In recent years, most of the hotel and other lodging businesses are planning to acquire new reservations with minimum cost. With the help of hotel booking engines and marketing strategies, a great number of properties built a direct reservation channel successfully.
In this article, we have explained the important features, how it works and how to implement them with other property management technologies to help you out.
A booking engine, which is known as IBE or Internet Booking Engine, refers to an application or software with primary function including, collection of reservation and credit card information. You can integrate the data information of booking with other hotel management software such as a PMS, CRS, channel manager, and payment gateway.
Using booking engines, hotels can acquire new reservations easier without third-party distributors such as travel agents, OTAs, GDS, and other online marketplaces, etc. By implementing a payment gateway, you can help guests to make bookings at any time and from anywhere using credit cards online.
The booking engine helps hotels to sell rooms directly to guests and reduces the commission from distribution channels. Which ultimately increases the profits of the hotel and eliminates the cost of guest acquisition.
By offering some extra services on your website, you deliver great experiences to your guests. Make use of these extra services to boost your property and gain guest attention.
Most of the travelers encourage booking from the accommodation provider directly. To have a seamless booking option and engage with property owners in real-time.
You can help guests by offering personalized services on your website. This helps hotels to manage major concerns of their guests such as health and safety concerns accordingly.
Allow your guest to compare pricing across various travel agencies and hotels with travel metasearch engines. For example, you can make use of giant travel-related meta searches including, Google, Trivago, TripAdvisor, and Kayak.
The direct reservation denotes that your property owns the complete reservation data and guest relationship. The terms and conditions such as cancellations, payments, and few other property roles help to manage your bookings.
To build an effective guest loyalty strategy, you must have a hotel booking engine. The most efficient and profitable way to process your reservation is possible with guest loyalty programs.
There is the significant importance of establishing a unique brand to grow your travel businesses. Build trust and loyalty in your B2B marketplace, to showcase your property’s value proposition, especially in hospitality businesses.
Your booking engine helps to have direct access with your guest online, with 24 hours a day and 7 days a week support.
Every visitor expects seamless booking options on the website. The online sites must provide a simple and quick reservation process to ensure convenience for guests.
Your booking engine has to be reliable, during the availability of the room, types of rate, and pricing. Using booking engines, you can manage overbookings, pricing errors and transfer data from one software to another easily.
Nowadays, most travelers prefer using online payments and instant bookings with credit or debit cards. This is helpful for hotels to manage booking charges hassle-free.
As smartphones play a dominant role in online businesses, look for a booking engine that offers fast-loading and full-optimization for mobile devices. Don’t lack an unresponsive website and miss out on any of your sales.
Your website is the better option to provide special offers to your guests. You can help your guests by providing promo codes, special offers, and support extra services like local tours, fun activities, and many more.
By enabling multi-currency and multi-language, you are more likely to attract international guests. Set your online bookings accessible for making reservations based on guest preferences.
Pick your booking engine with customizable features or custom CSS to support your hotel website. Showcase your hotel rooms, amenities, and locations with extraordinary design and rich imagery to attract more guests.
The terms booking engine and hotel reservation system are often used interchangeably. However, they provide the same solutions, the only difference is that a booking engine is an app or software used by guests for booking online reservations. Most of the hotels will integrate this booking engine with an integrated PMS to manage guest details and reservations efficiently.
Whereas the hotel reservation system is software with more features that helps hotels to manage the entire reservation process. From canceling or modifying booking options, add pricing, notes, and much more.
Channel Management is an automatic process of managing room inventory on various online distribution sites with the use of channel manager software. While integrating a booking engine, make sure to look for channel manager integration in real-time. This guarantees that your hotel information such as pricing and availability will be up to date and accurate everywhere.
By choosing a booking engine with property management system integration, you can avoid data transfer from one platform to another manually. You can save operational timings by automating updates such as new bookings, credit card details, availability, pricing, etc.
So there you have it! If you are looking for effective ways to improve your hotel bookings and upscale your business. Ensure to get a top-notch booking engine to maximize your website traffic and overall customer base.
