Juggling between multiple properties and reservations is often prone to errors and double bookings.
It can be stressful, time-consuming, and tedious trying to manage all the reservations when the season comes.
Luckily, hotel booking engines have simplified and automated the booking process for both parties.
However, the question is which one will suit your needs and budget the best.
That’s where we step in – to shed light on the best hotel booking engines and help you choose the most suitable solution.
Let’s dive in!
What is A Hotel Booking Engine (HBE)?
Аn Hotel Booking Engine(HBE) is software that helps you manage your hotel rooms and accommodations online, allowing guests to book them easily.
They are commonly integrated into hotel websites or online travel agency (OTA) platforms to facilitate seamless booking experiences for guests.
On the other hand, it allows guests to search for available rooms, view hotel information, and make reservations in real-time.
Although HBEs can vary, they usually share some key features.
Key Features of Hotel Booking Engines
1. Search and Filtering
You can search for hotels based on various criteria, such as location, dates, room types, and amenities.
This way, you can narrow down options based on preferences.
2. Real-time Availability
Provides up-to-date information on room availability, allowing you to see which rooms are available for booking at any time.
3. Pricing and Discounts
You can view room rates, special offers, and discounts.
The HBE often includes dynamic pricing, adjusting rates based on demand, seasonal trends, and booking lead times.
4. Secure Booking
HBEs ensure secure transactions by integrating with payment gateways, allowing guests to make reservations and payments online.
5. Integration with Property Management Systems (PMS)
HBEs can integrate with the hotel’s PMS to synchronize room availability, reservations, and other relevant data.
Hotel Booking Engines (HBEs) vs. Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)
Both HBEs and OTAs serve important roles in the hotel industry but cater to different needs and preferences.
Therefore, a hotel might choose to prioritize its own Hotel Booking Engine over relying solely on OTAs due to:
- Direct Revenue
When guests book directly through the hotel’s website using the Hotel Booking Engine, the hotel avoids paying commissions to third-party OTAs.
This means a higher percentage of the booking revenue goes directly to the hotel, contributing to increased profitability.
- Brand Loyalty
Direct bookings help build and reinforce brand loyalty, leading to potential repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
- Control over Pricing and Policies
Hotels have more control over their pricing strategies and policies when bookings are made through their own booking engine.
They can implement special promotions, discounts, or loyalty programs tailored to their specific needs without being constrained by OTA agreements.
- Personalized Upselling
HBEs allow for personalized upselling by offering guests additional services, amenities, or room upgrades during the booking process.
- Flexibility and Customization
HBEs offer more flexibility in terms of customization because you can tailor the booking process, user interface, and overall experience to align with your brand.
Despite these advantages, we aren’t implying that your hotels shouldn’t use OTAs.
Striking a balance between direct bookings and OTA partnerships is often a part of a hotel’s overall distribution strategy.
The key is to use a combination of channels that maximizes revenue while maintaining control over the guest experience and brand image.
And now, let’s check the best hotel booking engines.
5 Best Hotel Booking Engines To Try This Season
1. OTA SYNC
OTA SYNC is an all-encompassing hotel property management software that helps hotels seamlessly manage bookings and operations within a single app.
Being an all-in-one tool, it helps you with every step in the booking process and provides features belonging to 3 major groups:
- Property Management System,
- Channel Manager, and
- Booking Engine.
In addition, OTA SYNC provides a 2-way XML connection with all major OTAs, but it also has rich integrations with platforms like Paypal, Stripe, AdriaScan, HubSpot, etc.
Moreover, OTA SYNC offers an open API.
Key Features
✨ Booking Engine – An online reservation system integrated into a hotel’s website, allowing guests to book rooms directly, check room availability, view pricing, and complete secure bookings in real time.
✨ Channel Manager – Manages and updates room availability, rates, and bookings in real time, ensuring consistency across multiple OTAs and booking platforms
✨ OTA Payments – A fully integrated payment gateway that uses automation to process transactions instantly.
