Every hotel has different accommodation options, facilities, amenities, services, and extras that play a role in the booking process. Therefore, a booking engine is essential to drive direct bookings and improve the overall customer experience on a hotel's website.
The right booking engine must integrate into an existing hotel website while also connecting with the hotel's PMS or Channel Manager that share's the hotel's room inventory on unlimited distribution channels, like OTAs and third-party hotel search engines.
A booking engine offers critical advantages for hoteliers, sales managers, and front desk staff by:
- reducing time-consuming email exchanges between the hotel and guests;
- reducing time spent on dealing with phone inquiries;
- providing control over room availability, rates, and availability;
- generating direct bookings revenue at a lower cost compared to room distribution to OTAs and third-party channels;
- enabling hoteliers to add incentives to incentivize direct bookings (room upgrades, discounts, complimentary extras, etc.);
- enhancing the booking experience for potential guests;
- maintaining real-time inventory, rate parity, and handling overbookings from the same platform, eliminating manual tasks;
How to Choose the Right Booking Engine for Your Hotel?
The right booking engine has all the capabilities hoteliers need to drive direct revenue, manage inventory, rate parity, etc. Still, the customer experience is essential, and a good booking engine must ensure an optimal booking experience: an intuitive interface that makes the booking process easy, quick, and efficient.
The following criteria should give you a rounded overview of what to look for when choosing a booking engine for your hotel:
- Seamless user experience: make it easy for guests to search for room availability based on arrival and departure dates, pricing, room types, number of guests, etc.
- Secure payments: customers will only trust a booking engine that offers secure payment solutions. The right booking engine should have PCI DSS certification based on the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard established by the major payment card brands: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB and managed by PCI SSC.
- Payment processing: A good booking engine should handle payments 24/7 in different currencies, allowing you to receive instant online payments securely and regulating your cash flows.
- Website integration: guests will trust a booking engine that integrates directly into your website. Customize your booking engine with your logo, brand message, design theme, and brand colors to establish trust and offer a cohesive user experience.
- Channel Manager and PMS integration: Ensure your booking engine integrates with your Channel Manager and PMS to access your hotel's live room inventory and avoid overbookings.
- Add-ons: A good booking engine will allow you to add incentives to stimulate direct bookings—for example, room upgrades, welcome gifts, spa packages, time-limited deals, exclusive offers, last-minute deals, etc. These add-ons will enable you to upsell certain services and amenities while boosting your booking engine's revenue potential.
- Value for money: You must choose the right booking engine for your hotel to avoid overpaying for a service that does not deliver the tools and value for your investment. Choose a budget-friendly hotel booking engine with all the tools you need to streamline your bookings: mobile responsiveness, payment solutions, integration with PMS or Channel Manager, etc.
Smart and advanced booking engine for your hotel
Choosing the right booking engine depends on your hotel's size, characteristics, needs, and budget. WebHotelier is a good example of a booking engine that you can consider integrating with your hotel website, PMS, and Channel Manager.
WebHotelier: offers a conversion-optimized booking engine with all the features hoteliers need to drive direct bookings, boost revenue, and ensure a seamless booking experience for guests. The platform's features include the following:
- highly performant, conversion-optimized booking engine;
- customization tools that help hoteliers deliver clear information, easy to find, and the design elements that harmonize the booking engine with the hotel website's theme and color scheme;
- reliable security through PCI certification, encrypted communication, firewalls, etc.;
- powerful back-office with increased functionality—for example, dynamic pricing—that will unlock the hotel website's full revenue potential;
- easy setup, integration, and optimization for fast and straightforward management of any property;
- rich statistics and reports deliver all the information and intelligence hoteliers need for actionable insights and decisions that count;
- responsive user interface, optimized for all smartphones and touch-based devices;
- PMS connectivity for room availability and reservations management;
- a Facebook app to drive users to the hotel's sales channel straight from the hotel's Facebook Page.
Over 9150 hoteliers—from large hotel chains to urban boutique hotels—use the WebHotelier booking engine for online bookings directly through their sites.
In conclusion, when you choose the booking engine for your hotel's website, consider all the factors that will help you increase efficiency and improve the customer experience, then decide based on the platform's functionality, website integration, payment gateway integration, add-ons, reliability, pricing, and customer support.