The hotel booking engine is the single most powerful and important element of a hotel Website. It is the component which exists to make you money by converting shoppers into guests and hopefully loyal, long-term customers. Before making  the important decision of which booking engine should be on your site, it is essential to do your research and choose a booking engine that is going to help you grow your business.

There are times in life when taking advantage of free offers works well both for the consumer as well as the company marketing the free product. However, in my experience the old adage, “you get what you pay for,” still almost always proves true. Booking engines are no exception.

When hoteliers tell me they have been offered a free booking engine from, say, their PMS provider, I offer strong caution to the thought of them putting the most important element of their Website in the hands of a free offer.

The hotel booking engine is the single most powerful and important element of a hotel Website. It is the component which exists to make you money by converting shoppers into guests and hopefully loyal, long-term customers. Before making  the important decision of which booking engine should be on your site, it is essential to do your research and choose a booking engine that is going to help you grow your business.

When considering a free booking engine is whether you would feel comfortable running your Web site on a computer hosted in your hotel?.

In my opinion, a hotel / chain should treat its booking engine just like its Website in terms of security, scalability, and accessibility – if not even more carefully – since credit card and personal data are now in the equation. The PMS is not always located in a hosted facility with robust security. Also, when the PMS is down, such as during nightly audits, would you be comfortable with your booking engine being down too?

When it comes to distribution, would you prefer to deal with multiple companies, multiple training and implementation departments, and multiple views of your data – or – with one company who understands your overall business based on key metrics that you define?

The “One-Stop Shop” bottom line: Having your distribution managed in one place through one company makes sense on many levels, the least of which is to give you a big picture view of your business to make better strategic and tactical decisions, save time, improve your revenue management capabilities through a single image inventory, and help you to maintain your sanity.

If you are considering adding a free booking engine from your PMS or other provider, here are just a few of the other points to consider:

  • Channel Management capabilities: PMSs often cannot handle the necessary channel management that hotels / chains need, and offer only a limited number of rates to the Web booking engine – or – offer them with specific names and descriptions. Look for a provider who can offer you complete channel management, including dynamic packaging and connectivity to multiple distribution channels, as well as content syndication.

 

  • Scalability: Don’t underestimate the importance of a scalable system. PMSs are often limited by an inability to handle high volumes of booking requests that are generated by a consumer-based Web booking engine. For example, automated shopping requests could hit the system for a given arrival day for a one-night stay, followed by a two-night stay, and so forth. Some systems do this for 30 arrival dates at a time. The system resources that handle these requests are often shared with other critical functions in a PMS environment, potentially impacting performance of business-critical operations.

 

  • Merchandising capabilities: As the most important piece of your website, you need a booking engine that is going to market your property and its best features and do it well. PMS systems generally do not feature advanced, and sometimes even basic, merchandising features such as promotional (slash-through) pricing, dynamic packaging and other capacities to help close the deal and generate more revenue for your hotel.

In short: the best booking engines are made by booking engine providers who have carefully crafted this all-important tool to help you stand out among your competitors.  We had hoteliers’ needs in mind when creating Guest Connect, but then took it a few steps further and extensively tested the system for usability, flexibility, and controls to make sure it could be considered the absolute best in its class.  A booking engine that is not specifically designed to make you money? I’m afraid it’s going to cost you!