Whether you want to book a vacation in Mexico or you’re looking for a secluded cabin or campsite in the mountains, the first place you go, just like everyone else, is the internet. The vast majority of people prefer using an online travel agency, or OTA, to plan and book their trips. This is mainly due to the convenience of being able to quickly find what you are looking for using the search filters on these websites, making it easier to find that perfect spot that meets your needs.
But with so many people using OTAs to book their vacations, why should you even bother with an online booking hotel system for your accommodation business?
Well, despite the fact that OTAs are a very popular method of booking vacations, direct bookings are on the rise. A few reasons why this could be are better online booking engines, the power of word of mouth, and the billboard effect—a phenomenon that states while the first stop for most would-be travelers is an OTA website like Airbnb or Booking.com, more than half of people tend to visit the hotel’s website directly instead of booking through the OTA, whether it be to find more information or to book directly with the hotel instead.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that once a guest stays with you and has a great experience, they’ll be much more likely to book with you directly next time—because why go through an OTA when you already know which hotel you want to book with? Plus, you can better retain these repeat customers through loyalty programs and get them to get their friends on board with referral incentives—perks that OTAs don’t offer.
This all means that you, as an accommodation business owner, can’t afford to not take advantage of the increased traffic that OTAs bring to your website. Think of OTAs more like partners rather than competitors (although in a sense they are both). But in order to take full advantage of increased visitors to your website, you need to provide potential guests with a great booking experience.
In this article, we explore more about the importance of an online booking hotel system, including what it is, key features you should be looking for, and much more.
Online Booking Hotel System: Key Features & What It Is
An online hotel booking system is a piece of software that enables you to effectively manage incoming bookings for your hotel, regardless of where they come from. This is extremely useful for hoteliers to be able to ensure that their bookings are properly organized and managed.
What Is Hotel Reservation Management?
Most hoteliers utilize OTAs to increase their reach, meaning they list their property (or properties) on multiple websites. Combined with other booking methods, like direct booking through the hotelier’s own website, plus bookings that are done over the phone or in person, managing every booking accurately can quickly become difficult. With manual management and so many possible different platforms that a potential guest can book on, the possibility of double bookings and incorrect pricing can quickly become an issue.
The key is to be able to manage all of these incoming bookings in a centralized location and use automation to ensure that the correct availability and pricing are always listed online and in internal systems, no matter where and how a guest decides to book with you.
With a centralized reservation system, all bookings from every source that you’re listed with online, plus bookings that are done on your website or internally all go to one place for ease of management, even if you have multiple properties. This is an essential feature that you should look for in any online booking hotel system that you’re looking at purchasing.
How Does an Online Booking Hotel System Work?
Centralized reservation management aside, an online accommodation booking system allows you to take direct reservations from guests on your website. But the software takes it beyond the guest simply selecting a date and time, it allows them to have more control over their stay by enabling them to select things like site size (if you have an RV park or Campground), available rooms or sites from an interactive map, and even add amenities and services during the booking process.
Using Newbook as an example, other features that an online accommodation booking system typically has includes:
- Suggestions for similar accommodations and/or dates when the initial selection is unavailable. By automatically suggesting similar dates and accommodation types, you can more easily secure bookings for guests who would otherwise look elsewhere if what you have wasn’t available at the time they made their initial selection. This is especially useful when you have multiple properties that are close together, as the software can recommend available sites or rooms at one of your other properties as well.
- The ability for guests to manage their bookings after the fact via a guest portal. Whether a guest decides that they want to lengthen or shorten their stay (you can also indicate minimum or maximum nights) or add additional amenities and services, they can do so through the guest portal. This is not only convenient for the guest, but reduces workload for frontline staff as well.
- Upselling is incorporated during the booking process. Guests want to be able to tailor their vacation experience easily. By giving them the ability to add things like wine to the room, a kayak rental, breakfast in bed, or whatever else your business offers, it streamlines their vacation booking experience and gives them more options to make it a truly special time.
- Payment plans for long-term stays. If you allow guests to stay for weeks or months, a hotel room booking system like Newbook offers your guests the ability to pay in installments. Plus, automated notifications ensure that your guests are reminded when their next payment is due.
- Discounts, offers, and promotions. With online booking hotel software, you can encourage more direct bookings by incorporating unique offers during the booking process for your guests. Incorporating loyalty and referral programs is also possible.
The Importance of an Accommodation Reservation System
Using a hotel reservation online system is important for a variety of reasons, including enhancing your hotel’s operations and improving the overall guest experience. An online hotel booking management system can also save you money by reducing workload, reducing or eliminating human error, and increasing your revenue by allowing you to capture more bookings.
