4 things to look for in online booking software

Confused about the gazillions of choices for online booking software?

Here are a few key questions to use when drawing up a shortlist:

1. Rooms or room types?
One thing which usually distinguishes online booking software aimed at hotels from that aimed at smaller guesthouses/B&Bs is the concept of a room type. Many B&Bs manage their rooms individually, rather than group them into types. Hotels do the opposite and don't worry too much about individual rooms, but just manage groups of rooms (Twins, Doubles, Luxury Doubles, Suites, etc.)

If your online booking software expects you to group and manage your rooms into types, that's probably going to make life a little harder for you if you normally manage them individually. And vice-versa: if you are a 50 room hotel and you had to manage the pricing and bookings for each room individually, that would be a headache. So pick the type of online booking software that suits your business.

2. Embedded widget or link to separate booking site?
There are broadly two ways to link your website to your booking system: a widget or a link. Both will require you to copy-paste a little snippet of code onto your website (or the person who manages your website will do this for you), and that's equally easy for either method. But there are differences in the guest's experience.

A widget sits within your page, so the guest never leaves your website (except probably for the final payment page, as that needs to be on a secure server). And you can have your availability & booking calendar sitting right on your home page, or any other page.

Here's an example of the KeepMeBooked online booking widget embedded on this page:

(As this is a demo example, there is no payment required. In real life, guests would enter their card details at the end of the booking process. But we don't want you paying for a demo booking.)



Because it sits in your page, the space available is limited, so the widget probably won't have photos of your rooms within it (for example), you'll have to put those and other room information on the surrounding page yourself.

A link off to another site will take the guest to a page hosted by your online booking software provider. You will probably be able to customize the look of the page, but because it is on a different server, it probably won't look exactly like the rest of your site (and, depending on how much you can customisisation you are able to do, might look completely different to your site). The change from one page style to another can be jarring for guests. Having said that, there will be much more space on this separate booking page than on a widget embedded into your page, so you can probably present photos of rooms and so on within the booking process. Also, the entire booking process can be on a secure site so the payment stage can be more seamless than with a widget.

One thing to be aware of with booking links: some online booking services, once they have the guest on their server, present alternative accommodation options to "your" guest if you don't have the availability on the first date they search for. Be sure that you are happy with that - you might prefer a process where the guest checks other dates with you before they are sent off elsewhere.

3. Can the software correctly represent your pricing?
If you charge the same price for a room every day of the year, regardless of how many people in the room, then this question probably doesn't apply to you (any software will at least be able to apply a single price to each room)

But if you offer any of these types of pricing, you'll need to check that your software can handle them:

 - Charging per person instead of per room
 - Charging per week instead of per night
 - Occupancy based pricing (e.g. a discount for single occupancy; or an extra charge for a third person in the room)
 - Seasonal pricing
 - Weekend supplements / mid-week discounts
 - Length-of-stay pricing ("5 nights for price of 4")
 - Late-availability or early-bird discounts
 - Minimum stay requirements

(And don't necessarily look for software which handles all these price permutations if you don't need them all. Having features you don't need might just makes the software more cumbersome for you to use.)

4. Can you store your offline bookings?
Some online booking systems don't have a facility to let you record offline bookings, you can only mark rooms as available or unavailable. So you need to store your other booking details elsewhere, which creates extra work keeping two sets of records in sync.

And once you've found software which does allow you to record your offline bookings, it is good to check how quick and easy this is. If you are on the telephone to a guest and need to record or look up their details, you don't want to have to spend ages clicking through lots of screens to be able to do this.


(If you are wondering, the answers to these questions for KeepMeBooked, our online booking software, are as follows: we focus on rooms, not room types; we use a widget rather than booking link; we handle all those pricing examples except for late availability and early bird discounts; we let you record an offline booking very quickly)

You can now specify seasons year-by-year

We've made a little change to how season setup works in KeepMeBooked, which makes it much better: you can now specify different season dates for different years.

This does mean, though, that you now need to specify 2011 seasons separately from 2010 (whereas before KeepMeBooked just assumed whatever season dates you had specified applied to 2010, 2011, and onwards forever).

You can now specify seasons as far into the future as you like. Guests will only be able to make bookings online as far into the future as you have configured seasons (so until you configure seasons for 2011, you won't be able to take online bookings for 2011.) (We thought about automatically creating 2011 seasons for you based your existing dates but figured that might cause more problems than it solved).

Login to KeepMeBooked and go to Settings > Seasons to set up your seasons for 2011 and onwards. Note that each season still needs a unique name. So for example you'd need to give "High season" a different name for each year, like "High (2010)" and "High (2011)".

This change solves two problems:

1. It used to be impossible to have different prices for bookings next year versus this year. If you set prices for, say, August, those prices had to apply to both August 2010 and August 2011. Now you can have one price for this year and another for next.

2. A season which spanned two years (e.g. "Christmas / New Year" from 20th Dec to 7th Jan) needed to be setup as two separate periods (20th Dec - 31st Dec and 1st Jan - 7th Jan). Now you can just have 20th Dec 2010 to 7th Jan 2011.

4 reasons NOT to offer online bookings at your Bed & Breakfast

1. It’s too complicated
Not really. There are several web-based systems (like ours, KeepMeBooked), which let you sign up for a trial account and you just need to set up your rooms and prices, and add a link or snippet of code to your website. Your website will then let visitors make live online bookings.

You really could have live online bookings running in a few minutes if you are quick on your keyboard; maybe a half-hour otherwise.


(One caveat here: You might also need to enter your existing bookings, which could be time-consuming. You need to at least mark as unavailable those rooms you've already sold offline, even if you don't transfer all your guest details and so on into your new online booking system. But many online booking services will import your existing bookings for you, if you ask nicely. We do.)

2. It’s expensive
Nope. Some commission-based online booking software can get pricey, but with commission-based software you are only paying if you get bookings, so some people prefer that. But there are several non-commission-based services which charge a flat fee of around £20 / $30 / €30, which if you get more than a couple of online bookings a month will work out much cheaper than paying a commission. It is definitely much more expensive to have someone book elsewhere because they couldn't book online. It costs you money each time someone leaves your website to book elsewhere.

3. I’ll get double-bookings
Nope. If you choose an online booking system that also lets you record your offline bookings you can just use one tool for all your bookings. So there is no risk of double-bookings, everything is always bang up to date.


4. Guests will phone anyway
Maybe. Lots of guests do phone, of course, especially if they have slightly complex requirements. But there are very many guests who would prefer to book online. In fact, 55% of internet users will book online if they can.



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If you'd like to test out our online booking software, KeepMeBooked,  you can sign up here, or just watch a quick tour video here.