Many hotels depend on online travel agencies for their bookings and that may not always be in the hotel’s best interest business-wise. Many online travel agencies charge as much as 30% commission for every reservation that comes through them. It can add up to be a significant amount and detracts from the hotel’s profits. That is why independent and branded hotels must consider implementing a hotel booking engine.

What is a hotel booking engine?

A hotel booking engine is an online application that integrates with a hotel website and also with its social media platforms or other third party websites listing the hotel and enables the convenient and secure processing of online reservations. It allows guests to view available rooms, amenities, and other hospitality products, and make their room reservations quickly and easily. Booking engines for hotels can enable them to establish direct channel funnels and drive a higher percentage of direct and commission-free bookings through the hotel website. They also store guest data and make it accessible to the hotel management.

Tips for implementing a hotel booking engine

The following tips may be helpful for implementing booking engines for hotels:

• Customize the booking engine to suit the hotel’s brand and create an easy-to-navigate website layout and design. Use a grid layout on the rooms page for easier viewing and follow a mobile-first design strategy to make the website work seamlessly on different mobile devices.

• Optimize the hotel website with the right keywords and phrases for search engines to attract visitors and capture direct bookings.

• Ensure faster load times to offer visitors a better user experience and increase conversion rates.

• Sync the booking engine with the hotel’s property management system and channel manager.

• Automate bookings so that available rooms inventory is updated immediately after every booking or check-out.

• Make it easy for guests to check room availability and compare room types and room rates.

• Allow group booking functionality to allow holiday tour operators to easily book rooms in bulk.

• Enable multiple language options so that visitors can read the website information in their preferred language.

• Include multiple payment options and in different currencies to make it more convenient for visitors to make online payments.

• Link the hotel’s social media sites to the booking engine to increase its online visibility and boost social media booking and marketing.

• Use purchase widgets to trigger intent and increase conversions. These purchase intent widgets include price comparisons, special offers, social proof, and various pop-ups.

• Provide various upsell add-on services such as promo codes, gift vouchers, hospitality packages, and local tours to earn more revenue from hotel guests.

• Allow for automated and customized collection, analysis, and reports of hotel reservation data and baseline metrics.

How to implement a hotel booking engine?

It is essential to implement a hotel booking engine by integrating it with the hotel’s channel manager, payment processor, and property management system and ensuring that it shares information with them.

Channel Manager integration with booking engine

With the channel manager integration, the hotel management gets the advantage of a one-stop revenue management platform. It allows them to send, receive, and review room rates and availability. They can update their inventory, manage room rates, and accept high-volume group bookings.

Payment processor integration with booking engine

Integrating the booking engines for hotels with the payment systems makes it easier for the hotels to work with payment providers and establish rules for accepting payments. For instance, they might decide to receive an advance payment before the guest arrives and the remainder before the guest checks out. They can automate the collection and storage of information of credit cards or other payment modes and automate charging these for guest payments.

Property management system integration with booking engine

By integrating with the hotel booking engine, the hotel’s property management system is able to receive data from the hotel website about guests and their reservations. The property management system will automatically and accurately make the necessary adjustments in the room inventory. Automating this process can reduce or eliminate the double-booking or overbooking errors which can occur with manual booking. The automation also reduces the workload on the hotel’s management team, and they can direct their focus towards other essential tasks.