Useful Articles - Your Hotel Booking System or PMS, choosing the right one

Time is precious, especially for the smaller owner-managed hotel or guest-house. We are very aware that simplicity is not just important but essential, because installing a booking reservation system may seem like a daunting prospect & there are now many options for hotel booking software.

We decided to put together this page to help you make an informed decision on the options you have available. There are quite a few hotel management systems available nowadays and some claim to be all things to all men while others are more specific, hopefully this article will be of help.

Price verses Functionality.
The price of a hotel booking system can vary wildly. From free, to tens of thousands of pounds! If you are running a large hotel with 100's of rooms, an integral system in the thousands of pounds may be suitable, but if you are managing an establishment with 50 rooms or less, you should be able to spend a lot less than this without foregoing functionality. If you are on an extreme budget, some of the cheapest systems may be suitable but the majority of these simply replace your booking reservation diary and offer some reporting. CaterBook is designed to be simple to use, affordable and still have the up to the minute functionality that makes it outstanding value for money. In fact there are many areas where CaterBook is ahead of the game, offering features that even the most expensive systems don't yet have.

What price is the system including the online bookings?
Be very wary of the price you are being charged... do you have to pay extra for features you are going to need, if the system is to be useful? What are the ongoing costs of the software? Are you going to be charged commissions and transaction charges for online bookings? The apparently small percentages can very quickly mount up to big figures! Remember why you are looking for a property management system - It should save you time and money, not lock you into a situation where you are paying other people for your bookings. It may be tempting to head for the cheapest hotel booking system you can find, but remember you will be running your business with whatever you purchase and penny pinching at this stage could be an expensive mistake in the future. Make sure you have a clear picture of the costs of the booking system you are purchasing before finding out you have to pay more later on. How much is the annual cost for continuing support? How much are the charges if you use online bookings? Are you going to be charged commissions? Are you going to be charged for credit card transactions? For our part we make it clear right from the start: no commissions, & no transaction charges.

What functionality?
Do you need to pay extra for functions you don't need or will never use? It may sound fancy at first, but do you really need to automatically fax the newsagent with a newspaper list? Also keep in mind that if the hotel booking system you get has every function under the sun, you may need a masters degree, a lot of time and many days of training to get around the software. Training is very expensive and if you have staff, they will need training too. With a change of staff, this is going to get very expensive and time consuming. Make sure your booking software does what you need it to do of course, but also remember that more is not necessarily better. A good analogy is a washing machine- in the shop, the more knobs and dials the better, however once the machine is in the house, the vast majority of people find that they use just two settings - whites and colours! With CaterBook, training is at a minimum because the system has been carefully designed and a great deal of attention paid to the day to day usage of the program. Click here for an overview.

Online Bookings.
We get a wide variety of feedback regarding the subject of online booking systems. It is taken for granted that large hotel groups like Hilton and Travelodge will be using this technology. However our clients range from 3 letting rooms to around 50 rooms and they have very different views on this topic. Smaller guest-houses often do not want to partake in the online bookings because they feel a loss of control, the inability to weed out certain types of guest such as stag or hen parties who would be unsuitable for a specific style of establishment. However there is now increasing pressure within the industry to take on online bookings whether you want them or not. The simple answer is that providing your business is generating the kind of turnover you are happy with, you can make your own decisions on this. For guesthouses who don't yet want an online booking system, CaterBook is ideal, because you don't have to use them, but it is reassuring to know that they are there if you decide to take the plunge. Our Online Booking Manager (an administration program for the online booking software) enables you to manage and control the online presence and create rules enabling restricted availability and price changes during peak season stays, and enabling you to extend your season. You can even lock out availability on-line when you are at the height of the season, encouraging on-line bookings for the lower seasons. We help set up your online booking system for you and we host them for you so that you can display them within your own website. This gives you the opportunity to convert a site browser into a customer with the minimum of fuss. Putting a 'call to action' in the form of 'book online' on your website will ensure you make the best use of your internet presence.

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