is so high and the safety regulations so strict, very few startups attempt to build an entire SPMS.
No. Just like in hotels, the booking is done by a Central Reservation System (CRS) shoreside. A few days prior to the voyage, the CRS downloads the passenger list to the ship’s local Ship Property Management System (SPMS).
Next-generation cruise tech makes use of IoT (Internet of Things) sensors installed in the ceilings of the ship. For instance, when a passenger walks by a sensor, it reads their wearable and pings to the Ship Property Management System to automatically unlock their cabin door or tell a waiter exactly where a person is sitting to bring a drink to them.
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