It is humbling to read these lovely reviews of KeepMeBooked from some of our customers on the software directory Capterra:
"Easy to manage and customize to the business, trustworthy system and excellent support"
"The support is the best I have ever experienced in this line of business"
"Extremely easy to use. No software installation required. Paypal integration is insanely simple."
And my personal favourite:
"KeepMeBooked rocks"
Thanks to Alex at Cinq et Sept (in Roujan, France), Victor at Rue Sade B&B (Antibes, France) and Mani at Finer Pages (Vancouver, Canada) for taking the time to share your thoughts about KeepMeBooked.
Enjoy KeepMeBooked for yourself by signing up for a free one-month trial at www.keepmebooked.com/signup
Friday, 25 June 2010
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
KeepMeBooked shortlisted for Travolution Award
We are very excited to hear that KeepMeBooked has been shortlisted for a Travolution Award in the "Best Online / Desktop Application" category.
The Travolution Awards:
Pretty cool. Fingers crossed. Winner to be announced on 28 September.
The Travolution Awards:
"are unique in recognising companies, brands and individuals who excel in the fields of online travel distribution, digital marketing and technology."
Pretty cool. Fingers crossed. Winner to be announced on 28 September.
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
New feature: option to require guest to acknowledge terms & conditions
We've just released a new option which allows you to require your guests booking online to accept your terms and conditions. Check the box under Settings > Online Bookings and enter the URL of your terms & conditions page:
If you've checked this option, the guest will see a new line in the final page of an online booking asking them to acknowledge that they've read and accept your terms and conditions:
Monday, 14 June 2010
Improved accommodation page
The Accommodation page was starting to look quite untidy as we've added more pricing options over the past few months, so we've jiggled around the layout a little to tidy it all up.
Here's what it used to look like:
All a bit higgledy-piggledy. So we've tidied it all up and it now looks like this, which we hope you'll find a little easier on the eye and quicker to scan:
Here's what it used to look like:
All a bit higgledy-piggledy. So we've tidied it all up and it now looks like this, which we hope you'll find a little easier on the eye and quicker to scan:
Thursday, 10 June 2010
Eviivo cashback
One of our long-established competitors in the UK is eviivo. We think their software is a little dated and over-complicated, but we have the greatest respect for the work they've done over the past few years persuading the independent accommodation sector in the UK to get themselves online.
So I was a little surprised to notice that they have resorted to having to pay customers to use their product, via a £300 cashback offer to new customers.
Sounds like a good deal, in these lean times, until you actually run the numbers.
By the time you get the cashback (end of September), your 10-room B&B could have incurred nearly £1,500 in commission fees from bookings coming from your own website:
Between today and end of September (112 nights), you'd incur:
Assuming you are paying 6% commission on those online bookings from your own website, that's about £1,400 in commissions due.
Oh, no, sorry, that'll be a mere £1,100 after you get your £300 cashback!
(KeepMeBooked charges a flat rate of £27/month for a 10-room B&B, with no commissions. Our pricing is online here. Eviivo also allows you to take bookings from online travel agents, something we don't yet offer, but I haven't included any commissions from those bookings in the above calculation. We are talking here just about bookings coming from your own website.)
We'd like to think that our software is fun and pleasant and useful enough not to need us to actually pay customers to use it ;-) But decide for yourself, and feel free to add your comments below.
So I was a little surprised to notice that they have resorted to having to pay customers to use their product, via a £300 cashback offer to new customers.
Sounds like a good deal, in these lean times, until you actually run the numbers.
By the time you get the cashback (end of September), your 10-room B&B could have incurred nearly £1,500 in commission fees from bookings coming from your own website:
Let's say you charge £80 per room per night
And you are 50% full
And you get 50% of your bookings online from your own website
Between today and end of September (112 nights), you'd incur:
10 rooms x 112 nights x £85/night x 50% full x 50% online = £24k
Assuming you are paying 6% commission on those online bookings from your own website, that's about £1,400 in commissions due.
Oh, no, sorry, that'll be a mere £1,100 after you get your £300 cashback!
(KeepMeBooked charges a flat rate of £27/month for a 10-room B&B, with no commissions. Our pricing is online here. Eviivo also allows you to take bookings from online travel agents, something we don't yet offer, but I haven't included any commissions from those bookings in the above calculation. We are talking here just about bookings coming from your own website.)
