In today’s online world, most travelers look to reserve hotel rooms via the Internet. Without an online reservation system available, your hotel may be overlooked by the tech-savvy traveler looking for ultimate convenience when booking. Apart from being attractive to prospective guests, online reservation systems help your hotel track your day-to-day operations on the back end so you can ensure a more seamless stay for your guests!
What Is a Hotel Reservation System?
A hotel reservation system is digital booking software that allows hotel owners and staff to easily centralize all their incoming reservations. This software can even integrate with third-party sites, sometimes known as OTAs, and puts all reservations across different channels into one software. This makes it easy to track incoming guests, whether they booked directly through your hotel website or on Expedia, a common OTA website.
Apart from offering ease and convenience for incoming guests, hotel reservation systems provide your staff with new tools to better run the operations of your hotel. Some hotel reservation systems, like the one offered by Hotelogix, offer a centralized, single dashboard view of availability, check-in dates and incoming guests, and more.
With some additional resources, you can also add a channel manager to the hotel reservation system. The channel manager allows hotel management to distribute listings across multiple websites, and still have all confirmed bookings come back to the same central dashboard. This integration helps hoteliers broaden their reach, without risking human errors like double bookings.
Why Do Hotels Need a Reservation System?
Many travelers today do their browsing and booking of vacation accommodations online. Whether by computer, smartphone, or even tablet – prospective guests can now book a hotel while riding the train or sitting at their desk. Since guests can book anytime and anywhere, your hotel needs to mirror that.
By employing an online hotel reservation system, your hotel can keep up with your prospective guests, and ensure that your hotel is available for booking whether it’s midnight or early morning. Without an online reservation system, a large amount of revenue is at risk. If your hotel doesn’t have an option to book online, it’s much more likely that prospective guests will simply find a comparable hotel nearby that does. You don’t want to lose revenue over something so easy to fix!
Plus, hotel reservation systems help the hospitality staff as well. It allows your staff to use a simple, centralized dashboard to see updates to bookings in real-time, giving them an easy way to prepare for incoming guests. Plus, your staff’s time will be freed up for better use, because they won’t have to wait around by the phone in case someone calls to book a room. They can be of more use to you and your guests when they can freely travel around the property.
Hotelogix’s reservation system software allows for remote access, so hotel managers and staff alike can view incoming reservations right on their smartphone and do tasks like approving incoming reservations, checking availability, and more – while being on the move throughout the property and beyond.
What Are the Benefits of a Hotel Reservation System?
When considering the benefits of an online hotel reservation system, there’s much to consider. It benefits guests, staff, management, and hotel owners all at once. Below, check out the advantages of the hotel reservation system, and how these benefits can help your hotel thrive.
Optimize Revenue
A benefit of reservation systems for hotels is they allow hoteliers to better manage their vacancies. Using online reservation software, hotel staff can easily look at vacancies, supply and demand, existing reservations, and current pricing. This software allows hotel managers to change pricing in real-time if they need to compete with nearby hotels.
These systems also allow hotel managers to visualize their average vacancy rate, as well as data like on what websites most people are booking, or any other trends that may emerge. Better yet, they allow on-site hospitality staff to better prepare for incoming guests each day by giving them an overview of what groups will check in and when. In this way, hotel reservation software allows hotel staff to provide guests with a better experience, which will boost your positive online reviews and word of mouth, adding to potential revenue.
Personalized Experience
They call it the “hospitality industry” for a reason – it’s all about the guests and how comfortable they feel when they arrive on your property! This business relies on guest satisfaction and good word of mouth. Yet so many unique guests walk through the doors of a hotel each day. Without a way to centralize information about your guests, your staff may be unable to provide a truly personalized experience to anyone.
An online booking software integrated with a PMS like Hotelogix’s can track the booking habits of each guest and gather important personal information from them. If a guest needs an extra sleeping cot, the online booking system will have a place to request that. Guests can tell the hotel as little or as much as they want about their stay using online reservation tools.
If a group is traveling for a birthday or wedding celebration, your reservation system can gather that information and display it to your staff on the dashboard. With that information received ahead of check-in, staff can add special touches to your guests’ stay, such as flowers or a free birthday cake. These seemingly small touches go a long way with guests. People are much more likely to book repeatedly at hotels they feel comfortable and cared for in!
Streamline Hotel Operations
A practical benefit of the hotel reservation system that shouldn’t be overlooked is how it optimizes hotel operations. The software that allows online booking can also be integrated to provide much more utility. Take for example Hotelogix’s online reservation system. It can be used for tracking room inventory, quickening booking processes, and facilitating smooth communication between internal departments. Hotelogix acts as a PMS and RMS that are fully integrated with a CMS, meaning it syncs data from multiple channels and sites to provide a detailed, data-driven overview of the hotel’s performance on one convenient dashboard.
Conclusion
An online reservation system offers numerous benefits on all sides of the fence. It helps guests book a room with more ease and allows them to have a more personalized and speedy check-in experience at your hotel. Reservation systems help your staff keep up with day-to-day tasks, and better utilize their time by planning around current reservations. Finally, for hotel management and owners, this online booking software collects data to provide key insights into business performance and room for growth. There are simply no downsides to using an online hotel reservation system!