If Your Hotel Booking Engine sucks…It’s Time to Wake Up!
I have always been close to the hospitality sector. As many of you know, I started my career there. After moving to the hyper-competitive world of search engine marketing, I quickly noticed that other sectors of the economy are VERY serious about their revenue delivery machines, aka shopping carts.
However, years later, the hospitality sector continues to suffer from apathy when it comes to their own booking engines. Here are some of the top booking engine issues that plague hotels today:
Cannot Track PPC
Really? Its 2009, and still the majority of booking engines don’t let you track PPC revenue. This issue stems from a total disregard for the hotel owners and marketers who are spending marketing dollars on Google. Can you imagine how hard it is for a marketing agency to discuss a Google campaign with an owner when they can’t track ROI? Booking engines that cannot provide this capability should be fired by hotels right away.
Failure to Communicate
Many PMS companies trap hotels into using primitive add-on booking engines that connect with their product. (PMS = property management system used by the front desk to manage guests.) Hotels end up using these booking engines because they simplify operations: reservation information is delivered directly to the PMS at the front desk. My question is: Why should hotels be made to choose between convenience and revenue?
Losing money online in the name of “connectivity” is a sad way to run a hotel. Charging hotels thousands of dollars to provide PMS connectivity is a sham. Logic check: When a hotel buys a PMS, the PMS guys should know that there is this thing called internet that will send reservations to the system. Same goes for the booking engine champs. You know that a hotel cannot manage guests without a PMS, so please get moving on connectivity. This lack of communication has got to stop.
Dismal Reports and Usability
Adding insult to injury, some of the booking engine reports I have seen over the years have been shocking. Usability “improvements” touted by some of the hotel booking engine companies can be likened to putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. Useful data is not an oxymoron… PPC stats, Bounce Rates, Denials, etc, are essential for making long-term marketing and ROI projections. If your booking engine does not give you custom reporting, or if it takes more than 4 clicks to book a room…it’s time to move on!
Flash + One Screen = Shiny!
In the last 2 years, hotel have been seduced by new, shiny, one-screen flash booking engines. But I have always insisted that it’s better to emulate the successful kids than the cool kids. Look at Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. They sell more room nights that any hotel brand. Have they switched to a flashy one-page booking engine? Ask yourself why not… Simple answer: it’s all about usability. These online giants spend millions on website usability… the multistep booking engine has to do with getting progressive agreement from a guest who is about to book. So follow the leaders, or lose yourself in the shiny collateral your booking engine vendor sent you!
Booking Fees
Why are you sharing your revenue with your booking engine vendor?
This is my biggest issue with booking engines. Owners own the hotel, run it, and pay for marketing, yet hotel booking engines out there are asking for a booking fee ranging from 2%-8%. Someone call the cops! Most of the shopping cart solutions I’ve worked with in retail have had phenomenal tracking, usability, and the ability to move thousands of different products online… BUT they offer flat fees. Hotels, stop bleeding revenue and switch to a flat fee system. Nobody should be taking a piece of your revenue when all they have done is give you a piece of software. If the retail industry can enjoy the benefits of robust shopping carts minus the booking fees, why not hotels?
But wait… there is hope!
Someday the open source revolution will hit the hotel sector bringing with it a wave of relief. Hotel booking engines and PMS systems need to stop over-complicating things and move into the new age of web usability. There should be a bug-free open source interface between the hotel PMS and all the booking engines out there. This advance will save hotels millions of dollars in “booking fees” and “connectivity fees” and give them real freedom to choose the systems they like best.
Coding a decent booking engine is not rocket science (I have confirmed this with numerous rocket scientists), so let’s stop pretending that it’s too hard to give hotels what they want.
Hotels owners: be selective, and ask your vendors the hard questions. Booking engine companies: get off your commission-hogging behinds and start investing in better technology. Let’s make this internet thing work as well for hotels as it has worked for other sectors, and stop treating them like second class web citizens.
