This blog post looks at a real-life situation regarding online booking as observed by Carson Foerster, Director of Sales at Springer-Miller Systems.
I recently attended a conference in California last month. Upon landing at LAX, I realized I had forgotten to book a hotel reservation, whoops! As I waited to deplane, I immediately opened up Google Maps from my iPhone to get a birds-eye view of properties that were in close proximity to the conference facility. I came across a clean, reasonably priced, boutique hotel a few miles from my conference (and it was directly across the street from a sushi restaurant, bonus). I navigated through Google to the hotel website and clicked on the ‘Book Now’ button to reserve my room. This redirected me from the hotel’s online booking engine to a third-party website provided by the property’s distribution provider, allowing me to successfully complete my booking without issue.
That evening, I checked-in to the hotel and as I was given my room key packet and headed to the elevator, the front desk agent said, “thank you for booking directly with us!”. Interesting…did I really book directly with the hotel? Sure, I saved them the fees by not going through a pricey GDS or IDS channel, but booking engines located on a hotel website often still carry a per-reservation transaction cost.
Alternatively, WorldNXT, Springer-Miller’s proprietary online booking engine, offers a low-cost monthly subscription. For example, a 220-room hotel or resort property could save $10K, $20K, $30K or more annually by switching to a subscription model based on its overall size, rather than incurring transaction-based fees.
Here is a visual comparison of a property running WorldNXT Lodging Online Booking Engine versus a property running a different booking engine:
As you can see from this graph above, the total savings for this property would have been $18,140.50 per year, simply by switching to the WorldNXT Online Booking Engine. While it might seem like the better option at first to pay per transaction, we often see properties spending more on a year-over-year basis. In addition, with the added benefit of paying a flat fee per year with WorldNXT, you can better forecast costs and avoid any unnecessary, and often costly surprises.
To learn more about the WorldNXT Online Booking Engine, please click HERE.
About WorldNXT
WorldNXT is an online booking engine designed to increase revenue through your property’s most important online channel – your website. The fully integrated WorldNXT Lodging Booking Engine enables you to maximize reservations from your direct booking website by allowing guests to book rooms and packages online with real-time availability. Fully integrated into the SMS|Host Hospitality Management System, online reservations flow in real-time from the web directly into the system without incurring transaction-based fees.