We'd like to think that our software is fun and pleasant and useful enough not to need us to actually pay customers to use it ;-) But decide for yourself, and feel free to add your comments below.
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Are you paying commission on bookings from your own website?
Thinking of adding online bookings to your website? Thinking of testing the water with a commission-based booking engine, so you only pay if it brings in bookings? Be sure to do the maths first:
Some commission-based booking engines charge 6% commission:
Ten rooms, that's €360 per month for a booking engine on your website. (For the record, KeepMeBooked costs $40/€32/£27 per month for ten rooms, less than a tenth of the cost of a commission-based booking engine.)
Some of those will, for sure, be bookings you wouldn't otherwise get (many visitors to your site might not trouble to phone or email if they can't book online). But they are all bookings you have paid a marketing cost for already. It is your Adwords budget, your search engine efforts, your Yellow Pages ad that has got the guest to your website in the first place. It is one thing to pay a commission on a booking from a travel agent (although FairerFees has something to say about that too), but kind of nuts to pay commission on a booking from your own website.
Sure, all that stuff commission-based services have about "we only make money when you make money" sounds persuasive, but just be sure to run the numbers first.
Just sayin'
*********
KeepMeBooked: commission-free online bookings for your B&B website.
Let's say you charge £80 or $80 or €80 for a room for the night.
And you are 50% full
And, say, 50% of those bookings come online
€80 x 30 nights x 50% x 50% = €600 in online bookings per room per month
Some commission-based booking engines charge 6% commission:
6% of €600 = €36 per room per month.
Ten rooms, that's €360 per month for a booking engine on your website. (For the record, KeepMeBooked costs $40/€32/£27 per month for ten rooms, less than a tenth of the cost of a commission-based booking engine.)
Some of those will, for sure, be bookings you wouldn't otherwise get (many visitors to your site might not trouble to phone or email if they can't book online). But they are all bookings you have paid a marketing cost for already. It is your Adwords budget, your search engine efforts, your Yellow Pages ad that has got the guest to your website in the first place. It is one thing to pay a commission on a booking from a travel agent (although FairerFees has something to say about that too), but kind of nuts to pay commission on a booking from your own website.
Sure, all that stuff commission-based services have about "we only make money when you make money" sounds persuasive, but just be sure to run the numbers first.
Just sayin'
*********
KeepMeBooked: commission-free online bookings for your B&B website.
Thursday, 3 June 2010
New payment gateways added: SagePay and Authorize.net
We've added two new payment gateways to the online booking engine. You can now choose from:
PayPal
SagePay (UK)
Authorize.net (US)
to accept online card payments from your guests.
We've also added the facility to request, on the Settings > Online Bookings screen, a different gateway. If we get more than a couple of requests for a particular gateway we'll do the work required to integrate it for you. Just select Other from the list of gateways and tell us which gateway you'd like to be able to use:
(Note that Authorize.net only appears as an option if you are using US Dollars, because Authorize.net only works with US Dollars)
PayPal
SagePay (UK)
Authorize.net (US)
to accept online card payments from your guests.
We've also added the facility to request, on the Settings > Online Bookings screen, a different gateway. If we get more than a couple of requests for a particular gateway we'll do the work required to integrate it for you. Just select Other from the list of gateways and tell us which gateway you'd like to be able to use:
(Note that Authorize.net only appears as an option if you are using US Dollars, because Authorize.net only works with US Dollars)
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
New feature: login with your Google Account
We've just added the facility to login to KeepMeBooked using a Google Account. If you already have a Google Account, chances are you stay logged into it most of the day so you won't need to separately login to KeepMeBooked.
If you are an existing KeepMeBooked user, you'll see a new option under Settings > Your Details to link your Google Account:
Once you've done this, you can then login using the 'Login with Google' option on the login page:
If you are a new user, you have the option of creating a KeepMeBooked account using your Google Account, which then means you don't have to manually link the two together later. There is a new option on the sign up page to allow new users to do this:
If you are an existing KeepMeBooked user, you'll see a new option under Settings > Your Details to link your Google Account:
If you are a new user, you have the option of creating a KeepMeBooked account using your Google Account, which then means you don't have to manually link the two together later. There is a new option on the sign up page to allow new users to do this:
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
How to get more online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse
Want more online bookings? Then a good place to start is to get more people coming to your website. If you are very new to online marketing, here are a few basic pointers:
1. Choose some sensible phrases and search terms that you'd like to score highly for in Google. You probably aren't going to get the #1 spot in Google for "Bed and breakfast" (and would you want to? are you really looking for guests who want to stay at absolutely any bed and breakfast? Or do you actually want people who'd like to stay at your B&B?). But you could quite easily get the #1 spot for "dog friendly B&B Newquay".
