Drive More Direct Bookings With Best Hotel Booking Engine

Yes, Smart Booking, the booking engine by BOTSHOT is customizable to match your hotel’s branding.

Yes, Smart Booking could be integrated seamlessly with other online distribution channels and travel agencies.

A booking engine is important for your hotel because of the following reasons: 

It enhances guest experience

With a booking engine for direct reservations, a guest does not have to visit a lot of sites. Exploration and reservations can both be done on the same hotel website that is more trusted, simplifying the booking process for the guests.  

The likelihood of sale increases when the process is seamless, with easy checkout and not a lot of steps to follow.  

Facilitates commission-free, direct bookings

Guests, before making any bookings, research and compare prices. These comparisons are usually between the OTA and the hotel website prices. Hence, if the hotel sells its inventory at relatively lower prices, it gains direct booking. The saved commission compensates for the slightly lowered prices. 

Increased bookings and hotel revenue

Offering an easy booking process on a trusted website site, is professional and attracts more bookings. Guests visit hotel websites to receive the perks of direct bookings offered by some hotels. This increases the direct bookings and allows hotels to save commission allocated towards other indirect sales channels.  

Upsell services:

Hotels can easily create, promote as well as offer add-ons, and special packages through the booking engine.  

Secure and faster payments:

The hotel booking engines are secure gateways for payments through credit and debit cards. Payments are processed quickly, and data is safely stored in one place with around-the-clock accessibility by authorized people.

A hotel booking engine is a reservation processing system that is used by hotels to capture bookings through their website, social media accounts, or other marketing channels. It makes the hotel website a direct sales channel for the hotel property.

These direct bookings are further processed, and the data including the payment and personal details, is shared with the integrated systems such as PMS, channel manager, CRS, etc., through this software.

Through this system, hotels capture commission-free, direct bookings and optimize property sales strategy as well as maximize revenue. A booking engine allows hotels to balance their distribution strategy and save some commission given to online and offline travel agents.

You should always look for the following features/factors in a hotel booking engine: 

Ease of integration with website and other hotel software

The booking engine should be easily integrated with your website and match its theme and color scheme.  

At the same time, it should offer seamless integration with the other key hotel systems such as PMS, channel manager, etc. This is crucial for effective distribution management; to avoid over or double-booking and maximize occupancy.  

If you have multiple properties, the booking engine should be apt for the chain properties.  

The booking engine should be responsive

The booking engine should have a responsive design for ease of usage on any device. 

Payment options

Payment processing is a crucial aspect of a hotel booking engine. The booking engine should thus be capable of handling payments, and allow hotels to add deals, discounts, coupons, etc., based on payment methods.  

Easy, round-the-clock accessibility

The booking engine should have ease of use and accessibility from anywhere, anytime. Hotel staff with a desktop/mobile headset and a stable internet connection should be able to access and oversee direct bookings from anywhere, anytime. 

Multi-currency and language support

If you want to cater to an international audience as well, then your booking engine must include information displayed in different global languages and currencies.  

Security provisions

Data security is one of the priorities of the hotel booking engine thus ensure that the chosen one is secure, preferably with PCI DSS certification. 

Budget-friendly

Last but not least, all the above-written features/functionalities should come in your pre-determined budget.

The key features to look for in a hotel booking engine are:  

• Mobile-first approach 
• Customization options 
• 24*7 availability 
• Speed/Fast loading times and seamless user experience  
• Integrations; compatibility with channel manager, PMS, website, etc. 
• Language and currency options 
• Social media bookings; The booking engine should be able to capture social media bookings.
• Group booking functionality; offer rate codes or unique URLs for large booking groups through the booking engine. 
• Data collection; booking, occupancy, revenue, month-on-month bookings, year-over-year, etc., reports, analytics and stats.
• SSL protection 
• Provisions for services such as upselling, promo codes, special deals

Whenever a guest books a room using the booking engine, the payment gets processed right away and the reservation details are delivered to the connected hotel PMS. Then an automatic booking confirmation email is triggered, and the integrated channel manager updates all the distribution channels in real-time.  

Additionally, the connected revenue management software facilitates smart pricing decisions with the help of real-time market and competitor rate comparison data. It allows hotels to set rules and triggers to adjust rates based on multiple internal and external factors and update the prices across the hotel website and connected sales channels.  

For the booking engine to work effectively, seamless integration with key hotel software is paramount.

This is roughly how a booking engine and Smart Booking handles room availability and pricing updates.