An on-line booking engine or web booking engine provides potential lodging guests with the means to check room prices and book reservations from a web site, usually the hotel's web site.
Statistics vary from publication to publication, however the year after year trend is an increase in the number of reservations being booked using an on-line booking engine. If you are a hotel owner or manager you will find that to be very good news as your guests spend more time making reservations while your staff spend less. These savings in staff time and costs in the reservations area may then be better used towards spending more time looking after your guests during their visit.
During the comparison of on-line booking engines you will find some vast differences. The evaluation process is the time to find what each has to offer and which will work best for your business needs. Some look great while others not so pretty, some very functional while others are a little clunky. The goal when evaluating on-line booking engines of course is to get the best of both worlds.
Some property management system vendors provide booking engines as an extension of the property management system so that any reservations booked from the web site are completed in real time, meaning there is no delay in the reservation being available in the property management system. The room inventory availability is supplied by the property management system so no manual inventory updating is necessary.
There are other options for booking engines that need mentioning. It is possible that the property management system vendor does not have an on-line booking engine available so in this case a third party booking engine would be used. If this is the case it is likely that the inventory needs to be manually updated or an allotment to be set. The reservations in this case are typically not real time; there may be a delay in transfer to the property management system so it would be considered seamless but not real-time. If there is no interface available between the property management system and the booking engine this means that manual intervention will be required and reservations booked using the on-line booking engine will need to be manually entered into the property management system.
Another option would be if your business has a Global Distribution System provider they may offer an on-line booking engine as part of their service. In this case it is likely the reservations are not available in the property management system in real-time however they may be available with a slight delay in which case they would be seamless. In other cases the property management system vendor may not have an interface available between the property management system and the global distribution system provider in which case they would need to be manually entered into the property management system.
Further considerations when selecting an on-line booking engine would be to determine if it possible to change the look, font and colours to meet your business branding requirements and match the look of your web site? Is it possible to display your logo within the on-line booking engine? What features are available to showcase your rooms and amenties? How many room and property pictures are you able to include? Are there any tools available to measure the conversion rate? In other words how many visitors are checking rates and how many are actually booking a reservation? What type of reporting is available? Are you able to get reporting on items such as as production, consumption, room type, market segment or source of business?
It is important to also evaluate the costs associated with purchasing an integrated real-time on-line booking engine or one that may be seamless with a slight delay or even one with manual intervention needed and weighing those costs with the labour dollars spent. This is definitely an important part of the property management system and booking engine evaluation.
Good luck with your evaluation process!
property management system evaluation
Recent Comments