Software for taking online bookings

Hey Gordo,

Actually, the staff have an incredibly easy time with it. I'm guessing that the problem you had was with staff you had, who had been working on a previous PMS, who switched over to Charts. This is very tough. Because Charts is very different from most other programs, switching over to Charts requires patience and a lot of training. However, any new hires pick it up in 6 hours of training (they can perform the basics such as taking reservations, checking people in and out). After about 12 hours of training they're very comfortable with everything. I can believe that there might be another program that is as quick and easy for receptionists to learn, but definitely not any quicker. And this is without a manual. I had one that I used with my first two employees, but found that they were just wasting time reading it. Every employee since just sits down with our Assistant-Manager and uses the practice version of Charts (exactly like the live version but it uses the information from the day before) to practice taking reservations, then check ins, how to take payments etc., and with 1 hour of training the first day and 5 hours the next, they're good to go with little supervision.

But yes, if the staff are switching from another PMS, they will definitely not like it at first and it will take them a while to learn it (including myself). But you will be so happy the next time you have a new hire!

Does anyone know anything about this? I've always been led to believe that BPO is free, and we get the deposit back off bookings on our website.

Here's what Hostelworld says (taken from the Hostelworld Inbox):

"What are the costs?
We take a 10% deposit but will pay you back 7.5% of this at the end of each month. This only applies to reservations originating from your own website. To cover processing costs, the first booking every day will not qualify for payback. We will also give you an optional 50/50 share on booking fees, giving you the option to charge no booking fee or to earn revenue from charging a booking fee. These processing fees save you having to pay separately for a secure site certificate, online merchant account set up fees, remittance fees, online processing fees and annual cc online merchant fees . They also ensure you benefit from our expertise in online reservations including integration with Backpack for Windows PMS, detailed reporting on own site bookings, multilingual customer support, implemention of tagging for PPC Engines, and high speed servers with multiple redundancy. Now you can benefit from all the additional advertising and marketing you do to promote your own website. By driving reservations through your own site you will ensure you get maximum benefits from these lower processing costs."

I'm wondering if people are fooled into thinking that they aren't paying anything because they're getting a refund, although according to this statement, it isn't a full refund. Or is this statement from Hostelworld false?

I'm wondering if people are fooled into thinking that they aren't paying anything because they're getting a refund, although according to this statement, it isn't a full refund. Or is this statement from Hostelworld false?

no, thats the way it works - but given that most of our bookings come through HW anyway (and it appears thats the same for most places these days), we're actually making more than we were prior to using BPO when HW would take 10% of every booking. for us, it effectively means HW is paying us to use their software.

If you're getting more reservations through HW than you are through your own website, then you have a serious problem with your website.

I think it may have to do with the number of the hostels in a city. It's a lot easier to get bookings through a hostel website when there aren't many hostels in a city. We're lucky in the US because there isn't serious competition yet :)