15 years
I can only say what we have done, there are many other ways to do this, but most of them will cost money. The people who sell them to you will tell you that they will make more money for you than they cost. This probably depends where you are and how busy you'll be.
-We use Backpackonline from hostelworld as our front desk software
-We have one booking system integrated with our website - I can't see how you could integrate 3. You'd have to have 3 seperate booking forms to do this which would confuse people.
-Our website uses the Hostelworld booking engine which is integrated with backpackonline so bookings come straight through on that with no manual allocation needed.
- If you want to integrate many different Booking Engines to your front desk software you'll have to pay for this - how much I'm not sure.
With our system the bookings that come through our website we get the 10% deposit paid to Hostelworld refunded to us (less Credit Card fee). If the bookings are made through HW itself then they keep the 10% deposit. In our market (rural small hostel) I've found not much traffic through hostelbookers. I haven't tried other booking engines.
My goal is to drive as much of the traffic through our wesite as possible - I think this is the best thing to do, rather than rely on HW, HB, gomio, HC or whatever to do it for you. I guess that it might be different in different markets - you'd have to research that for where you are. They say that say Hostelclub is big in the medeterranian countries.
As far as what the various softwares that are about that will manage bookings on different booking engines I have no idea about them as I've never used them. Not many of them that post on here seem to be too up front with costs though - you have to go and dig about on ther websites and even then it can be hard to know what they'll cost you.
Good Luck
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