This way, you can accept customer payments through various online, in-store, or mobile channels.
✨Multi-Property Hub – Integration that allows you to connect a customized booking engine to your website and drive increased bookings while creating a better guest experience.
✨ Statistics & Reports – Provide valuable statistics into the number of nights your guests have stayed, your average and max revenue, monthly occupancy, etc.
✨ Guest App – Adapts to your guests’ needs and offers quick check-ins, tailored recommendations, instant notifications, etc.
OTA SYNC is a robust platform catering to all hotel sizes, that can help you run your everyday operations and bookings more efficiently and easily.
Pricing
The price depends on the number of properties and rooms. Pricing starts from €22.08 per month for 1 property with 1 room.
Each plan comes with a 14-day free trial.
OTA SYNC: Pros & Cons
Pros:
🟢 A robust set of features.
🟢 Easy onboarding without the need for account manager assistance.
🟢 A centralized and intuitive dashboard.
Cons:
🔴 Lacks Online check-in and Upselling features, but they are coming soon.
2. SiteMinder
SiteMinder is an online hotel booking engine catering to all hotel sizes and providing solutions to increase hotel sales, direct booking, hotel occupancy and hotel revenue.
It offers features ranging from Hotel Channel Manager, Global Distribution Systems,
Guest Engagement over Hotel Booking Engine to Property Management Systems.
SiteMinder’s core features fall into 7 categories:
- Channel Manager
- Booking Engine
- Business Insights
- Payments
- Reservations
- Integrations and experts
- Multi-Property.
SiteMinder integrates with more than 450 booking channels and Global Distribution systems (GDS), wholesalers, Property management systems (PMS), etc.
Key Features
✨ Mobile bookings – Enables you to book from a mobile in 3 steps.
✨ A flexible date calendar – Allows you to book multiple rooms in a single reservation.
✨ Manage guest reviews – You can auto-trigger reviews on Tripadvisor for guests who’ve stayed at your place.
✨ Guest experience – Provides extras, add-ons, special discounts, etc., to enhance guest experience.
✨ Payment processing – Provides tools to automate your payments, take instant payments and refunds, send payment requests, etc.
Pricing
SiteMinder has 3 Premium Plans with a 14-day free trial each. The pricing changes depending on the room count.
SiteMinder: Pros & Cons
Pros:
🟢 Easy to set up.
🟢 A great number of integrations.
Cons:
🔴 Not very responsive customer support.
🔴 Lack of customization options for the Booking Engine.
🔴 You have to pay extra for certain features as add-ons.
3. Profitroom
Profitroom is the booking platform that includes:
- The Hotel Booking Engine,
- The Marketing Automation platform with CRM functionalities,
- The Channel Managers,
- Digital Marketing Services and
- Access to reporting and data insights.
The platform provides solutions to enhance guest experience and facilitate the booking process.
In addition, it automates personalized guest communication and offers features like stay opportunities, package selling, and automated reminders.
Profitroom has integrations with multiple platforms, such as OTAs, GDS, PMS, payment platforms, etc.
Key Features
✨ Booking process recovery – Provides a built-in abandoned cart recovery mechanism.
✨ Availability assistance – Automatically suggests alternatives for unavailable dates of rooms or other properties within a hotel group.
✨Dynamic pricing – Supports multiple pricing methods, applies dynamic pricing, and offers special discounts, promotional codes, vouchers, etc.
✨ Multi-properties – Enables bulk updating prices, availability, and channel management for more than one property.
✨ Automated communication with guests – Allows you to set up automated responses, confirmation emails, and personalized messages.
Pricing
The pricing is on demand.
Profitroom: Pros & Cons
Pros:
🟢 A guest-centric platform.
🟢 Easy to use and set up.
🟢 Has a great variety of integrations.
Cons:
🔴 Doesn’t have transparent pricing.
🔴 You have to pay extra for certain features as add-ons.
🔴 Can glitch from time to time.
4. innRoad
innRoad is a cloud-based PMS catering to independent and boutique hotels, inns and BnBs, etc.
