Software for taking online bookings

I have experienced the difference. Maybe I was biased, maybe people´s attitude is different now than 10 years ago but I really had that impression when I first worked in a non-paper reception.

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.

I guess you've been working too much on your laptop and the hard drive overheated. I also had problems with my external hard drive last week when it accidently slipped out from my case and broke. Thank god it only had backup data from my laptop, so I still have all my important files. Otherwise than that, I had no problems with desktops (besides public ones, hehe :D)

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.

IMHO the only advantage it has that you can use it from anywhere.

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.

There are some situations what staff can't solve, that's when they call the manager...

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

It's only 30EUR per month, although I have to have a permission to plan it to the roof. It is the Hungarian division of Nextra from Telenor group... if that helps. If you can't find anything about it, let me know and I'll look into this matter.

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

I don't really expect that. What I'd rather expect is all booking engines should support plugins for independent softwares like Hostelpower, which supports the open source plugin architecture. It is both engines' and hostels' interest to sell more beds and have a real competition. BEs (Booking Engines) rather keep their territories, but in this case everyone lose on it. Liberated markets work always more efficient than monopolies.

HW should realize that BPO is not the perfect software which suits any hostels demands. They should be open for any platforms which sells more beds for the hostels.

A Hostel Association would be good for such purposes, gathering hostels together and push the BEs to such directions, not to mention common marketing purposes.

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.

Sounds interesting but it relies more on automatic actions and would be hard to follow up where did people make mistakes. IMHO, a software should support the receptionist and the management providing more detailed information, reports, follow operations history, and a complete operations support from reservations (including online bookings) until check out including all guest related operations. This should be topped with an easily handled surface and able to track mistakes.

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.

I agree and this is why we have a the paper system as well. Receptionists should write down payments to a sheet, not only to the computer. We have another sheet for the till which should be checked at every shift change.

But the main operations document: Daily report for guests list, the other side of it has the check out list including due payments. The bottom of it is for notes like lightbulb needs change in dorm A or so. And its just one page. We are a small hostel though.

Sounds like we don't need a software at all. However, reservations come through the internet and we need an updated info about the availabilities. The print out only shows the morning situation which changes during the day. The software shows always the current statement we have.

Also I prefer small repetitions. If let say, you enter a payment into the computer and to the paper, there is a 50% less chance for a mistake, as long as you can track it down on the other one.

Reservations (especially through the net) ten years ago was not as popular as nowadays. Any overbooking can lower your reputation, which is also an important factor now.

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".

That's what happens when those people write the software who have no clue about hostels at all!

Surely the fact that all the HW bookings we get are automatically integrated to our system and the availability taken off both our bedplan and hostelworld is an advantage? When you combine it with a commission free booking page on our website it's a real advantage.

So I suppose you only get HW bookings then... and it assures you that you will have a full house all year round! Not many hostels can say the same thing!

I can't see why HW would want to go opensource - BPO is one of their selling points - get rid of that and they lose their competitive advantage.

It looks like a Microsoft IE vs other browsers deathmatch: Remember when MS kept pushing IE with Win95 and 98? And IE still have got security issues...
Netscape was killed by then but Firefox is more popular than ever...

BPO is their main selling point... but not every hostel is interested using BPO, for example not even Klaus, although they have a huge traffic on their website and they would save a lot on a free booking page.

IMHO, HW should focus more on attracting more guests instead of selling BPO to the hostels, but they are more curious about what are hostels' reservation channels so they can check how bad is their competition catching up. So far, Hostelbookers catching up and Gomio is going down allegedly...

Also, I start thinking that there is only BPO "conversions" (I wouldn't call then sales as it is free) and facebook bookings are in the mind of HW's marketing department... but I'm also sure they are busy with their expansion in Asia and Central America right now.

Too bad the majority of hostels are in Europe. Yet.

No, I didn't say we only get HW bookings. And no, we're not full all year round. The majority of our bookings are done direct, either walk-ups or on the phone, and inputted direct into BPO. The main internet sources we have are HW and HB. I'd imagine a lot of hostels are in the same boat. If you don't like BPO, then I'm sure you won't use it. I'm just trying to make any other hostel managers aware of it who aren't. It is a viable front desk booking system.

I'm sorry if my previous post gave you an offensive impression, I didn't mean to. I just wanted to spot on several problems of the BEs market.

