Does a Reservation System Truly Help Hoteliers – Especially
in Dealing with Travel Agents (TA) and Corporate Clients (CC)?

Nov 16, 2005

A system to manage your reservations: is this really going to be helpful for you or is just going to be an additional cost?

This may sound like a stupid question, which some competent hoteliers might definitely get a laugh from. Eventually, many hoteliers still have their doubts about any system to manage reservations. Before proceeding, it has to be stated clearly for the hotelier that a reservation system should be able to efficiently manage reservations from all market segments: Travel agents, Corporate Clients and Internet Users. In this case, managing implies planning, execution, monitoring and evaluating functions.

Beginning with planning: a hotel surely has rates and an inventory allotment plan. In other words, a hotel knows which market will receive what size of allotment, in what rate and at which period. Bear in mind that over hundreds, if not thousands of travel agents and corporate clients are the target focus for a hotel – but can they do this effectively through a manual sorting process? Is the time and investment involved going to be worth it? In executing such a plan, a hotel must definitely distribute rates and inventory allotment to massive numbers of travel agents and corporate clients.

Rates and inventory are customarily stated in manual contracts, on a yearly, bi-yearly or quarterly basis. Imagine how many phone calls and faxes must be prepared and delivered, due to the inevitable changes in this mass of information. What about making reservations, modify and cancel them? How many phone calls, faxes or email must be carried out before they are confirmed? Monitoring and evaluating TAs and CCs productivity is again time-consuming, demanding much attention and time to go through entire paper contracts. In the end, a hotel often decides only concentrate on large-scale travel agents/corporate clients, just to simplify all these processes. Whether this is actually fair or wise, it is for hotel to decide.

Given these realities, a good reservation system should be able to come up with wiser and more effective solutions. Categorizing markets into groups and allowing a hotel to assign rates and inventory efficiently is a must. Any reservation system must be web-based, so that any registered TAs/CCs would have DIRECT access to the rates and inventory, in REAL TIME. Thus, no more phone calls, faxes or emails would be needed to confirm rate changes.

Moreover, hotel can accept as many registrations as possible without worrying about how to keep in touch with rates and inventory submitted to registered TAs/CCs. All registered TAs and CCs will be granted a login and password to permit access to rates and inventory; further, this will empower them to make, modify and cancel reservations – all INSTANTLY CONFIRMED . That's the beauty of a web-based reservation system, isn't it? Here's how a hotel can serve a broader market without having to hire and maintain a '24-hour reservation staff'. In the age of cyber-technology, a 24-hour online reservation system will do the job for you!

Clearly, to keep up with what's going on, comprehensive reports should be provided in any system for monitoring and evaluating purposes. Hence, a hotel can acknowledge which TAs and CCs is actually generating reservations, as direct access is established. Pelican Reservation System comes with the solutions detailed above, as it is understood that TAs and CCs play important roles in generating hotel reservations. Kindly calculate all the costs and time value consumed from dealing you're your TAs and CCs manually and online for yourself, and then contact us and click here