The software provides solutions to streamline the booking process, migrate your data, automate tasks, manage your revenue, etc.
The core features comprise:
- Property Management
- Booking Engine
- Task Management
- Revenue Management
- Advanced Reporting.
Additional or optional features that you pay as add-ons include Payment Processing
Channel Management, Online Check-In / Check-Out, Website Development, and Google Booking Links.
Regarding integrations, innRoad integrates with industry-leading OTAs like Google, Airbnb, Vrbo, etc.
Key Features
✨ Hotel Booking Engine – Provides customization options for your PMS, real-time availability calendar
✨ Rate syncing – Guarantees the best rate by syncing rates and availability across booking channels.
✨ Guest Experience – Provides the possibility to include extras, perks and add-ons for your guests.
✨ Revenue management software – Monitors and measures your property’s performance.
✨Yield Management Tool – Increases or decreases your rates based on your occupancy percentage.
Pricing
The pricing is on demand and depends on the property (size, room count, specific needs, etc.), but it is around $150 per month for most properties.
innRoad: Pros & Cons
Pros:
🟢 Good customer support.
🟢 Easy to use.
🟢 Has customizable online booking features.
Cons:
🔴 The software can glitch from time to time.
🔴 The group booking isn’t user-friendly.
🔴 Lacks automated cancellation emails.
5. HotelRunner
HotelRunner is sales, operations, and distribution management platform catering to properties of all sizes.
It provides various features ranging from the Booking Engine, Channel Manager, PMS over Metasearch, and Business Intelligence to Analytics and Reporting.
Although it offers features typical of PMS, its main focus is direct sales optimization in order to reduce reliance on OTAs.
Thus, regarding integrations, HotelRunner doesn’t integrate with OTAs, but it lets you connect your desired PMS, revenue management system, web app, or other third-party software.
Furthermore, you can use HotelRunner API to integrate your third-party apps.
Key Features
✨ Booking Engine – Accept direct bookings, receive online payments from your website, and display your rates and availability in real time.
✨ Promotion Engine – Offers special deals, promotions, coupon codes, etc.
✨ Multiple currencies – Supports 159 currencies and local tax rates.
✨ Autopilot – Automates your sales, distribution, and operations and triggers automation according to your set preferences,
✨ Rate Intelligence – Compares your rates with competitors, cross-checks your rates on different sales channels, etc.
Pricing
HotelRunner has 1 Free and 1 Premium Plan starting from $9.95 billed annually. However, you have to pay additionally for integrations with other systems and add-ons.
HotelRunner: Pros & Cons
Pros:
🟢 Easy-to-use interface.
🟢 Has a mobile app.
🟢 Fast and accurate updates.
Cons:
🔴 Only annual billing is possible.
🔴 Customer support isn’t very responsive.
🔴 The app crashes from time to time.
Wrapping It Up
Choosing the right hotel booking engine is paramount for hoteliers and travelers.
Furthermore, hotel booking engines have highlighted the importance of real-time availability, secure transactions, and personalized experiences.
Each of the HBEs above provides robust features to facilitate your booking processes.
However, one solution stands out because it addresses the full hotel management rather than a specific functionality.
Furthermore, its pricing plan doesn’t charge you additionally for extras and add-ons.
Why Should You Opt For OTA SYNC?
OTA SYNC is a robust PMS catering to hotels of all sizes and providing innovative solutions to streamline and facilitate your everyday operations, booking, payments, etc.
Furthermore, OTA SYNC enables you to:
🔥 Do easy onboarding that doesn’t require external assistance.
🔥 Easy setup of different market-specific tax settings.
🔥 Use premium management functionalities such as housekeeping, guest experience, and event management within a property.
🔥 Manage multiple properties from a centralized dashboard without switching from one account to another.
🔥 Benefit from deep analytics tools to see how your property performs.
🔥 And so much more.
Enticed to explore OTA SYNC more?
Sign up for OTA SYNC today to automate and streamline the way you manage bookings.
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