Hotel Booking Engines
September 2nd, 2008 Posted in Hotel Marketing, booking engine
Choosing the right hotel booking engine is becoming really important as it has a strong impact in the online strategy of the hotel.
Several companies are offering the technology to be able to book a room online but i don’t think that it is available any technological solution that satisfy the hotel and the user.
All the solutions on the market have usuability problems making difficult the life of the user that is willing to book the room online. I was surprised to find out that many technological solutions have limitations and do not allow to enter third party tracking code. This is an important limitation as the hotel often need third party tracking code to be able to run their webanalytics or their affiliate marketing programme.
In addition it is really important to implement the third party booking engine correctly in your hotel website. It is crucial that the booking engine is available in all the pages of the hotel website and the booking mask should be placed on the top left corner as it is the most visible part.
Choosing the right booking engine it is difficult as you need to find the right technology but the right pricing as well.
The most important criteria that an hotelier should take in consideration when selecting an hotel booking engines are:
- an easy to use system for the user that doesn’t need more than 3 steps to book and doesn’t ask you information that you have already provided; sistema facile da usare per l’utente finale che non richieda piu’ di tre step per la prenotazione e non richieda all’utente informazioni che ha gia’ fornito
-Integration with an nline payment system
- back end allowing a complex management of the hotel pricing allowing to implement yield management techniques;
- back end allowing to manage pricing and availability in all the main OTA’s (expedia, booking, venere) using the api or xml technology;
- customizable system to be able to display the look and feel of the hotel main website;
- flexible technology allowing to insert third party tracking code;
