9 key things to look for in your Booking Engine provider

Your hotels Internet Booking Engine (IBE) should be flexible, fully controllable and a feature rich solution with in-depth reporting to allow you to monitor direct revenue results. 

While having the right booking engine is important, as a luxury hotelier you should also consider having the right IBE provider. 

They should be able to help you with brand promotions, cost you significantly less than other online channels, increase the lifetime value of your guests and finally be able to retain the loyalty of your returning guests. 

It may be a tedious task to shortlist hotel booking engine providers in this feature rich and highly competitive market. 

Here are the top 9 things you should look for in your digital and booking engine partner: 

According to research, almost 80% of customers book hotels from the ease of their mobile phones. 

Your IBE should be easy to use and navigate on all devices like laptops, mobile phones and tablets. 

Does the booking engine on your luxury hotel website promote exclusive book direct rates? 

These should be lower rates than those offered by online travel operators and a lucrative benefit for bookers on your hotel website. 

With recent trends in travel, hotel gift vouchers are a great choice for family and friends. 

Your IBE should support gift vouchers with different delivery options to allow gifting flexibility to the purchasers. 

Time and again, we have reiterated how an open booking panel converts 25-30% better than a closed booking panel. 

The booking panel on your home page should have pre-filled dates with easy search options to provide the visitors with a smooth browsing experience.

With the ever-changing landscape in technology, your booking engine provider must always be trying to push the boundaries and deliver new product benefits to cope with the changing market. 

You need a provider who is always planning and preparing themselves and you for the future. 

With the right reporting tools integrated with your booking engine, you can be confident of results. 

At Aró Digital Strategy, we aim to provide futuristic result driven reports to our clients with extensive solutions and suggestions to achieve higher book direct revenue. 

It's crucial that you can always capture trends and data on your current guests. 

This should be integrated with your booking engine to deliver better results and with a seamless experience for your current and future guests. 

For example, with the Aró Booking Engine, you can capture email data for your guests and target these guests in the future with pre-arrival and post departure offers while maintaining long term relationships with them. 

While your booking engine provider can deliver results on direct revenue, you should consider having the same provider for your other services like digital marketing and website design. 

This ensures a complete alignment of your digital strategy; a digital partner who understands the true essence of your services, can effectively deliver this to your end customer. 

Your Digital provider should work as your partner and should be willing to grow with you. 

They should always be pushing you harder to achieve higher book direct revenue while giving you suggestions to improve overall performance. 

At Aró Digital Strategy we are committed to providing our clients with a ‘5 star by every measure’ service. 

To learn more on contact us now.