First of all, HW is too big and slow. It is important for a company which grows, to keep a transparency and a clean teamwork on tasks but it often happens that employees have too much freedom and they don't know how to work together efficiently. This usually regards to the lack of management, although sometimes it's called "liberal working environment". They have to have goals and plans to achieve those goals. Growing in Asia should not be at the price of having less sales of Europe. Even if the high oil prices are not their fault but they were focusing a bit too much on their "flashpackers" and blinking to the hotels market. I understand it though, because there is more dough. I understand it but it would not satisfy my sales, just as yours.

The main problem of it is their dominance. Lot of booking engines were born and died during the past couple of years because of it.

If a BE is not popular enough, hostels won't give it allocations. If a BE doesn't have any availabilities, won't sell beds, ergo no visitors, can't be popular (originally quoted from Josh). It's a catch 22, but a software with multiple engine capabilities would break this paradox. That's not the interest of HW as it would give more chance to their competition but it should be an interest of the hostels to ensure maximizing sales on multi legs. Also it would make a healthy race between BEs about improving costumer services, expanding markets and everyone could have a chance to build up their channels, would have budget to promote budget travels and we wouldn't be sitting in dump awaiting for HW to do something about getting more costumers in Europe, while they deal with hotels and Asian markets.

The problem which comes with it, there is not much alternative beside HW. At this moment, if HW doesn't sell well, we are literally f*cked. A lot of hostels built their marketing on HW since it is so efficient, some of them thinking about it like a messiah, a fried chicken which flies itself to our mouth.
IMHO, any marketing talented manager should avoid one-pole markets. The more legs you have, the more stable you are.

HW were very efficient at the beginning, that's true, that's how they became number 1, using their advantages. But as they become THE budget travel industry (as Ray Nolan stated as well truly in one of the PR articles), and they got bigger, the improvements slowed down. Just take a look of the topics of HW conferences in the past few years.

They have more and more bookings every year although IMHO, it's due their positioning on flashpackers/budget fliers and their expansions on the developing markets. It would be nice to see their detailed sales stats (by continent, country) to confirm their decreasing sales in Europe but I don't think they would give such secrets out and even although it should be public information so we could learn but that's what happens if there is a one company industry present. Someone should tell them sharing is caring.

Anyhow, anywhere I've been in Eastern Europe recently, there were complaints about the less tourists comparing to the past few years. You should know about your own situation and it would be appreciated if you all could share your experience as well.

Some suspects about the strong EEU currencies against the Euro, the weak dollar, also IMHO the Olympics have sucked away some even more tourists to Asia and the high oil prices didn't help at all as well, just to top of it.

Back to the topic, we all need a liberated market. Even HW should realize that the healthier a competition is, the better a market improves. Just take a look of hostels now, you know what I'm talking about. It should be the same with BEs, so they would be able to attract more costumers by expanding the market instead of just snatching them away from each other.

I don't really see it as the same as the browser wars as it's provided free whilst most other booking software I've used is paid for. It's probably unrealistic to think there'll be a lot of free software out there for such a specialized application, but maybe HB will implement a system?

If HB would have a system like that, it would be the same situation with BPO.
Own bookings supported only. We rather need a system which handles all booking engines. I can only imagine it in an independent environment, or would you run your own booking system on your competition's server?
I certainly wouldn't.

Which one worth more, having a free software which mainly sticks you to one engine or paying for a software which increases your sales on a long term?

Not to mention the administration excess with synchronizing, the bigger chance of overbookings, or the unsold beds due the wrong allocation setup.
The inbox system is old and difficult, BEs should recognize it and work on the second generation back offices.

From your post I'd assume you don't like BPO or HW which is fair enough, the dominant player in any industry will always get the most flak. I agree some of your criticisms are valid, and I'm certainly not trying to "sell" BPO or HW to anyone. Everyone should use what works for them - I'm not trying to tell you what works for you.

No offense taken! We are on this forum to discuss topics, help each other about problems, options and opportunities regarding our experience. If BPO suits for you, then I hope everything works just fine with it!

I just wanted to explain IMHO why BPO would be a dead track and why would be open source better from a marketing and industry point of view...

I'm not trying to tell you either how you should do your business, as it is not my business! ;)

I just wanted to share my alternative opinion about it!

Like as I said before, the bigger you are, the more you are responsible for your costumers. It should stand for even HW as well as they became the online budget travel industry!