Boosting direct bookings is essential for the success and growth of your hotel. The more you trust your website, the fewer commissions you will have to pay to intermediaries and the stronger the relationship with your guests will be. Do you have a hotel booking engine? Would you like to know more about how to integrate it into your website or into your management software or PMS? Keep reading
Why integrate a hotel booking engine on your website?
Your hotel should not only worry about having an attractive, intuitive website that reflects your value proposition very well. It is also necessary to offer travelers an easy way to complete their reservation online from any device. That's where a hotel booking engine comes into play.
But there is also a third important point: make sure that your website and the booking engine work perfectly to offer a simple and totally personalized experience to your guests, ensuring correct integration with other systems such as the PMS or the hotel ERP. . Why is it important to integrate a booking engine on your website?
1. Personalization of the experience
Depending on the information previously available to the guest, the offer can be customized with the aim of increasing the conversion rate. In addition, these engines switch between different languages automatically, facilitating reservations from anywhere in the world.
2. Boost your marketing actions
If there is a two-way communication between your PMS and the booking engine, you will be able to activate and launch all kinds of promotional campaigns to your clients, visible from the booking process.
On the other hand, you can activate notifications or communications with your clients focused on increasing direct sales before the guest arrives at your hotel.
3. Improve the visibility of your hotel on the Internet
Booking engines allow you to increase your local SEO and help you capture traffic from potential customers interested in making a reservation online. On the other hand, the engines reinforce the quality and prestige of your hotel, generating a good experience.
4. Streamline your reservation management processes and reduce intermediation
Reduce the workload of your hotel staff attending to possible reservations and reduce the margin of error in data collection. The engines generate databases automatically and register customers in a few minutes without the need for the intervention of your staff.
Why is the integration between the booking engine and the website important?
Good integration between your website and the hotel booking engine is key to providing a quick and seamless experience for guests when completing their booking. This is one of the first guest touch points in your guest trip and it is very important to start delighting them from the beginning.
One of the main reasons guests abandon a reservation is if the process is slow, clunky, or inconsistent. If the appearance of the booking engine doesn't match the hotel's brand or the two systems aren't connected, customers may feel confused or frustrated.
Another important point to achieve conversions in your hotel ecommerce is that the booking engine is up to the OTAs, in terms of experience, customization and speed.
According to a recent Travelport study travelers consult up to 38 websites on average before formalizing a reservation. There is a significant "experience gap" and for this reason it is important that your hotel stands out from other alternatives during its navigation.
Keep learning: How to improve the security of your hotel payment gateway
How are a booking engine and a website for hotels integrated?
There are two ideal options:
- Integrate a booking engine into your website, either through a plugin or a custom design.
- Host your website with your hotel booking engine provider.
Integrate a booking engine plugin on your website or integrate via code
It is likely that your hotel has the CMS WordPress. This content manager has a multitude of plugins to quickly integrate a booking engine.
It is important that the reservation system you choose allows:
- Work with all WordPress themes and be customizable for
- fit your brand.
- Maximum mobile optimization
- Having large and easy-to-use reserve buttons that make the action as simple as possible.
- Offer secure data entry and comply with PCI regulations.
- Have the ability to integrate with other systems you may be using, such as a front desk system, hotel PMS, ERP, channel manager, or loyalty software.
- Ease of payment processing and agility in collection.
Often times the limits of plugins are offering true two-way integration. It is also possible that not all booking engine plugins can integrate with your current website due to some incompatibility.
The integration via code, although more expensive, will allow you to overcome possible limitations of the plugins and ensure maximum integration with your hotel systems.
Host the website on the hotel booking engine provider
It would be an "all in one" experience with a website that is developed and integrated into a booking engine (all under one platform).
It is a more basic option in terms of design and features that may be more interesting for small hotel properties.
Integration between the booking engine and the hotel PMS
Two-way integration between your PMS and your booking engine or third-party booking channels (GDS, OTA and metasearch channels) is a huge time saver and helps maximize online revenue by minimizing issues like double bookings.
The integration allows you to control GDS/OTA inventory, rates and reservations from the PMS itself, avoiding having to go into various channel extranets to update inventory manually.
The PMS sends the designated inventory, rates, and availability to the channel or booking engine, and reservations made through the connected channels are automatically imported into the PMS. Room availability is adjusted accordingly on all connected channels.
En Cerium, as a company specialized in integrations in the hotel sector, we can help you achieve maximum integration of your hotel ecommerce with different management systems to help you offer the best guest experience while optimizing back office processes to the maximum and reducing operating costs . Contact us through this form for more information.
