Caterease vs. Oracle Hospitality - OPERA

Integration with Microsoft Access - We use Access for a lot of different Queries, such as for our bar back to know the specifics of each bar. Caterease allows Access to pull data directly so all we have to do is run the report instead of entering all the information manually. Same with diagramming, having software like Placez that pulls from Caterease allows for such things as table and chair counts to be pulled directly from Caterease instead of having to place each individual table.

Incentivized

Oracle Hospitality OPERA--Sales and Catering is suitable for handling all hotel procedures in the best possible way. It is also well suited to keep track of restaurant sales and all invoices issued on the current day are immediately recorded in the main database that collects all the administrative information of the company.

Oracle Hospitality OPERA is not well suited for maintaining multiple sessions between departments. It causes software downgrades and loss of information if not handled properly.

• Quick updates to contracts/files
• Great integrations available
• Report generation

Incentivized

• OPERA keeps a record of our activities at the hotel.
• OPERA's interface is simple, empathetic and allows better communication between different departments.
• OPERA allows its users to execute actions without moving from their posts.
• Registering guests with OPERA is easier than with any similar program.

• It’s a great program, but it’s missing some aspects that would be incredibly useful. It has the ability to store venues and locations that you’ve used in the past, but it doesn’t allow you to associate a tax rate with the saved venue. As our company handles events all throughout Southern California and tax rates are constantly changing, it would be nice to be able to assign certain tax rates to certain zip codes and venues.
• It can be a little finicky sometimes with its equipment conflict algorithm. There will be events In the system that have been marked as cancelled, yet it will insist that an event I am working on has an equipment conflict with it (even though that event is not going through). It will not let you save out of your event and, sometimes, will end up deleting all your changes and progress, which is incredibly frustrating.
• I wish there was a way to export PDFs of your proposals without re-saving your entire proposal. Sometimes, clients will ask for two versions of the same proposal with just slight changes, and it’s annoying to have to go in and completely re-do and save the proposal and have to adjust it back to the original.
• It would be nice if there was a way to see a history of all of the changes that had been made in a proposal, that would be great. Because we often have many hands on each event we do, having a comprehensive list of all the changes made to each proposal and the date and times, and users who made these changes would be an incredible asset.

Incentivized

• OPERA is too slow to run for the first time and the problem persists in time.
• That OPERA only opens through browsers like Internet Explorer takes away from the user's interest and makes it adapt to the slowness of the browser in question.
• It does not allow autonomy in terms of software, which means that if you are occupying your session on the platform and another collaborator needs to use it because it causes crashes in the OPERA system, which causes problems.

I have not had to use the support in my over 3 years of using Caterease. This is why I gave it a 9 rating because even though I haven't had to interact with support, the fact that I haven't had to use support speaks volumes to how good the software is and how it is user friendly.

Incentivized

I haven’t used too many other events programs in the past – at a former company, we used the back end of our website in order to create events, but Caterease is a lot more user-friendly. Our website wasn’t particularly fancy – it didn’t allow us to conflict check or see if there was another event at the same time. It was used for the sole purpose of posting the information to our system – not for creating full proposals. Caterease is much more effective for what we need to use it for in this context.

Incentivized

OPERA has taken a new perspective on how to manage the hospitality industry today and what holds it together with its predecessor Oracle Hospitality (formerly MICROS) is that it allows for better functionality in terms of its interface and the fact that MICROS is an outdated system makes it very susceptible to constant errors in its data system. OPERA, however, has proven itself in every aspect for which it was created and makes it suitable for the hospitality industry.

• Has made our team more efficient and be able to have a central place to store all info so everyone can access it.
• Manually printing BEOs has proven to be incredibly inefficient as they get updated quickly and often times just causes confusion and mistakes.
• It's nice to be able to generate contracts fairly quickly for clients

Incentivized

• We have reached our occupancy goal in the first quarter of 2020 by using OPERA properly.
• Housekeeping reports now better align with the maintenance checklist for repair requests, etc.
• Our company has saved at least 27% in administrative costs and has spent 56% less than in previous years.