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9 Questions to ask when choosing a Hotel Booking Engine Provider
Your hospitality website boasts gorgeous imagery and descriptions to entice guests to your property, but does your booking engine functionality match up? A website that’s as practical as it is beautiful needs a booking engine that fits your online sales strategy. This checklist of questions will help guide you through evaluating and choosing a booking engine.
1. What volume of traffic do you expect your online booking engine to handle today—and in three years? Can your entire booking engine package—including software, hardware, and web host—handle that bandwidth need?
2. When you change rates and inventory, or offer packages and specials, how easy is it to update the booking engine? Can special offers be saved and reused?
3. Do you accept foreign currencies and communicate in different languages? How does the booking engine handle international business?
4. What kind of data reporting do you need? Does the booking engine provide that? (Note that it’s easier to collect data than to thoroughly analyze it, so consider which reports are most useful.)
5. Which people in your organization will be responsible for maintaining and updating the booking engine? Does the engine limit the number of users? What security structures/password levels are built in to control access?
6. What kinds of support services are available? How is support delivered: by phone, email, online troubleshooting, other? During what hours is support available? Is there an additional fee for a support contract?
7. Is the booking engine customizable? Can it match your site’s design, logo, and color scheme?
8. Are room descriptions, photo images, and rates visible on the reservation form? If not, does the booking engine need to reload each time the customer navigates away to check and re-check descriptions, rates, and images? That process could be slow and frustrating.
9. How is cost calculated? By monthly commission based upon reservations? By flat monthly fee? Is there a monthly minimum?
In short, make sure that you know what kind of booking engine functionality your hospitality site really needs before you commit—because no matter how enticing your website, you won’t boost sales with the wrong back-end technology.