A hotel booking engine is an application on hotel websites that is used to capture and process direct online guest reservations. It’s your key to commission-free direct bookings and a way to optimize your property’s sales and revenue strategies.
With most travelers now booking their stays online, hotels have to rely on online travel agents to deliver them a large portion of reservations. Listing on these sites includes the benefits of reaching large new audiences and increasing bookings but each reservation requires a commission fee to be paid to the third-party. When this fee starts to creep up over 20%, it becomes incredibly frustrating for hotels, especially independent operators, as they see their profits melt away.
How does an online booking engine work?
An online booking engine works by plugging into your hotel website and processing secure online reservations made by travelers through the website. The data is then passed onto your property management system so you can easily manage the bookings, and onto your channel manager so your inventory is automatically updated.
The booking engine can be synced not only with your hotel website, but you can also add a direct link to your booking engine from your Facebook profile via a ‘Book now’ button.This also tracks the bookings coming from your page . This means guests can book your rooms without ever being on your official website or any other online travel site.
It’s a highly convenient way for travelers to make a reservation. The booking engine will display your rates and availability in real-time and allows guests to select their dates and finalize the reservation. Other features may come with it – for example, the automation of reservation confirmation emails.
Online booking definition
Online booking is a convenient way for traveler to research and book their holidays or work trips. Using online booking methods, traveler can often book and organize an entire trip in one sitting – sometimes from a single website. They’ll use the internet to browse travel websites and look for hotels, flights, car rental, guided tours, attractions, and more before making a purchase decision. They can also plan and build itineraries for their trip.
An online booking tool is a tool used by organization to manage their business travel online. As well as making bookings, online booking tools usually allow organization to view real-time data on their business travel spend, track their traveler online and enforce business travel policy.
Online booking is now also the best way for traveler to book and securely pay for their travel. It streamlines the process for you and your guests. It’s also vital for increasing exposure and gets you on the road to more bookings.
Why does your hotel need an online booking engine?
You need an online booking engine at your hotel if you want to adequately meet guest demands, hit your revenue targets, and stay competitive. No matter the size of your property, a hotel booking engine will provide your guests with additional flexibility and a better overall guest experience.
Travelers have come to expect this functionality from modern-day accommodation providers, appreciating the convenience and security it provides.
This is because:
- Guests can easily self-serve – Travelers can check which rooms are available when, and for how much, without ever speaking to you.
- Guests trust online booking – When guests make a booking, your booking engine can securely accept credit card payments, and guest data is safely stored and accessible in one place.
- Guests can book quicker – Online booking puts an end to games of phone or email tag, with travelers and hotels liaising for days before confirming a booking.
- Guests look for direct booking perks – People will often head to your website in the hopes that if they book directly they’ll get something a little extra added to their stay. This is a trade-off many properties will make to save on paying third-party commissions.
- It’s more professional – Modern guests will be surprised if they can’t perform an online booking on your website. It’s likely to give them the impression that you’re not organized and they’ll end up booking another property.
- It’s more international – Guests from overseas will find it easier to book with you online than by calling you property directly due to the complexity and cost of international phone calls.
The outlet an internet booking engine provides your property for bookings that are all your own is invaluable. When guests book direct, you own all this data and you own the relationship. Once a guest books direct it is much easier to turn them into a return visitor and ensure they book direct every time they visit you. Without an internet booking engine, this is much more difficult.
In a sense you can improve the profitability of every guest, one by one, just by securing their direct booking and earning their loyalty.
What are the benefits of booking engine software?
With the right booking engine in place you can:
- Increase conversions with a simple guest booking experience
- Save time with quick and easy setup
- Eliminate manual entry with instant integration
- More effectively capture guest data for better decision making
- Gain an advantage over competitors who don’t have one
Here’s a range of benefits in more detail that booking engine software can provide hoteliers.
It improves your efficiency as a business With PMS and channel manager integration your availability is updated immediately upon receiving a reservation, not only in your own system, but across all of your channels.
It simplifies the administrative process for you and your staff Rather than requiring you to respond to email inquiries and accept reservations over the phone, an online booking system does the work for you. You can then spend more time interacting with your guests and keep the rest of the staff more organized and efficient, because everyone will have access to live information about the current occupancy at the hotel.
It allows you to collect valuable data about your guests Data collection is absolutely critical, especially in the hotel industry where guests are demanding a more personalized experience. Guest data can help you tailor your marketing campaigns to attract the most motivated guests to your property and improve the personalization of your guest communications to enhance your guest’s overall experience.
It directly improves the guest experience at your property A cloud-based system allows your guests to book their preferred room type on their computers, from their tablets or on their phones. With short forms and secure payment portals, it makes the process of online booking a room simple, easy and enjoyable. Remember, this is their first impression of your hotel and it will have a lasting impact on their perception of your brand. It should be user-friendly if your guests will complete the process and book online.
Why your website needs booking engine integration
Think about every successful relationship, working or otherwise, that you’ve ever had. It’s likely that a common denominator throughout all of them has been effective communication and cooperation.
The same principles should apply to your hotel business. If your systems are not syncing together seamlessly in real-time, the probability of them working as you’d like is low, at best.
The two most prominent cogs in the machine are your website and booking engine. Unless you want errors, erratic results, and confused or cranky customers, these two systems must sync with each other.
