A hotel booking engine system is used widely by hotels regardless of the size of the businesses ranging from small boutique hotels to medium-size, grouping hotels, and luxury types. A good online booking engine system is important to ensure it serves hotel business needs and purposes, at the same time making it convenient for guests to do the reservation online. 

Google is the most used and most popular search engine, approximately has 5 billion search queries in a day. That makes sense every business now should have one Google Business account. So, if you are opening a new hotel, let’s start to list your hotel on Google by following the below suggestions.

A payment gateway is a system that is used to process customers’ payments and is widely used by e-commerce websites to enable online payments. Hence, a payment gateway provider is a business that provides payment gateways as a service such as Eghl, Billplz, iPay88, and Paypal.

Google Maps was founded in 2005, where it helps people to get from Location A to Location B and it was available on desktop version only.  Today, Google Maps has been widely used by everyone in the world as it evolved into more than just helping people get around. 

In March 2021, Google is expanding its features by introducing free hotel booking links and showing them on Google Search and Google Maps. 

~ Updated on July  2023 ~ 

Every year, the number of hotel walk-ins decreases. Hotel bookings are now made online in the age of global digitalisation. Of that number, 40% are made through Booking.com, 32% through other aggregators, and 21% through hotel websites. That shows how important it is for hotels to connect to online booking channels to grow and attract more customers.

Latest update: It's here! Google Free Booking Link is now on Google Maps desktop and App! Check out how it works in this video below:

When travel resumes in earnest, people would need to find information and contact travel companies online quickly. For many years, Google has helped travellers find the perfect hotel by providing a list of options with reviews, photos, and amenities. In the Hotel Ads, prices and availability for specific dates of travel are shown in real-time. Google Free Booking is one of Google’s efforts to allow for more extensive access for users to see available listings they can book with. 

Many guests, especially the regulars, call the host to make a booking. This is good for the business. However, the host will end up answering tons of phone inquiries regardless of the time. Having the option to book online gives many advantages that are not only beneficial to you as the host, but to your customers as well.

After Airbnb went public listed, they are on a drive to increase their revenue. That is why the removal of guest service charges and moves to a 15% host commission model - up from 3% commission. Rising commission to the property is nothing new since most of the OTAs do so to the hotels over the years. Airbnb might follow the path to success set forth by other OTAs. The more hotel relies on OTAs, the harder for them to say "No" to the hike in commission. That's why many hotels focus on "direct booking" now to reduce their reliance on OTAs. On the other hand, the hike in commission is inevitable. After all, it's getting more costly for OTAs to distribute your Airbnb (or your room) because most of them are competing to sell to the same group of customers (fixed demand).

You love how OTA’s brings your hotel in with more exposure, but you wish you don’t have to pay them a very high commission. Here are a few tips to implement that will help you increase direct bookings in your website without needing to share your revenue with others.

Hotel Direct Booking is referring to the room booking received via the hotel's official website or via phone calls, emails, and walk-ins. This means that direct bookings made by the guests are without going through a middleman like OTAs which takes a commission from the bookings. A hotel direct booking is the cheapest channel for the hotel to receive bookings from guests, it serves the purpose to free commission which helps to maximize the hotel's revenue. 

The importance of hotel booking engines can’t be denied nowadays. People are becoming more comfortable with online booking, hence the demand for online hotel room reservations is also increasing. The power of booking engines should not be neglected as it gives a lot of benefits, most importantly reducing the number of paid commissions to OTAs. Hotels without online booking engine systems are reducing in numbers and quickly become obsolete.