Portable booking engine; a difficult concept
Reading Time: 2 minutesby Joao Trindade
Being at the forefront of innovation for the hospitality industry sometimes creates unplanned obstacles: how do you encapsulate in a “buzz word” a multitude of features in a way that people will understand: what it is and what it does? Let me tell you, it’s not easy. I think this is what happens when people hear about our portable booking engine. “Is this hotel booking engine really portable?”: Yes it is. “Ok, so what do you mean by portable?”: it’s actually a good thing you asked because this will allow me to explain how this works a bit better! I will give you 3 examples:
- You can post it in websites: Our Hotel Booking engine will allow you to place it on any website just by adding a link with a “book now” image. This means that if you have a restaurant or a surf academy that you partner with, you can easily add your hotel’s booking engine in their website and expand your visibility.
- You can post it in Facebook: Expanding your brand nowadays is a key success factor for hotels and Facebook is one of the main ingredients. With GuestCentric’s Portable booking engine you can add booking capabilities to Facebook that will allow people to book directly.
- You can send it via Twitter: So, you have your Twitter account setup and, with the help of GuestCentric’s Twitter Center, you are following a bunch of people that mention your hotel’s name or your location. If someone mentions that they want to travel on a specific time frame to your area, what do you do? With GuestCentric Portable booking engine you can send this person a tweet (a twitter message for those not yet familiar with these new words) with a link. This link can be setup to open the booking engine with the dates pre-selected and even the room choice pre-selected. How cool is that?!
Best of all, we’re always talking about the same booking engine, same back-office/platform and the same security. This means that you can do all this with no extra work, extra software and probably the most important factor, no extra cost!
PS: If you think you have a better term for it, I would love to hear it
(View Pedro’s presentation at the PhoCusWright Innovation Summit ’09)
for travel booking
Very nice point.