Hi! We have a small hostel (25 beds) and we don't want to use the computer that much...we have our bed/room list on paper in front of us and a reservations book from which we transcribe all the reservations onto the bed/room list. when someone is a reservation, they are in pencil. when someone arrives, they get penned in. When someone pays, we highlight their name. Pretty simple. We'll stay with that.
Our main problem is that we are on Hostelbookers, Hostelworld, Gomio, and we use Max on our website booking system. We are constantly checking emails to make sure we haven't overbooked, and we put very little availability up, so that walk-ins won't have to leave, empty-handed.
It would be great to have a system where if we take a phone booking, we can immediately input that reservation on a program that then strikes the beds or rooms off of HB, HW, GO, or MAX...
Does Hostel power do this?
15 years
hostel power downloads gomio and hostelworld bookings (but doesnt adjust availability for phone bookings etc)... but i could never get it to work. the program has SO much potential but when i was using it, it was incredibly unstable. now that hostelsclub has bought it, they will hopefully be working on it full time and can resolve those issues.
15 years
the program has SO much potential
Hostelsclub should open-source it so other programmers could speed up the bug fixes and expand the features ;)
(Hostelsclub maintains copyright)
If it was programmed in C#, it could be converted to Mono so that it runs on Mac and Linux too.
15 years
Every hostel wants to do as you wish. Please see the adjacent thread "Software for taking online bookings". I summarised the situation as follows:
There seems to be some convergence of views here. It seems appropriate that we (software writers, supported by hostel managers) take the initiative to devise a practicable solution, namely a standardised format for data on bed vacancies that would be transferred from hostel computer system to booking engine, and for data on bookings that would be transferred the other way. The aim would be a system that any hostel could use, any software writer could build in to their system, and any booking engine could use. I will make a start. If any booking engine already has a system, we would be interested to hear about it.
Such an interchange format should be developed and promoted under Open Source principles, and I will be happy to work on it with that aim.
15 years
We're using hostel power right now and we're pretty happy with it. The online interface is the only part that doesn't work spot on. When we put a reservation into the system, it does strike out the bed on hostelworld (the only plug-in we're currently using) however, we cannot download reservations from hostelworld, which they advertise as a feature. It just isn't working. Could be that our new desktop has Vista though. I really like the way it looks and how easy it is, and that you can so easily use two currencies, that's huge for us.
15 years
...however, we cannot download reservations from hostelworld, which they advertise as a feature. It just isn't working. Could be that our new desktop has Vista though.
How long have you been using it?
(I'm wondering if it used to be a feature.)
15 years
We just swiched from a program called Ezres. The downloading reservations plugin comes with it, but there's a bug. You can synch your availability though, and it actually does this automatically every 2 minutes. So no more logging into HW and making sweeping availability changes.
15 years
we developed a plugin for hostelworld lately but the plugin worked for less than a month, thats because hostelworld doesn't want our system to interact with their booking engine (as they say if you want our booking engine you got to use our online system) untill we solve this problem the plugin wont work
thank you for using hostelpower
15 years
we developed a plugin for hostelworld lately but the plugin worked for less than a month, thats because hostelworld doesn't want our system to interact with their booking engine (as they say if you want our booking engine you got to use our online system) untill we solve this problem the plugin wont work
If you haven't seen it yet, you might be interested in this thread:
http://www.hostelmanagement.com/forum/f25/hostel-booking-engine-apis-hostelworld-hostelbookers-1722.html
15 years
I understand that the people who are running booking sites like HW are a little nervous about software they don´t know being connected with their servers all the time.
The solution is simple and obvious though: every booking site should provide a plugin which can be integrated in any software the hostels use. I understand that you don´t want to use any software at all in a hostel with only 25 beds - it´s simply not necessary, but there would even be an easy solution for cases like this: a simple software telling all those plugins "I have 25 beds, if one gets booked on HW tell the other booking sites only 24 are left". You would still download the bookings manually and use your "reservations book", only the booking site allocations are automatically synchronized.
15 years
I understand that the people who are running booking sites like HW are a little nervous about software they don´t know being connected with their servers all the time.
Is that the reason given? I don't see a difference between affiliate websites repeatedly connecting to a booking engine with an API and a front desk program repeatedly connecting to a booking engine with an API. :)
(API = Application Programming Interface)
every booking site should provide a plugin which can be integrated in any software the hostels use.
An API is something like a plugin. It accepts a request in a certain format. Example:
The software sends a bit of text to the API server that says:
The API responds:
That's all the data that passes. Credit card info never has to be transferred. If the hostel needs to charge a no-show, they could login to the booking engine's control panel.
The front desk software just has to make a method to send the request and read the reply. It's usually in a format call XML that is something like HTML.
Security is covered by things like encrypted connections and access allowed only to preapproved IP addresses. There would never be direct contact between the front desk software and the booking engine databases. Everything would run through the API.
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