Features That Are Mandatory In Any Online Hotel Booking Engine
The hotel industry is blooming rapidly all over the globe. People look for hotels while going on vacations and holidays as well as when they go on business trips. The requirements of hotels have increased many times over the past few years. Bookings in the hotels also need to be made in advance so that the availability of the hotel is confirmed. With the advent of the Internet, making hotel bookings online has become extremely easy and convenient. Most of the well-known and reputed hotels have their own websites and an online hotel booking engine that helps in making online bookings.
People do not need to go and check personally for availability of rooms in a hotel or need to call up the hotel to enquire about rooms. With the help of the booking engine, all kinds of information are displayed to the customers directly and they can check status on their own and make decisions accordingly. The moment a room is booked online, it is shown unavailable to other customers. So there is no confusion regarding double booking at all. As soon as bookings are made, a confirmation mail is received by the applicant. This ensures that the booking has been made. The print out can be taken to the hotel as proof of the booking made.
Any online hotel booking engine should have the following features to be more appealing to the customers:
• The form that needs to be filled up by the customer for making the booking should be simple. Details like number of rooms, category of rooms and the dates for which the bookings are made should be there. Others additional details should be avoided as customers might get distracted. The search results that are obtained after putting in the details should be fast as customers might not have the patience of waiting for long for the results to be displayed.
• In case a room is already booked, it should be clearly mentioned in the booking engine. This helps in avoiding any kind of confusions while making bookings. In case the bookings of the room are cancelled, it should again be made available and displayed in the search results.
• Before making bookings for the rooms in various hotels, people like to have a look at the rooms. Therefore, it is a great idea if the online hotel booking engine has pictures of the rooms from different angles so that people can have a look at the rooms and then make their minds in booking the rooms of their choice.
• The hotel booking engine should also display the tariffs clearly. There should be no hidden costs and the prices should be displayed with all the taxes and other service charges included. Hidden prices are often misleading and confuse customers, as they see a kind of price on the booking engine and when they make payments, greater amounts are deducted.
With advanced technological improvements, various kind of features are being implemented and integrated with the hotel booking engines online so that they become more effective and help customers in a greater way. Effective booking engines help in saving lots of time of the customers as well. Any changes are also informed to the customer via email or by short message text.
