An excellent booking engine, key to the profitability of your hotel chain!

Implementing a new booking engine is a very important decision for a hotel or hotel chain and according to our experience, the hotel or chain team dedicates between four months and a year to the selection process, during which they evaluate between 3 and 8 booking engines.

In this article we will outline some basic characteristics that indicate a booking engine is unsuitable and should not be considered for future implementation.

As we have mentioned in our previous post, the direct channel of a hotel or hotel chain not only has to be prioritized, but should be the main channel. To transform it into a main channel we have to dedicate time and effort to take care of the main aspects such as the website, the booking engine and the digital strategy.

Choosing between one booking engine and another is a complex decision, but without going into differentiating features that cannot be assessed at a glance and require specialized analysis, here are some basic warning signs a hotel should consider when assessing whether a booking engine is unsuitable:

• Unclear or nonexistent call to action
• Space for photos too small
• Obsolete photo gallery
• Small space for room descriptions
• Look & Feel different from the site and inability to customize
• Poorly visible search widget
• Inability to represent services and facilities through icons
• Displaying too many rates or only one
• No progress bar in the booking process
• Inability to offer other room types / alternative dates in the absence of availability
• Not responsive (40% of reservations are made today through mobile or tablet)
• Showing promotional codes in the last step of the booking process, where payment is made
• No space, insufficient space for the sale of extra products and services or inadequate representation of them
• No possibility to cross-sell between several properties of a chain in the absence of availability
• No possibility to emphasize that the price shown is the lowest
• No space to highlight benefits of booking directly on the website during the booking process
• Inability to incorporate new languages easily
• No possibility for the user to book more than one room in the same booking process
• No possibility to change the number of people or rooms in the process

On the other hand, a booking engine that avoids these shortcomings is not necessarily suitable, but it has the basic features a booking engine must have and can be taken into consideration for an in-depth evaluation.