Booking Engines
A good booking engine is the key to maximising your online bookings. No matter how comprehensive your website, no matter how competitive your rates, if visitors to your site find it difficult to make a booking, you will lose business. However, if your website offers user-friendly, fast and efficient booking technology, this will result in higher conversion rates and greater revenues.
At Wigmas, we have in-depth knowledge of the various booking engines available and can help you find the system that will work best for you. Certainly, you should consider the following points.
Ten essentials of a good booking engine:
1. Must support customer’s own language and currency – Make it as easy as possible for your customer to book. That means enabling him to make a booking in his own language. A good booking engine will detect the country of the internet user and open the booking page directly in his language.
2. Completely supports your brand and visual identity – The booking engine should provide a customised interface with your website’s visual identity. The customer should not be confused by seeing the booking engine company’s name at any point in the transaction.
3. Real time booking and immediate email confirmation – Your customer must be able to access your availability and rates in real time and complete their booking in just a few clicks. The booking engine must be FAST with immediate and automatic email confirmation.
4. Specific booking interfaces – Your booking engine should allow you to sell your additional services such as restaurant, seminar rooms, spa or shows, as well as your rooms.
5. Rich content and multiple photo facility – It is essential that your offer can be enhanced with extensive description and photos to provide your customer with all the information they need to complete their booking.
6. Integrated IATA database – A booking engine that incorporates an up to date IATA database means that travel agents can access their own information and book their specially negotiated rates directly on your site.
7. Supports client-negotiated corporate rates – Your corporate clients should be able to enter their unique code so that they can book their specially negotiated rates directly on your site.
8. Interfaces with your Property Management System (PMS) - The bookings you receive through your booking engine must be directly and automatically transferred into your PMS, avoiding any need for manual entry.
9. Reservation tracking and management reports – These are essential to help you identify new revenue opportunities. By tracking the origin of your bookings you will be able to evaluate the efficiency of your website and various marketing campaigns, calculate your conversion rate and measure your return on investment: natural traffic, pay per click campaigns, distribution partnerships etc.
Which brings us to our final, and possibly most important, point…
10. E-Consulting - A good booking engine company will not just sell you the technology. They will also help you to analyse your specific hotel offerings and packages, and work with you to continually optimise your website for maximum conversion.
Please contact us for more information.
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