WBS – deliver reservations directly into your PMS

WBS – deliver reservations directly into your PMS

The need for enhancing the Hotel’s web-based services

In the recent Benchmark Survey on Hotel Internet Marketing Budget Planning and Best Practices in Hospitality conducted by Hospitality eBusiness Consultants, it was found that Hoteliers should take a holistic view of the hotel on-line environment and adopt a comprehensive, long-term strategic approach to grow their on-line channel. According to the study:

No longer viewed as a source for only incremental sales, the hotels website is a major revenue driver where on-line booking and value added services are becoming compulsory to maintain guest loyalty. For the first time ever the industry reported that on-line business is coming from their own website more than third parties or corporate brand sites.

Unleash your PMS’s Potential

Applying business logic that integrates Opera PMS and our Web Booking Solution (WBS) is one of the main objectives within Hospitality Solutions. By working closely together with hotels, fully testing and following strict objectives we have the ability to deploy a Web Booking System with the following features that interface directly with your Opera PMS:

  • Individual Guest Bookings.
  • Guest Profile Logins. Increase guest loyalty and user experience by providing personalised guest login options to update preferences and addresses, modify existing bookings and cancel existing reservations
  • Travel Agent Bookings (with reservations directly linked to company or travel agent profiles).
  • Negotiated rates for companies and travel Agents.
  • Block booking availability for travel agents to check and book according to PMS block codes/allotments.
  • Web promotions packages linked to Opera PMS.
  • A fast Step by Step booking engine. The goal is to have users get a confirmation number from Opera PMS within 2 minutes of entering the booking page.
  • Continued seamless system upgrades and software development on the Web Booking System. This included changes needed as the result of Opera PMS upgrades.
  • Advanced weekly or monthly statistical reporting of web visitors using the web booking system to assist marketing and sales in achieving desired goals as per management
  • The WBS interface is language independent and was designed from the ground up for translation into multiple languages.
  • Mobile device compatibility. The WBS is accessible on mobile devices that support the HTTP1.0 protocol.
  • Integrated currency conversion of rates and prices (more than 35 main currencies supported)
  • Continuous monitoring of the Hotel’s on-site Opera PMS web services software, to ensure that the Web Booking System is not ‘down‘ or unavailable.

During the install phases, each hotel is given clear guidance on how to set up Opera PMS to take advantage of each respective feature.

Continued support and superior product knowledge covering both Opera PMS & Opera Web Service (OWS) and ‘Web Development Integration’ makes Hospitality Solutions so unique.

Detailed usage statistics, analysis and reporting

All pages in the Web Booking Solution process should be expanded in order to provide detailed usage statistics. Usage statistics is considered to be an invaluable tool in order to measure the effectiveness of on-line systems, and to provide insight into possible enhancements based on usage patterns.

Having access to detailed statistical reports will, at a minimum, enable the following functionality:

  • Look vs Book Ratio’s – Goal Funnels are set up to monitor just how many people visited the site and how many actually booked a room.
  • E-commerce– Once users book rooms we track what country they came from, how much they spent (room rate revenue), what room type was booked.
  • The visitor bounce-rate will be tracked. This is an extremely important tool as it identifies weak content sections where visitors choose to end the browsing process or close the website. Numerous usability and optimisation improvements can be made by simply tracking and analysing the bounce-rate.
  • The precise geo-location of visitors will be tracked. This will provide valuable marketing insight into the need of content-localisation for certain countries and regions.
  • Visitor loyalty will be tracked – It will pin-point the amount of unique visitors and help us identify potential abuse of services.It will also allow us to see which parts of the site visitors find interesting during certain times (seasons) of the year/month/week.
  • The amount of page views and amount of time each visitor spends on the site will be tracked. This will allows us to identify possible bottle-necks and areas where information is unclear or overly complicated.
  • Each visitor’s browser and system capabilities will be tracked. This information is extremely important from a software developer’s point of view. It allows us to be sure that we provide functionality for the highest majority of visitors and help us identify the need to expand the system for certain devices (e.g. to develop a mobile-phone friendly service if a significant amount of users try to access the service via hand-held devices).
  • Referrals will be tracked. Referral statistics help us determine the top sources that direct traffic to the web site, be it search engines (in which case the keywords that visitors searched for will be listed, allowing for further content optimisation) or other web sites. It will also allow detailed consideration of the price versus output ratio of paid advertisements on third party web sites.
  • An analysis and summary of each month’s statistics should be made and sent to management on a monthly basis (accompanied by the detailed statistical data).