Using a booking system for your property serves two main goals; 1) you get to manage your bookings easily in one system, 2) your guests get an optimal booking experience because of your easy-to-use booking form. These goals already hint how your booking system should function and what your booking form should look like, whether you run a surf camp or a yoga retreat venue. You want it to be simple to use yet state-of-the-art – so guests are inticed to book instantly.

A calendar

Your booking form on your website should contain a visual calendar for your guests to see your availability and book directly for a desired period. It should be clear from the calendar what rooms are available, for which dates and at what price

Images

Of course beautiful images of your rooms as well as your property itself can not be lacking. Make sure your booking system has the ability to add photos to the booking form on your website in order to give your guests a clear picture of what you are offering. It will also encourage your guests to book directly and reduce the need for them to contact you to ask questions about your products.

Multiple payment options

Not all of us feel comfortable leaving our credit card details online. Your booking system should support other payments options such as iDeal and PayPal to make booking convenient for all of your guests.

Discount & Gift Vouchers

Not only do you want to push marketing activities such as promo deals or coupon code giveaways, you also want to track performance of such marketing campaigns. It’s up to the booking software to make this possible.

Language and currencies

Your guests come from all parts of the world. You want your guests to use your booking form with ease when booking their holiday. Therefore, you need to make it as simple as possible for them to retrieve information about your products. Include the option to set languages and currencies to customer’s preference.

Real-time booking

Gone are the days of phone and email to make a booking. Your guests want to book with minimal clicks. Your booking system should therefore allow for bookings to be made directly and for guests to receive confirmation immediately.

Email automation

As mentioned, you don’t want to spend time emailing back and forth with guests about their booking. Automated emails to send booking confirmations, payment requests and arrival information really help you save time managing your business.

Channel management

In addition to your own website, you probably get bookings through channel such as Booking.com, AirBnB, etc. Your booking system should be able to receive bookings from all of your channels and automatically update availability through syncing your calendars. , This should happen in real-time to avoid overbookings.

Third-party integration

Your booking system helps you manage all of your booking data. Customer data you use for marketing purposes, as well as financial data for bookkeeping. Integrations with third-parties for marketing tools such as Facebook or Google Adwords are important to make use of this data for marketing your business. Integrations with financial management systems are also important for handling your business finances.

Reporting options

A state-of-the-art booking system also allows you to do get a quick overview on the status of your business for you to be able to take immediate action. This should include overviews of payment statuses, revenues, occupancy rates, but could also include an overview of your bookings per channel.