What a hotel booking engine does and why you need one

At 11:30 at night, a guest fills in the enquiry form on your website: two adults, Friday to Sunday. Your reply goes out at 9:15 the next morning, polite and complete. By then she has booked another hotel, on an app that confirmed in a minute. This post explains what a booking engine does, what a good one shows the guest, and what it should cost you.

An enquiry form asks the guest to wait

An enquiry form turns a guest who wants to book into a guest who has to wait. Someone at your hotel has to read it, check the dates, work out a price and reply. At night, that can take until morning.

An OTA app doesn't make anyone wait. It shows the price, holds the room and confirms. Guests are used to that now, so a form on your own site feels like a closed door.

A phone number doesn't fix it either. The desk can't answer well at 2 am in the middle of a late check-in, and some guests would rather not call at all. A booking engine does the reception's first job on your website, at any hour.

	Enquiry form	Booking engine
Price	Sent in your reply	On screen, for the exact dates
Availability	Checked by hand	Live, from your inventory
Confirmation	Your next reply, maybe next morning	Straight away, with a booking reference
The room	Can sell elsewhere while you reply	Held while the guest types their details
Your staff	Reply to every enquiry	Welcome the guest on arrival

An enquiry form that makes a guest wait until morning hands the booking to an OTA.

Live rates and real rooms, from the same inventory as your OTAs

The most important thing a booking engine does is invisible. It reads the same inventory as your front desk and your channel manager.

That matters in two ways. A room shown on your website is a room that is really free, at the price your rate plans set. And when a guest books it, that room closes on every OTA at once, so nobody can sell it twice.

An engine that keeps its own separate stock of rooms, updated by hand, brings back the old problems. Rooms get sold twice, or rooms sit held back for the website while the OTAs could have sold them. What a channel manager does explains how one shared inventory prevents both.

A good engine also holds the room for a few minutes while the guest types their details. That way no other channel can take it halfway through a booking.

What a good booking engine shows the guest

A guest on your booking page is asking the same questions they would ask at the desk. The page should answer every one before they have to ask.

ZimmerStack's booking page shows each of these. Promo codes are part of the Scale plan.

The price beside the OTAs' only helps if yours is lower. If an OTA sells the same room for less, the comparison works against you. Why your website must never cost more shows how to keep your own price the lowest.

Your booking page has to work on a phone, on mobile data

Many guests find you and book from a phone, often on patchy mobile data. A page that looks fine on the office computer can be slow and fiddly in a guest's hand. Test it the way a guest would.

Every box you remove and every second you save gives a guest one less reason to go back to the app.

Pay at the hotel or pay now: choose what fits your guests

There are two ways to take a direct booking, and each has a trade-off.

• Pay at the hotel. The guest confirms without a card and pays at the desk. It is the easiest way to book, but a guest who doesn't turn up has paid nothing.
• Pay now, in full or as a deposit. It protects you from no-shows, but each extra step at checkout gives some guests a reason to leave.

ZimmerStack's booking engine confirms bookings with pay at the hotel. Payments are recorded on the guest's folio when they are made, and ZimmerStack does not process card payments itself. If you want a deposit, collect it the way you already take payments, and record it against the booking.

To cut down on careless bookings, ZimmerStack can ask guests with an Indian mobile number to confirm it with a one-time code. That way every pay-at-hotel booking comes with a number that really reaches the guest.

What a booking engine costs, and what ZimmerStack charges

Booking engines are usually paid for in one of two ways: a monthly fee, or a percentage of each booking. A percentage feels cheap when you have few bookings, and it grows as your direct business grows.

With ZimmerStack, the hotel website is free. The booking engine is included in every paid plan, from ₹199 ($3.99) per room per month, with 0% commission on bookings. A hotel on the free website can also switch booking on for a small share of each direct booking instead (5% today), which the hotel sees and accepts before booking is switched on. The booking engine page shows what it looks like to a guest.

Worked example

What the booking engine has to earn back

In this example, a 20-room hotel is on the Essential plan at ₹199 per room per month, which is ₹3,980 a month. Its website takes 15 bookings a month that would otherwise have come through an OTA, each worth ₹6,000, at 18% commission.

• Each of those bookings saves ₹1,080 in commission.
• Fifteen of them save ₹16,200 a month.
• Four such bookings cover the whole monthly plan.

Your own numbers will differ, so put them into the OTA commission calculator. Then read how to increase direct bookings for the other half of the work: sending guests to the page.

See your hotel website with booking built inType your hotel's name, pick a template and see where the booking button sits. You sign up only when you want to keep it.Design my website

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