What Features to Look for in a Good Hotel Reservation System

In case you are a hotel owner thinking about the advantages of an effective hotel reservation system, you are at the right place for sure.  In case you still have second thoughts about why you should look for a hotel reservation system for your hotel.  It is true that the internet has made everything absolutely convenient and more accessible, and booking a hotel room may be done from the ease of your own home, having simple touches on your mobile phone. You just have to invest in the right hotel reservation system software and you are good to experience the perfect outcomes.

The point is simple, once you have the right options in hand, you should look for them. The right system can help your hotel to grow and work smoothly.  Of course, you should know that the hotel management reservation system you choose should have the features and options that you want. If the software does not have the features that you need; it could get tricky for your hotel business.

Booking automation

With a proper hotel reservation system in your hotel, you can easily and effectively take bookings 24×7, that too in the absence of lifting a finger! In case you are a hotel owner, you can simply integrate the hotel booking engine into your overall website and permit the customers to simply search and book their preferred rooms right away on your site.

In case you are an agency, you can easily connect your third-party hotel XML supplier’s channel managers and even direct contracts to vend the live inventory online. Upon a booking request, the system effortlessly makes a call into the supplier system, checks overall availability, settles the reservation in case the room is available, and issues the voucher with your overall hotel branding.

Moreover, Cancellations, as well as refunds, can also get handled by the system to make sure that there are smooth operations. This is something that saves you and your staff the time as well as the hassle of performing all these tasks manually making use of Excel sheets and back-and-forth type of phone calls and emails with suppliers as well as clients.

It even increases your reach as well as revenue potential. When you implement a hotel booking system, you no longer really experience any sort of constraints of time and place. It simply denotes that you can take bookings from anybody, in any area of the world, at any time and not just during your overall working business hours.

Effortless Management & Control of Inventory

In case you are a hotel manager or the owner, using spreadsheets or even outdated type of tools to manage room details, overall availability, rates and allotments can be much more time-consuming. It is mainly if you have anywhere more than twenty to thirty rooms. It makes it even much more challenging in case you are simply a travel agency owner, selling several types of properties to keep checking availability on the mobile phone or simply email with your hotel partners.

This is one process that may even take longer if the hotels you work with don’t have a proper reservation system for their property. Every time any room gets booked; you may have to manually update it against that specific hotel in your excel sheet. This is something that may lead to errors, delays, and even overbookings. With a central type of reservation system(CRS), hoteliers, travel agencies, and even proper tour operators can manage overall hotel inventory for multiple properties in a single place and administer room allocations and availabilities for diverse types of sales channels.

Travel agencies as well as MDS can configure room rates and content in the CRS for overall live bookings. They may even provide logins to hoteliers so that they can simply update the rates or content in the system simply themselves. This is made possible via a proper Hotel Extranet. Following are just some of the aspects of hotel inventory that you can easily manage with a proper hotel reservation or booking system:

• Property details such as room types, overall property amenities, room amenities, and more.
• Photos of property, rooms as well as amenities
• Room rates grounded on room type, including rates for diverse seasons, events, festivals, and more
• Promotions or offers such as % off, free nights, fixed discounts, etc, for a particular period, with exception criteria
• Diverse types of policies such as payment policies, tax policies, cancellation policies, child policies and even other terms and conditions
• Stop selling as well as blackout dates
• Markups and commissions for diverse types of channels

Make use of a Channel Management System

It’s not at all uncommon to have your hotel in numerous distribution channels. Although you may have a platform ready with all the tools for booking a proper room, travellers may also find your property on OTAs such as Booking as well as Expedia. This is really a wise thing to do, as it offers you more visibility, and boosts your brand awareness.

But depending completely on them can be tricky since you require to pay a fee to the OTAs for simply every reservation made through their platform. Having said so, you can easily try to direct customers to your hotel’s website by simply offering discounts and all kinds of promotions.

Either way, you would find the reservations coming in and it is critical to not lose track of them. Since you are present on numerous booking platforms, reservations could even overlap. And to simply evade going through unpleasant moments and even making your customers dissatisfied, you require to use a proper channel management system. The point is once you have the right hotel management software demo, you can ensure that you know what it can do for you. Accordingly, you can pick the software that is perfect for your needs.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the hotel reservation management software that you choose would bring the utmost productivity and efficiency to the entire hotel.  After all, choosing the right software can make all the difference in your hotel reservation and management.