Install a Booking Engine: Let your Hotel’s Website become a Revenue Center

Your own website is a miniature of your property, for all the world to see. Optimize it! Access all important information to website visitors - let them be your GUEST .

In fact, today's intelligent hotelier must not underestimate the power of his or her website. Often, many hotel websites are casually designed, with little attention to effectiveness, and contain only limited information simply because it is seen as an additional cost to make it attractive and appealing. If this is indeed the case, in the end it becomes an additional cost!

Think of it this way: a hotel's website is not a cost but rather an investment. Compare this to a hotel brochure, for instance. This material is printed and distributed in order to build market awareness and to hopefully generate room sales in the end. Remember that a hotel's website can not only feature text and pictures, but can also employ animation, sound effects and music -most important, it can sell.

To make over your website so it becomes a revenue center, a booking engine must be readily available, so that VISITORS can turn into GUESTS.

Many booking engines are available in the market at the moment, but not all can match up what a hotel is prepared to supply with what a potential guest happens to be looking for. Many different requests should be anticipated; thus, it must be a seasoned hotel professional who builds a well-designed booking engine.

For example, consider a visitor trying to book two rooms, with 1 guest for room #1 and 2 guests for room#2. The booking engine must be able to accommodate this request with options showing request breakdowns for occupancy, room type and number of rooms. Along with that, it should have the ability to easily reserve multiple rooms of different room types in one reservation.

Other features, such as the engine's capability to allow a hotel to list room preferences as customized as possible, meal reservations, package reservations, airport pick-up reservations and many more are also essential to secure guest pre-visit satisfaction.

Apart from what has been mentioned, an engine's back office must be user-friendly in booking, not only for the visitor/booker but also for hotel staff: the personnel who must input all related information, such as rates, inventory and period of stay and all other related personnel.

Let's take "rate assignment", for instance. Hotels nowadays prepare several rates, such as weekend/weekday rates, individual/corporate rates, and distributor rates. Those who practice revenue management will even change their rates on a daily basis. There are two activities that are prone to human error in adjusting rates. The first is when the rates are set and the second is when they are distributed.

Pelican Booking Engine presents a feature called "Rate Template", which can be repeated as often as necessary. A hotel can assign rate templates to selected rate tiers. A rate tier is defined as a market segment that is entitled to the same rate (determined in advance). A special feature, "Priority Rates", is available to pre-empt all other rates when special events take place. Pelican's systematic way of inputting data minimizes the possibility of human error and is easy to understand, so that it is less costly and time-consuming for training. All features are developed by dedicated hotel professionals, thus making it as accurate as possible, conforming precisely to what a hotel needs in a booking engine; it accommodates potential reservations as described above.

Pelican system is predicated on the fact that a hotel's core product is room. Focusing on core products and outsourcing others will turn out to be a better use of limited capital, especially when developing a sophisticated reservation system is no cheap and easy matter. Pelican system thus offers an affordable solution, to transform a hotel's website into a revenue center.

Feel free to contact Pelican System, at here to learn in detail what else the system offers.