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. 

It is very common nowadays that a hotel has an online booking system installed on their hotel website or social media. The hotels are able to get a direct booking from the hotel website or social media by omitting to pay the commissions to OTAs. However, not every online booking system is suitable for your hotel. For example, you currently found an online booking system is at the lowest cost, but the feature it offers is that it is not suitable for you. It is a waste for you that you are unable to fully utilize the features of the online booking system.

Most of the hotels received their bookings from OTAs, but a smart hotelier chose a direct booking strategy which can help to attract potential customers to book through hotel websites and build strong customer relationships. With a good hotel website, you will need to have a smart booking engine installed on your website, which may lead your guest to check out immediately while browsing through your website without going to OTAs to book it there, and also help to reduce your paid commission to OTAs and lastly drive in direct booking sales.

Here are the Top 6 Reasons why you should choose Softinn Booking Engine:-

Booking engine is a system in which the hotel receives a room reservation directly when the guest makes a room reservation through the hotel website or social media, such as Facebook. There are more and more hotels starting to install booking engines on their hotel website or social media because it can increase the hotel revenue by gaining direct booking. Besides that, installing a booking engine can increase the cash flow of your hotels. This is because you can receive the payments from the guests immediately.

In this generation, the competition in the hotel industry has made software providers roll out booking engines even when they are not yet ready. Some software providers don’t care about their clients after they have started using their booking engine. Because of this, it is very important to do your research before you decide to invest in any booking engine. Herein, we discuss the expectation vs. reality of hotel booking engines. 

Read also: Hotel Booking Software

These days a lot of software providers are developing booking engines. And because of this, many booking engines now saturate the market. Sometimes it becomes difficult for hoteliers to decide which booking engine is good for them. Some booking engine providers in their effort to add many features to their booking engine now complicate the software. This complicated software now makes the booking process looks troublesome. Below we are going to discuss some features to look out for when deciding on a booking engine for your hotel.

Read also: Booking Engine For Hotels

These days hoteliers are looking for ways to increase their direct booking. Direct booking from guests will actually increase the revenue of the hotel. No wonder hoteliers are doing everything to make sure they increase their direct bookings. They optimize their website, integrate a good booking engine on their website and social media. They also make sure that the booking engine design integrates seamlessly with the design of their website. They use clear call-to-action buttons and good landing pages. All these actions help in increasing hotel direct booking. But another important way of increasing hotel direct booking is to communicate the benefit of your hotel direct booking to your guests. 

 Read also: Strategies To Increase Hotel Revenue

The internet has changed people’s behavior. The tourism industry has changed because of the internet. People use the internet to do their research online. Travelers use the internet to compare hotels and their prices when deciding on their vacation destinations. Thanks to the internet as the booking process is no longer the same as before.

Nowadays, booking can be made earlier than the date of the stay. No queuing up at the front desk is required. Travelers can choose which hotel they want to stay based on previous guests. People use the internet to read reviews about the place they want to go to and the things they want to do. Below we are going to discuss the difference between online hotel bookings and offline bookings.

Read: 5 Comparisons - Free, Open-Source Booking Engines and Commercial Booking Engines

Before talking about ways to increase your property direct bookings, you must believe that direct booking will be beneficial to your hotel. There are many benefits of direct booking to a hotelier. The most obvious one being that it will bring in more profits to your hotel and of course, less dependent on OTAs. It is important to note that, there is no magical strategy that will automatically increase your direct bookings. But rather your direct bookings will come as a result of applying some strategies which we are going to discuss in this article.

Read also: Benefits of Hotel Direct Booking