Software for taking online bookings

IMHO the blue screen of death was buried with Windows 98. XP so far is the best solution from Microsoft, although it has it's own miserable behaviours, slowing down, etc. Also hard disks are more reliable than before, as the technology advances. There are also lot of goodies available from the Internet, such as Zonealarm, AVG, Ad-Aware, Spy-Bot, etc. A regular user just goes up to download.com and checks for any popular freeware software can easily choose the best solution for their own.

I had one of those blue screens two weeks ago when the hard drive of my laptop died. You are right, XP is pretty good. I was able to restart the computer - it took the whole night and it was terribly slow and unstable, but I was able to copy all of my data to an external hard drive.

You are also right that anyone who knows at least a little bit about computers can avoid something like that happening in the first place.

Still - if you refuse to bother about it a browser-based software is a good solution. Probably only for small hostels though because browser-based software is somewhat limited in the things it can do.

Thanks, but I'd rather look for a stable solution than calculating with "what if" situations. Because what if I'm on a holiday? :D

That question applies to every tricky situation which may occur in your hostel. If you don´t have staff you can rely on you can´t go on holiday.

We are thinking about a new offer, a cable free access, by a satellite dish and it can provide about 8-10MBps bandwith... it works on AM-micro frequency.

Aha, sounds interesting. What´s the price for that?

Oh yes, a big pain in the ass. But so far, none of the booking engines want to support any softwares. HW supports his own backpack online but nothing else, although it is not supported by any other booking engines. So the cold war goes on and hostels keep suffering! :rolleyes:

As much as that sucks, you can´t really expect Hostelworld to provide you with free plugins for Hostelbookers.

I was working with "The Book"... Good if you are alone, but unreliable working with employees. Anyonce can skim money simply not writing the guests in and you need to have a second book for incomes and expenses, a third book for reservations, etc. Or if you have a better experience, please share it.

My experience was this: in my first hostel, we had "The Book" for the reservations. When somebody checked in, he filled in a registration form. When he paid, we typed the bill into a cash register - one of those old monsters you can now buy for EUR 10 on the flea market. The receipt came out twice - one for the guest, the other one was stapled to the registration form and the whole thing was put into "his" pidgeon hole in the big key cabinet on the back wall of the reception. The check-out date was printed in big letters on the top of the receipt - the side you see sticking out of the pidgeon hole. You could see in an instant who was due to check out (or pay another night) even though we had 509 beds. That system was pretty scam-proof.

IMHO, if you have a software, it makes operations faster, although we kept some parts of the written administration as well for double checking purposes.

Yes, but computers have a disadvantage. If you have the result of someone´s mistake on a computer screen, not everybody recognized it as a mistake, because people think "the computer is always right". Sounds trivial, but results in unnecessary debates with guests who are actually right but not trusted because they are "only" human, hence fallible.

Another disadvantage: a software is never made to be compatible with every possible situation. You sometimes spend a lot of effort to make the computer do what you want to do. That never really works perfectly and the next guy in the reception has no idea what exactly you had in mind with that booking...

Another disadvantage: we have to train our staff NOT to stare into the screen when they deal with guests, like check-in or check out. When guests think you are more busy with your computer than with them they don´t like that. The fact of the matter is though, bad reception software makes you busy. It does NOT make things getting done faster than with "The Book".

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