2. Optimise one page (see below) on your site for each of your chosen search terms. So if pet-friendliness is your thing, you might optimise your home page for "pet friendly B&B Newquay" and have other pages focussing on "dog friendly" and "cat friendly".
3. For each page, include your chosen phrase in the HTML title of your webpage. This is denoted by the tag <title> in the HTML of the page. If you don't control that yourself, make sure your web designer does it for you. If they can't, or think it is not necessary, refer them to this article by Google and consider finding a new web designer. Keep the title meaningful and human-readable: as well as using the title to help figure out what the page is about, Google (usually) also shows the title within the search results:
4. Make sure the content of the page has a headline (ideally tagged with the HTML tag <h1>) and include your chosen phrase in that headline. Something that is prominent for a user visiting that page will likely be taken as being important by Google.
5. Include the phrase also within the body of the page. So if your page is about being dog friendly, write something sensible about what kind of dogs you are happy to have, whether they can stay in your room unattended, which other parts of your B&B they are allowed in, etc. etc. Don't go overkill and fill your pages with very many repetitive variants of keywords. A page lots of sentences like:
"dog and cat and pet friendly B&B/guesthouse/hotel/inn/accommodation in newquay cornwall north cornwall where you can bring your dog or cat or other pet to stay with other dog and cat and pet loving guests at our luxury B&B/guesthouse on the north cornish coast ... etc."
probably won't score too highly in Google and will put off real visitors who will wonder why you are writing such nonsense.
Do those five things and you'll soon find that you get far more traffic than your local competition.
If you are interested in just how powerful these basic points are, take a look at this post on my personal blog where, as a demonstration, I briefly secured the #1 spot in Google for terms related to cosmetic surgery (about which, in reality, I know nothing).
Oh, one more thing: just getting visitors to your website isn't the end of the story. You'll also need to accept online bookings and you can of course use KeepMeBooked's online booking engine for that. ;-)
1. Choose some sensible phrases and search terms that you'd like to score highly for in Google. You probably aren't going to get the #1 spot in Google for "Bed and breakfast" (and would you want to? are you really looking for guests who want to stay at absolutely any bed and breakfast? Or do you actually want people who'd like to stay at your B&B?). But you could quite easily get the #1 spot for "dog friendly B&B Newquay".
2. Optimise one page (see below) on your site for each of your chosen search terms. So if pet-friendliness is your thing, you might optimise your home page for "pet friendly B&B Newquay" and have other pages focussing on "dog friendly" and "cat friendly".
3. For each page, include your chosen phrase in the HTML title of your webpage. This is denoted by the tag <title> in the HTML of the page. If you don't control that yourself, make sure your web designer does it for you. If they can't, or think it is not necessary, refer them to this article by Google and consider finding a new web designer. Keep the title meaningful and human-readable: as well as using the title to help figure out what the page is about, Google (usually) also shows the title within the search results:
4. Make sure the content of the page has a headline (ideally tagged with the HTML tag <h1>) and include your chosen phrase in that headline. Something that is prominent for a user visiting that page will likely be taken as being important by Google.
5. Include the phrase also within the body of the page. So if your page is about being dog friendly, write something sensible about what kind of dogs you are happy to have, whether they can stay in your room unattended, which other parts of your B&B they are allowed in, etc. etc. Don't go overkill and fill your pages with very many repetitive variants of keywords. A page lots of sentences like:
"dog and cat and pet friendly B&B/guesthouse/hotel/inn/accommodation in newquay cornwall north cornwall where you can bring your dog or cat or other pet to stay with other dog and cat and pet loving guests at our luxury B&B/guesthouse on the north cornish coast ... etc."
probably won't score too highly in Google and will put off real visitors who will wonder why you are writing such nonsense.
Do those five things and you'll soon find that you get far more traffic than your local competition.
If you are interested in just how powerful these basic points are, take a look at this post on my personal blog where, as a demonstration, I briefly secured the #1 spot in Google for terms related to cosmetic surgery (about which, in reality, I know nothing).
Oh, one more thing: just getting visitors to your website isn't the end of the story. You'll also need to accept online bookings and you can of course use KeepMeBooked's online booking engine for that. ;-)
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