Real Time bookings have never been more important if you want to compete in the modern travel world.
NB: This is an article from Mews
These types of bookings are a win-win for both you and your customers, allowing your potential guests to book from anywhere at any time of the day, and freeing up your front desk to provide better service to the guests already staying with you because they no longer have to manage monotonous manual reservation tasks.
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Other benefits for your hotel include more operational efficiency, decreased expenses for human resources, and convenience, among others. Keep reading to find out the top six reasons why your hotel should manage online real-time bookings.
Why should your hotel manage online real-time bookings?
There are many reasons why your hotel should manage online real-time bookings, which we will look at in further detail below. It’s also important to consider that before you implement live bookings on your website, it’s fundamental to have a reservation management software in place that can handle this surge in direct bookings.
The right software will allow you to take care of room assignment, billing, manage groups, and to intuitively manage all the reservations as they come in. It is key to have all this in place before implementing any strategy aimed at promoting real-time reservations in order to ensure the success and profitability of your hotel. Now, let’s look at some reasons why you should consider implementing online bookings.
Convenience
To put it simply, enabling your website to accept direct bookings is more convenient. Plus, if you have software for managing reservations, your reservations will automatically sync up from your different channels so that you no longer have to manually input reservations as they come in over the phone. This also reduces the chance of manual errors.
In addition, availability is immediately updated when rooms are booked, thus making it easy for your hotel to update its prices based on live availability, and to avoid double bookings.
Increased operational efficiency
Real-time bookings are not only more convenient, but they also lead to increased operational efficiency. You can rely on your reservation software to automatically sync reservations across channels, freeing up your front desk to provide better service, instead of dealing with manually inputting reservations.
Increased operational efficiency is also achieved because since guests input their own data, you no longer have to waste resources tracking down missing information or if any details are wrongly entered in the system. All the information is readily available, including their payment method of choice, which saves time and resources after the fact.
