Tailored for your business: does your website need a bespoke booking engine?

Getting the right booking engine for your hotel website isn’t necessarily an easy thing to achieve. The advantage of such a room reservation system means, of course, that a hotelier doesn’t have to rely on online travel agents (OTAs) and their third-party sites to process their bookings. In short, it eliminates the middle man. And yet, finding a booking engine that suits their specific business model, the nature of their website and all the ins and outs of their booking arrangements, is easier said than done for any hotel business.

Sure, there’s no lack of companies offering booking engine solutions for hotel websites, but how many of them properly fit these sites? How many of them look and feel like they belong to the site? And truly function as the site does? Few booking engines genuinely operate seamlessly with their host websites, which isn’t just irritating; it also means they’re not processing as many reservations as they might. So, they’re not generating as many all-important conversions and as much bottom-line revenue for the hotelier.

The solution then is to find a booking engine that looks and feels like a bespoke fit for a site – a booking engine that undoubtedly feels like the rest of the website. A reservation system like Digital Hotelier Booking Direct is a good example of such a bespoke offering. And that’s because it can achieve comprehensive content syndication.

As hotel reservation system software, such a booking engine delivers because it operates seamlessly with client websites – and, crucially, does so in real-time. Its big draw is that it ensures the user experience isn’t taken out of the site – it’s redirection-free. And, ideally, this customisation starts at the URL structure to flow throughout the booking engine, incorporating theme customisation right through to the incorporation of brand language.

A booking engine has to be designed specifically to inspire trust; without the user’s full trust there’s a high probability a purchase will end up abandoned before completion and in that scenario a hotelier would not only lose the customer to a third-party OTA’s booking engine, they’d likely lose a booking at their hotel altogether. A reservation system like Booking Direct avoids this eventuality as much as possible by providing a platform that’s essentially bespoke – because to the user, it’s simply part of the hotel’s (or the hotel group’s) website.

With a bespoke booking engine, the hotelier too can be assured it’s recognisably their booking engine thanks to how well integrated it will be with the rest of their business. For instance, not only does Booking Direct enable complete reservation management via the hotelier’s extranet, it also comes complete with a multiple channel manager option, enabling two-way integrations.

This means it’s capable of building a link between itself and a hotel business’s Property Management System/ Central Reservation System (PMS/ CRS) or Revenue Management System (RMS), so that data and information can be instantly exchanged across the two-way connection. And this ensures that the PMS/ CRS/ RMS can update itself automatically, immediately a customer purchases a room. Meanwhile, real-time rates, room availability and restrictions are also communicated automatically and instantly between the PMS/ CRS/ RMS and the booking engine.

Moreover, with a built-in capacity for functionality reporting and the smooth handling of reservation complexities (differing rate planes, special offers and multiple room types with different rate-booking), revenue can be maximised without any danger of overbooking. So, all things considered, a bespoke booking engine such as Booking Direct could well prove the ultimate solution for both hoteliers and their guests.