To be optimized:
- An online booking engine must be synchronized with your website
- Your website needs to display a ‘Book Now’ button
- The experience of your website and booking engine need to align on functionality and performance
- Design quality on your website must also be reflected on the booking engine and vice versa
- Your website will be HTTPS secure with an updated SSL certificate
Benefits gained from website and booking engine integration are numerous. They include:
- The ability to stay on par with the booking experience on OTAs, which is important if your hotel wants to remain a viable booking alternative to the third-party channels
- A consistently mobile-friendly platform which will help reduce user friction
- A quick and functional experience for guests given they won’t have to repeat actions or input the same information more than once
- A much easier way to manage rates and reservations since you won’t have to do any manual processing between the two systems, eliminating accidental errors
- Greater success with search engine optimization because your content and functionality will be optimized on both your website and booking engine
- More traffic, more regularly, to your booking engine flowing straight from your website in a single click
Integration is something you should always keep in mind, no matter what systems you’re using.
Features to look for in a hotel booking system
As with any product you purchase for your hotel, quality will vary along with the price. Obviously you’ll want the basics covered at a minimum.
Here’s a number of booking engine features you should expect.
- Up to 25 high-quality photos in your image gallery After you have done all the hard work of doing up your beautiful hotel and its rooms, you’ll want to showcase them. It’s already an established fact that visual experience through image galleries is one of the top factors to get guests over the line when booking. Being able to add a lot of high-resolution images to your gallery is important if you want to entice guests to book.
- Banner images What is the first thing that you notice on a website? Isn’t it the banner image that steals the show for first impressions? Your booking engine should allow you to display an exciting banner image.
- Facebook integration A booking engine should connect with your social media pages, so you can effortlessly measure and optimize your marketing campaigns across Facebook and Instagram.
- Room order auto optimization When you want your guests to have seamless and hassle-free booking experience, the best you can do is to present them with the options they searched for. This feature displays the rooms according to your guest’s search criteria on the top of the search results, making it quick and easy for them to book.
- Intuitive booking summary Whenever a guest chooses a room that is not close to the search criteria, a booking summary can alert the guests with a message that the rooms they selected do not match what they were looking for. This way, your guests are constantly engaged and guided to make the best choices for them.
- Google Analytics integration When you have a hotel business and most of your bookings are coming from online, you need to know exactly where they are coming from, and where your website visitors are exiting from. Data can be crucial in analyzing the success of your hotel website, so your booking engine should empower you with Google Analytics integration to keep track of your website visits and make decisions based on crucial data.
- Promotion codes You can always be a step ahead of your competitors by attracting more customers with the help of promotion codes. A booking engine should enable you to create your own promotions and give a code to your customers to avail discounts. You can have something special going on during school holidays, local festivals, or even corporate promotions, and sell your rooms much faster with value-for-money offers.
- Multilingual The hotel industry is one of the most diverse in the world. Since the hospitality business involves such a wide customer base from various regions and countries globally, your customers should be able to select the language they wish and have a smooth booking process without any language barriers.
- Multi-currency Where there are multiple languages, there are multiple currencies too! Setting up your booking engine to receive payments in your local currency should be easy.
- Extras Extras are a great way to up-sell your rooms. These are the items or services that you can sell along with a room for an extra fee. You can actually keep the basic room rate low and earn from extras. Say your lowest rate is priced at $100, you can offer an extra massage worth $40 with the room for a more attractive offer for the guest.
- Hide unavailable rooms Sometimes, your customers can be turned off or navigate away from your hotel website because they see more unavailable rooms than available ones. Well, you don’t always have to show what’s not available – instead, present them with all you have and let guests choose from the list.
- Quick and simple reservation process Your booking engine should offer a short form for your guests to fill out when they are ready to book a room. They should not be redirected to a different site to complete their reservation or process their payment.
- Mobile friendly The number of mobile bookings throughout the industry continues to increase with each passing year so your hotel booking software needs to allow you to accept mobile bookings.
8 reasons you need an online hotel booking system
There’s a lot of arguments for adopting an online booking system for your hotel and not many against. Let’s cement the advantages and identify the issues you have at the property that can be solved by this technology.
You need an online hotel booking system:
1. So you and your property are instantly bookable through your hotel website Research shows that most guests will look at both OTAs and the property website to inform their decision. By presenting an easy way for them to book right on your page, you increase the chances that when they’re ready to reserve, they’ll do it directly with you.
2. So you’re not entirely dependent on OTAs OTAs are a great way of getting your name out there. Your property shows up on search results for your destination, and guests find your presence there trustworthy, but it can limit your revenue to have all of your bookings coming through a third party. Why not take charge of your earnings by getting some of your bookings from your own channel?
3. To pay far less commission Bookings through your property website cost you much less commission than bookings through an OTA. This means that any direct bookings will have a big impact on your bottom line.
4. To increase your bookings There are many reasons guests are more likely to book your property when you have an embedded booking engine. For one, your booking engine is open 24/7 while your front desk may not be, so customers can book regardless of personal factors like time zones. Secondly, once travelers land on your site, the engine makes it easy for them to just click and reserve – rather than going back to the OTA to book and getting distracted by other options.
5. So you can easily accept credit cards and process payments A major plus of an online booking system is that guests can pay directly by credit card and the system will automatically process the reservation details – saving you time and hassle. This includes extra payments like deposits or charges for additional services such as breakfast and cleaning fees.
6. To control the guest experience through the entire customer journey From the moment a potential customer lands on your property website, they only interact with the content you have chosen. That means you can use your own branding throughout the process, and play a key role in making their user experience a positive one.
7. To allow guests to pay in their own language and currency An online booking engine can enable your customers to book in the language they feel most comfortable in, and pay in the currency that makes the most sense for them. This gives them the comfort and ease-of-use most customers hope for, and sets their expectations even before they arrive at your property.
8. So you have flexibility on the type of promotions you offer Your booking engine can easily set up last-minute deals and extended stay discounts with the click of a button. These kinds of offers increase loyalty and the likelihood that your guests will have a positive experience and leave a good review.
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