Your Website Needs an Instant Booking System
For hospitality businesses, a website is the key component of marketing, and not just a showcasing platform for their establishments.
Failure to build and meet the online demand for tourism can be expensive, and fatal in the hospitality sector. A key element to a hospitality website is enabling guests to check availability, pricing, and make instant bookings. Here are the reasons why businesses cannot afford to ignore instant booking systems for their website.
1. On Demand Purchasing
Since online shopping has become common place, customer’s expectations have shifted, which means the sale cycle has been shortened significantly.
Potential guests look for accommodation, flights, and activities, all at the same time. Some OTA (Online Travel Agencies) have long moved into this space, but not all customers buy or wish to buy from OTAs. Many travellers prefer to make their own travel arrangements, so it is not unusual for a potential guest to have multiple tabs open in their browser, whilst searching for Accommodation, Flights, and Activities simultaneously.
Travellers need assurance that their accommodation is securely booked before booking flights, so those vendors that do not allow instant booking will miss out.
2. Multi-Stop Trips
Many travellers stay in more than one location during their trip, so they are organising the itinerary with specific dates at specific locations, and need to know immediately if you can accommodate them.
This means potential guests expect to see exact prices and availability for their travel dates, as well as being able to secure the accommodation at the same time as they book their flights, activities, and other arrangements.
Failure to offer this instant information means they will look elsewhere as they cannot wait for you to respond to their enquiry. No matter how fast you believe you respond, it will be too late for these guests.
3. Time Saving
Whilst the ability to make instant bookings saves time for guests, many hospitality businesses do not recognise the time it can save their business.
Firstly, by exposing pricing and availability, staff or owners do not have to take time to respond to enquiries that are either for dates that are already booked out, or from guests that cannot afford the prices. In both cases, this is wasted time and effort.
Secondly, if integrated with a payment system and automated guests management, online booking systems save an enormous amount of time. On average, from first contact to arrival, the time spent on dealing with an enquiry, including processing a booking manually, is between 20 to 40 minutes. Online booking systems with a guest management functionality, can cut this down to just a few minutes. This is a significant time saving, which can be easily translated into real costs within any business.
Finally, online instant booking systems can increase the ability to “up sell” rooms, services, activities, etc. all of which will be incremental revenue.
4. Channel Management
Many hospitality businesses offer their accommodations via multiple channels using OTAs. It is imperative that inventory at all sales channels is kept up-to-date in order to avoid overbooking, whilst maximising occupancy.
Whether offering the same price across all channels, or different prices via different channels, manual management of pricing is time-consuming. Additionally, the smallest mistake can be costly in both revenue and margin terms, as well as damaging occupancy rates.
Booking systems with Channel Managers can synchronise your inventory across all channels without intervention, saving time and potential overbooking. Furthermore, some Channel Managers allow you to send different prices to different portals (OTA), so that you can adequately cater for the cost of doing business with different OTAs.
5. Revenue Management
Online booking systems with sophisticated rate plans, can allow even the smallest Hotels or B&Bs to better manage their rates, and respond to demand, occupancy, time of reservation, etc.
Revenue management can be tied to early booking, late booking, seasonal rates, occupancy, etc. Some booking systems offer the ability to link to 3rd party suppliers of more complex algorithmic pricing needed for busier and larger hotels, hence enabling revenue and margin maximisation.
Summary
Online instant booking systems are no longer the preserve of the larger hospitality businesses, but are an imperative survival tool. The ability to maximise every sales opportunity, maximise revenue, and increase margins are elements that no business can ignore regardless of their size or sector.
Online booking systems can be surprisingly affordable and flexible. Contact us to see how we can help you achieve better business results by implementing an online booking system for your hospitality business.