What is a booking engine?

Here are the various features of a booking engine:

• Easy booking process: Let your guests swiftly navigate through your rates, inventories and go through the booking process hassle-free. This simple, elegant and user-friendly booking engine will enable the guest to effortlessly book with your hotel.

• Group booking engine: If you’re a group of hotels, then with a group booking engine you can acquire bookings of your different locations from one place. Simultaneously, you can also centrally manage the inventory distribution of multiple locations.

• Add offline bookings: Easily manage all your offline bookings received from walk-in or phone call, through the hotel booking system. You can perform this operation in the backend system of the booking engine itself. Once you log-in, under 'Add Reservation' simply enter the guest details; thus it lets you avoid maintaining a register or diary for such bookings.

• Personalized to match your brand: It gives you complete freedom in terms of customizing the booking system to meet your hotel website’s brand. Additionally, you can set your own search criteria and visibility settings to offer a specific user experience.

• Mobile-friendly UI: Give your guests the ability to book directly from their smartphones and provide them a flawless booking experience. Regardless of the device used by the guest, the booking process remains the same on PC, tablets, and smartphones. Also, they can also easily check room details, rates, view pictures and more.

• Ready plug and play widgets: This feature lets you add and edit various ready to use plugins and widgets on the hotels’ website to create a smart booking impression. You can show information via notification to your visitors about recent bookings, ongoing promotions, offers, discounts, entry or exit popups etc to attract and turn them into bookers.

• Packages and promotions: Create and offer promotional packages or showcase free services like Wi-Fi, pool access and so on. Set secret deals for special as well as loyal guests by creating promo codes. Give discounts for last-minute and advanced bookers. Also, offer special rates for frequent guests, corporate discounts and much more through the booking engine.

• Payment gateway options: Easily accept guest payments directly from the website and allow them to choose from N number of integrated payment gateways, credit card processors as well as online banking (net banking).

• Yield management: Set room rates as per different occupancy levels of your hotel through the booking engine. Here, you can determine most profit selling rates by combining various factors such as occupancy rate, upcoming holidays, etc through yield management feature and earn profits during peak as well as weak seasons.

• Reports: Get detailed reports of all the reservations of your hotel from the booking engine. Starting from reservation to cancellation, generate a diverse set of these reports as well as get reservation statistics like bookings from mobile, desktop and Facebook. This will help you to make better decisions and increase efficiency.

• Multiple language and currency: The online booking engine supports multiple languages and currencies to help you expand your hotel's reach in global markets. In fact, you can convert the booking engine to any language of your choice. Further, you can also display rates in different currencies and allow your guests to make payment in the currency of their choice.

• Hotel chatbot: Allow your website lookers to book directly with you through a smart hotel chatbot. The chatbot works like a digital hotel attendant and responds to your hotel website inquiries smartly. It answers your guests’ queries 24x7 and also shares details of your hotel, amenities, services, availability, deals, and packages.

• Central Reservation System: The CRS gives you centralized access to rates, inventory and bookings of your hotel chain. Streamline all your operations for multiple hotel properties and get important information under a single panel. It also allows you to switch between different properties making it easier to manage rate and inventory of all of the properties.

• SMS and email marketing: Send automated personalised emails like pre-arrival, during-the-stay, and post-departures to your guests through the predefined email templates provided in the system. Additionally, instantly notify them via SMS regarding their booking, cancellation, room upgrade and more to improve guest engagement. Along with this, you can offer attractive promotions and packages as well as upsell your extra amenities and services to those who book directly with you.

• Guest Stats: Guest statistics help you to identify your property's most desirable features and use them for strategic planning. Get a complete breakdown of how the booker is engaging with your property’s website through details such as search criteria, the currency used, total session time, nights stayed and much more.

• Sell inventory through Facebook page: Convert your Facebook fans into happy guests, through social media integration. This allows your visitors to make direct hotel booking from the Facebook page itself thus enhancing your hotels’ bookings.

• Collect reviews: Reviews play a very essential role for your hotels’ online reputation. So, collect your guest feedback through the booking engine and showcase it on your hotel website itself. This will in turn convert your potential lookers into bookers.

• Affiliate tracking: The booking engine lets you track bookings received from any third party website. It organizes as well as supervises all your affiliated programs. You can perform this by generating affiliation codes for different users which are shared across the websites. This engages more audience to book with you, enhances your sales as well as lets you analyse which ones are performing better.

• Joomla/Wordpress website plugin: Simplify and standardize your business through this plugin. These extensions integrate the booking engine with your property's Joomla! Or Wordpress website and accept online bookings to increase reservations from there.

• Competitor rate analysis: Keep an eye on your competitors and monitor their pricing through a hotel rate shopper tool. The booking engine lets you analyze and compare your competitor's pricing as well as revenue for the next 30 days, through rates extracted from your mentioned OTAs. This will let you understand where you stand amongst your competitors in the market.

• Google analytics integration: Integrate the booking engine with your Google Analytics account (or other such analytic systems) to easily track your visitor rates, and compare them with the system generated statistics. Also, you can set up goals and see their progress over a period of time. Moreover, the system is compatible with your Google Adwords account to give you a clear idea about bookers coming through your Google advertisements.

• Holidays and weekend indication: Optimize your hotel rates by adding upcoming holidays and weekends in the booking system. It notifies you beforehand and assists you to predict the amount of business expected during that time. Furthermore, giving you a chance to set offers and discounts or alter rates during such times to grab more bookings.

• Ready API integration: The booking system offers various readily available APIs that integrate easily with your hotels’ website. It allows you to display your hotel's rates, inventory, amenities, listing, etc. on the various front ends of your choice such as hotel's website, Facebook page, etc; thereby offering an ultimate booking experience to your guests.