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Is there software to manage booking.com and hostelworld bookings together?

Front Desk Operations

Nathan Noerr started this discussion 7 years 6 months ago

Hi. I’m new here. I’ve been volunteering at a hostel in Malaysia and I found that they let half their beds on booking.com and the other half on hostelworld.com.

The problem is that if they book all their rooms out on say booking.com they struggle to move beds over to booking.com from hostelworld to allow more people to book (sometimes the system just refuses as it thinks they’re fully booked). This means potentially guests can think they’re full even when they have spare beds – so they’re leaving money on the table!

I spoke to another hostel afterwards and they seem to have a similar problem. I was wondering how people on here dealt with the problem?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

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Hayden JD

7 years

Heyo!

I'm a massive fan of using a peice of online software called CloudBeds.

I'm 100% unaffiliated with them, But 100% a fan.

It allows you to:

1. Automatically take bookings from Hostelworld, Booking.com, Agoda Etc Etc. More OTA's are being added all the time.
2. Instead of alocating X% of your rooms per service, It lets you put ALL your beds onto each booking engine, And once a room is booked it automatically lowers the avaliability on each platform. This leads to more beds filled and less overbookings.
3. Great Statistics! See that you've got a mid week slump in bookings? Shit, Time to throw up a 25% off promotion across all platforms *Which you can do through the Cloudbeds app* and get the beds filled!

It does cost a monthly fee, Which depends on the number of beds avaliable.

They've also got the best customer service across any booking management system I've ever experienced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFbpuFq-uEg

Throw them an email, Explain that you're a volunteer and want to show the features to your boss and they'll hook you up with a demonstration account.

Regards Hayden

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Rucksack Brian

7 years

Hi Nathan,

The general term for the software you’re looking for is a Channel Manager. It does exactly what Hayden explained above.

CloudBeds provides a channel manager called MyAllocator. Some other options that your bosses might look into are SiteMinder, ParityRate, or YieldPlanet.

Some Property Management Systems (PMS) will also connect directly to the booking sites, so a channel manager may not be necessary. Do you know which system you are currently using at the hostel?

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nathannoerr

7 years

Thank you so much both! This is precisely what I was hoping would exist :)

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Bugsy90

7 years

Just launched our 1 month trial with Siteminder today. Will let you know how we get on. 99% of our time is usually taken up with inputting bookings, very little time for anything else. Hopefully this Siteminder will be beneficial and user-friendly.

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Hotelogix

7 years

Hey Nathan,

Like Brian said, To manage your inventory and rates across multiple OTAs (booking.com and hostelworld) you need a channel manager. But channel manager alone might not be able to solve your problem as it also has certain limitations-

Most prominent one is that bookings coming from OTAs need to be manually tracked and entered into your property management system. And if it gets delayed in updating the booking, hostel may end up with a lot of over bookings.

Let me explain it with an example-

Let's assume that you have an availability of 20 rooms in your hostel which is updated across multiple OTAs through Channel manager.

If 10 booking comes from OTA 1 (booking.com) and 10 from OTA 2 (Priceline) that means there is no further availability of the room.

So the next step is to manually update the actual inventory on the channel manager.

However, OTAs will still be attracting more bookings because the inventory is not updated.

This will lead to Overbookings.

That’s where you need a smart property management system which can power you with 2-way communication between channel manager and frontdesk.

Hotelogix cloud-based property management system offers an easy-to-use, channel management interface, seamlessly integrated with the frontdesk which automatically tracks and updates OTA bookings into the PMS. It also allows you to update real-time rates and availability across all OTAs such as booking.com and hostelworld.

Know more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJoma_BxQNE

Disclosure: I am associated with Hotelogix

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ismail

7 years

What you are looking for is "Channel Managment", a software (better look for a cloud solution) that puts all your beds / rooms in all the channels (booking.com, Hostels.com, ...) and update automatically the available beds after any booking. so you avoid any overbooking.

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