Other key advantages that highlight the importance of an accommodation reservation system are listed below:
1. Real-Time Availability Updates
One of the most important aspects of having an online booking hotel system is its compatibility with real-time updates. For example, with a platform like Newbook, your online booking system, property management system (PMS), and channel manager are incorporated into one piece of software. This means that if a guest books through an OTA, the room and dates that they just reserved are automatically updated on the rest of the OTAs that you list with, as well as your internal systems. This ensures that you won’t have to contend with double bookings.
2. Real-Time Pricing Updates
Similar to the real-time availability updates, another important part of an online booking system is real-time pricing updates. Many hotels and other accommodation businesses use dynamic pricing as an effective strategy to set the best prices for rooms and sites using current and historical market rates and internal data.
With a dynamic pricing strategy, you can set minimum and maximum prices, but these prices still may change on a daily basis depending on fluctuations in the market and other factors, such as seasonality. With this in mind, it’s important that your current pricing is accurately reflected on all your listings and internal systems. An online booking hotel system like Newbook supports the pricing automation needed with a dynamic pricing strategy, ensuring that your guests are only seeing your correct current prices.
3. Secure Bookings Around the Clock
An online hotel booking management system enables guests to book rooms or sites at any time, even when your offices are closed. Giving your guests the convenience of being able to book at any time helps you secure more bookings, especially for guests who live in a timezone different from your hotel’s location.
4. Online Payment Processing
Most accommodation reservation system offerings are also compatible with online payment options, meaning that guests can pay as soon as they finish making their booking. This streamlines the booking process, eliminating the need for guests to have to pay when they arrive. It also eliminates the potential for errors with manual payment processing. When paired with an online check-in process, you’re offering your guests the ultimate in convenience.
Common Online Hotel Booking Management System Problems and Solutions
When you’re shopping around for a good online booking hotel system, it’s important to realize that not all providers will offer the same type of experience and that technical issues can of course arise you will need to be prepared to solve. By keeping in mind the following common problems, you can be better equipped to implement the solutions and preventative measures.
1. Lack of Integration Causing Double Bookings
It’s extremely important that your hotel reservation program is integrated with your channel manager and your PMS to ensure that the availability schedule for all your properties is seamlessly updated everywhere. With Newbook, the channel manager, PMS, and centralized reservation system are part of the software, so you don’t have to worry about these different areas of your software not talking to each other at all times.
2. Lack of Needed Features
There are a lot of online booking systems out there, and some don’t fit the bill when it comes to effective hotel booking management. The most important features that you need to ensure that the online booking hotel system that you choose includes are:
- Real-time updates for availability and pricing across all your listings
- Automation triggers that allow notifications and task scheduling to occur automatically with each booking as needed
- Easy site or room selection (via an interactive map or other intuitive interface) and the ability to offer additional options when the guest’s requested date and time isn’t available
Think about what problems or efficiency increases you’re expecting the hotel room booking software to solve, and ensure that the solution you’re choosing offers the ability to do that. Make a list of features that are essential, such as the ones listed above, and ones that are nice to have. When you’re comparing solutions, it will be much easier to narrow down your selections to ones that fit the bill if you know what you are looking for.
3. Lack of Integration Support
When you can’t integrate your online hotel booking system with the other software in your tech stack, the result is siloed information. The biggest issue with siloed information is that it isn’t easily accessible by those who need it, and it can quickly become incorrect and out of date. For example, if your booking system doesn’t integrate with your project management software, then scheduled tasks related to current bookings may not reflect properly, resulting in rooms not being ready for guests when they check in or cleanings scheduled before a guest has fully checked out.
The Relationship Between Online Hotel Reservation Systems and Property Management Systems
Your PMS is the core of your hotel’s digital operations. Think of it like the foundation of a building upon which everything else sits on top. Because your PMS is so important, it’s essential that every piece of software that you implement plays nicely with it. This includes your online hotel booking system, channel manager, revenue management system, and more. When all of these systems work seamlessly together, you increase the efficiency of your operations.
Arguably your online hotel booking system is the second most important piece of software that works alongside your PMS. With most hotels, the booking system is responsible for setting off a series of automation that are responsible for scheduling tasks once a guest successfully completes their booking.
This is why Newbook is built as an all-in-one solution for effective hotel management because all the moving parts that come after a guest books are efficiently and effectively handled by the system. When everything to do with booking is built into the PMS as part of the experience, you’re always going to get better results versus going with a third-party integration.
How to Generate More Bookings With a Hotel Reservation Online System
Generating more bookings with a hotel reservation online system involves strategic implementation and optimization. Here are key steps to enhance your hotel’s online reservation system and boost bookings:
1. Work to Streamline Your Booking Process
There is an important balance that you need to strike between having a comprehensive booking process where a guest is free to choose from many different options and keeping your booking process simple. When a guest is booking through your website, the process should be straightforward and easy to go through, otherwise the chances of the guest getting frustrated and either opting to book through an OTA or with a competitor instead. Carefully consider all the options you want to include in your online booking process and revisit them over time to make improvements. Asking your guests to complete a survey after successfully completing a booking is a great way to gain ideas for improvements.
