Senin, 16 Februari 2009

Ten Reasons Why You Need an Online Booking Engine

By Bartholomew Barandon

Give your customers the power to reserve their rooms anytime and anywhere with just a few clicks on your own website. But that is just part of the many advantages of having an online booking engine. The following are ten reasons why you need to integrate direct reservations in your website. So read on.

1. Simplify Your Overall Booking System

With a hotel booking engine, reserving a room will be a lot easier for your guests. Unlike the use of traditional registration cards, filling up forms has never been more convenient with guests typing in personal details and spending a fraction of their time online. The best part is, customer information will be kept permanently online, so guests need not fill the same information every time they check in to your hotel.

2. Provide Hotel Information in Real Time

While face-to-face contact is very important between hoteliers and guests, some aspects like inquiries about availability, room rates, and billings are best handled automatically via online hotel booking solutions. Standard hotel reservation software allows hoteliers and potential guests to view information like room inventory and rates in real time. Minimal or no reconciliations are needed for you to know what is going on in your hotel. Even special offers for specific dates can be tracked in actual time, so no guest will come to you with coupons that have expired already. That's one less hassle for busy hoteliers.

3. Increase Your Direct Sales

If only hoteliers can have their way, they would never allow agencies to eat a portion of the revenues. But alas, accommodation providers need agencies to help boost sales. By using online hotel booking solutions, hotel owners can lessen, if not eliminate their reliance on reservation and ticketing agents. You can take control of reservations directly via your website while third parties gain less and less involvement in your business.

4. Render Instant Confirmation to Guests

A hotel booking engine is designed to furnish instant confirmation for reservations. So while you are spared from checking your records every time a guest reserves a room, your guests do not have to worry whether their bookings are firmly assured or not. Since everything is done online, instant confirmations are offered to guests from anywhere in the globe, 24/7.

5. Enjoy Prompt Sales Transactions

Hotel online booking allows you to make prompt sales by cutting through communication exchanges via faxes, emails or, worse, telephone calls between you and your guests. As all important information about your hotel is posted on your website and reservation interface, you provide your potential guests with a one-stop inquiry shop that will do all the talking for you. So what's left for your guest to do is simply click the reserve button.

6. Create Better Opportunities for Your Hotel

Apart from attaining total control of your business, hotel booking solutions allow you to create more opportunities for your property. Here, you can easily change your rates to become more competitive in your market. You can even offer best value packages and hot deals without the need to please travel or ticketing agencies.

7. Effectively Manage Seasonality

Dealing with seasonality is part of managing a hotel. But the changing of particular periods in a year should not translate to zero bookings. Data that can be automatically gathered from your booking engine can allow you to come up with competitive rates based on your locality's seasonal changes. With a few mouse clicks, you can set your sights to the right guests for the current season. You can even come up with special rates exclusively for online bookings and widen your market categories with multi-tiered pricing.

8. Reduce Marketing Costs

Online booking solution providers often bundle their services with hotel Internet marketing. With online-based marketing campaigns, you can significantly reduce your costs. Imagine your hotel website being viewed by millions of Internet users or potential guests without you spending on expensive brochures and mailing. Because of this you can even aim to compete with bigger hotels in your area without necessarily matching their marketing budget.

9. Become More Visible To the World

Some hotel booking engines come with Internet marketing modules that help promote your hotel using up-to-date online marketing techniques. These allow your website to become more visible to potential guests who are searching for the right hotel. With online marketing techniques, you can say that customers will come to you instead of the other way around.

10. Set Your Business Free

With hotel online reservations, you can set your business free from the burdens of having to allot rooms and fix rates for travel agencies. In fact, you do not need to be bound by long-term contracts with agencies anymore, unless of course you really need their services.

Truly, with all the advantages of having online booking solutions, you have a better chance of gaining guest loyalty and improved revenues. Think of direct reservation software as your tool for revving up your bottom line, without the usual headaches.

Bartholomew Barandon is a researcher and online journalist for DirectWithHotels, a company which specializes in making direct online reservations easy for accommodation providers. For more information, visit http://www.directwithhotels.com

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