For contemporary hotels, there are numerous options available to offer a good guest experience and carry out the operations smoothly. During hotel operations, one very important thing that is changing rapidly is thehotel booking engine. In this blog, we try to look into some of the emerging trends and innovations that are going to drive the future of booking engines.
What Is A Booking Engine?
The term “booking engine” refers to a SaaS application used by hoteliers. It allows guests to reserve a property online on their own. A booking engine has two sides: the frontend and the backend. The frontend is where customers interact with the interface to select and book rooms on their own. The backend is generally used by hoteliers for setting up and managing configurations and reservations.
Why Is There A Need For A Booking Engine?
This evokes the days when the internet was not as widely used, with guests practically having to approach the hotel to ask for availability and pricing so they could plan their trips. Now, it causes problems for the staff at the hotel and the guests.
Going further, it is increasingly becoming a tough one for the front desk agents to decide whether they should cater to guest inquiries or to the walk-in customers already on line to make reservations.
If the guests felt dissatisfied by the pricing, they may have even gone somewhere else. Now, it becomes even worse when the guests have to call the same hotel back. Hoteliers, however, adopted all the booking engines to fix this issue.
Being able to book a room from the hotel booking engine makes it so much simpler for guests to do so. Thus, the hotel staff need not hire additional persons to attend to queries.
It also helps reduce the involvement of third-party agents in managing bookings. Currently, the booking is cheaper, as it eliminates the agent’s commission and saves time.
Following are some trends that every hotelier should be aware of:
1: Mobile Optimization For Booking Engine
With the ever-increasing demand for mobile devices, most people often spend the majority of their time on their mobile devices. Thus, it becomes essential for hotel booking engine providers to create a mobile-friendly interface. It will help the users to make hotel reservations on the go.
2: Integrate Your Booking Engine With AI
These days, everyone is dependent on AI for performing their day-to-day tasks, and the hospitality industry is no exception. Now, booking engines are integrated with AI tools, which helps them provide personalized guest experiences.
Moreover, it can be integrated with AI to provide you with automated chatbots. Thus, it will help in handling customer queries with ease. Therefore, if a user encounters a booking engine that is difficult to use, the AI bots guide them through every step of the booking process.
3: Booking With Loyalty Programs
In the early days, the booking engine was a platform for reserving a room, and now many things have changed. These days, we can see many booking engines used to upsell guests on services such as restaurant reservations. One can expect this trend to increase significantly. The hospitality industry is always seeking the best ways to enhance its revenue, and the booking engine is a key area where it needs to focus.
It has been observed that most hospitality businesses are moving towards loyalty programs. Also, they have an expected ROI and provide businesses with an incentive to retain their guests. Integrating loyalty programs into booking engines doesn’t seem easy, and you need to be aware of the straightforward steps to create a loyalty program.
4: Advancement of booking engine
On a hotel booking engine, if a guest initiates a booking for any reason and doesn’t complete it, then nothing happens. The guests need to complete the booking process, and with the help of booking engines, one can examine the booking steps and keep follow-ups. In this way, it reminds the customers of their booking process.
It can also examine what exactly guests are facing and prevent them from completing the booking. If the guest finds the room pricing to be higher, the booking engine will send them an email regarding our promotional offers.
Final Version
In the above article, we examined the trends and innovations in hotel booking engines. It indicates a turn toward a guest-centric, technologically advanced, and sustainable future for the hospitality business. In this cut-throat industry, knowing how to efficiently use your booking engine gives your property an edge to sell more rooms directly.
Hence, your website’s visibility can be enhanced if more potential guests come to it, which could be a big plus to your business. This will also help in position themselves at the forefront of industry and provide guests a truly exceptional experience.