2. Implement Dynamic Pricing
The hospitality industry is extremely competitive, meaning that accommodation providers have to constantly find ways to set themselves apart from their competitors. Dynamic pricing is a strategy where hotels adjust their prices based on current market conditions, taking into consideration factors such as occupancy levels, competitor pricing, booking time, seasonality, and more. The goal is to optimize room rates in real-time, so you’re always offering the most competitive price.
3. Personalize the Booking Experience for Repeat Guests
Making a guest feel special is a great way to earn their repeat business. Personalization can be as simple as incorporating the guest’s name and information into the booking process once they create an account to streamline the process even further and use their past booking history to offer specific promotions and discounts that match their usual preferences.
Newbook’s Hotel Reservation System Online
Newbook provides key booking features through its online booking engine that help you translate your booking process into an easy-to-use step-by-step system. With Newbook, your guests will likely prefer to book online with you than any other way!
Key Integrations With an Online Accommodation Booking System
To boost the functionality and effectiveness of your accommodation booking system, it’s important to take advantage of integrations. Newbook offers key integrations support for a variety of complementary functions as outlined in the table below:
| Integration Type | Integration Name and Description |
|---|---|
| OTA Connections | – Bookoutdoors – Google Hotel Ads – Hipcamp – Vrbo – The Dyrt – Spot2Nite |
| Marketing Automation | – Act-on—Helps you control outbound and inbound marketing tactics, lead generation, reporting, and more – Mailchimp—Allows you to send scheduled automated emails – Shiji ReviewPro—Provides insights that can be used to improve every aspect of your business, from operations to customer service |
| Business Intelligence | – Calumo—Provides intelligent dashboards, reporting functionalities, and forecasting tools tailored to your business – Qlik—Uses in-memory processing and on-demand aggregations to provide your with insights using your data, enabling better comprehensive analysis. – Tiger TMS—Specialized in middleware for smart devices, giving you valuable intelligence from usage patterns that can be used to make more educated business decisions |
| Online Payments | – Newbook Payments—An all-in-one payment system that handles all your guest’s payment needs, including EFTPOS terminals, gateways, BPAY, and more – BPAY—Enables fast payments so that the money gets into your account quickly, usually by the next day – BridgePay—A US only solution that allows you to debit your guest’s bank account directly – Commweb—Offers a reliable and secure payment experience – DOKU—A payment solution for Indonesia only – Epay—a global payment solution that can handle multiple currencies – Merchant Warrior—Combines an intuitive interface with a wide range of payment-related features |
Why Choose Newbook as Your Online Hotel Room Booking System
Utilizing an online booking system offers a substantial advantage by enhancing your business’s visibility and expanding your reach to a broader audience. Enabling reservations through your website, coupled with leveraging Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), is a pivotal strategy for boosting bookings and driving revenue.
Newbook’s online room booking system not only provides this crucial functionality but seamlessly integrates it into a comprehensive PMS and Revenue Management System. This integration allows you to harness valuable insights from your booking data, empowering you to make informed business decisions. Imagine leveraging a deep understanding of your customer base to enhance marketing promotions. By analyzing data on preferred room types and popular add-ons during the booking process, you can tailor your marketing strategies for maximum impact.
Furthermore, Newbook’s software offers exceptional reliability and speed, setting it apart from competitors. While some room booking software providers boast a 99% uptime guarantee, Newbook raises the bar with an impressive 99.99% uptime rate. To put this into perspective, compare the potential outage times in the table below:
| Reliability Rating | Potential Outage Time |
|---|---|
| 99% | 3 days, 15 hours, and 39 minutes annually |
| 99.99% | 52 minutes and 35 seconds annually |
The marginal difference of 0.99% significantly impacts reliability. Opting for Newbook ensures minimal downtime, with less than an hour of potential disruption annually, making it a superior choice for businesses seeking dependable and efficient room booking solutions.
Conclusion
Embracing an online booking hotel system is crucial for accommodation businesses aiming to thrive in today’s competitive hospitality landscape.
While online travel agencies (OTAs) remain popular, the rise of direct bookings cannot be overlooked, driven by factors such as superior online booking engines, the influence of word-of-mouth, and the billboard effect.
Direct bookings lead to increased revenue and foster customer loyalty through:
- Personalized experiences
- Loyalty programs
- Referral incentives
These features are often unavailable through OTAs. To capitalize on the surge in online traffic, accommodation businesses must provide an exceptional booking experience.
An online hotel booking system, like the one offered by Newbook, proves instrumental in managing bookings efficiently. Beyond centralizing reservation management, such systems empower businesses to offer real-time availability and pricing updates, secure bookings around the clock, and streamline online payment processing. These features enhance operational efficiency, reduce errors, and contribute to revenue growth.
To learn more about how Newbook can boost your accommodation business’s revenue, reach out to us today.
