Hotel Booking Engine is a system that is used to display room availability, make individual and group reservations, tract guest deposits and travel agent commissions, and generate reports such as arrival lists, reservation forecasts, and pre-registration cards.
Sources of Booking: Hotels can draw reservations from market sources within the hospitality industry. the most common sources of reservation are as follows:
- Central reservation system
- Global distribution system
- Intersell agencies
- Cluster reservation office
- Property direct reservation system
- Internet distribution system
By supporting a variety of reservation sources, hotel can handle a large volume of reservation transactions.
COMPUTERIZED / CENTRAL RESERVATION SYSTEM
In the early ‘70s, the airline business industry commenced modifying and enhancing their own in house reservation and booking systems to make the sale of airline tickets via travel agents more convenient/ efficient. The central reservation system gave travel agents access to information about flight schedules, fares, and seat availability. It also enabled them to ensure reservations and generate tickets automatically. Although the central reservation system was initially used in airlines, it was later used by hotels, railways, and other means of transport. Statistics show that around 50 percent of all reservations in US hotels are made through the central reservation system. A majority of the hotel groups belong to one or more than one reservation system.
DEFINITION
A central reservation system controls and maintains reservations for several hotels from one location and automatically redirects the reservation to the required hotel. A central reservation system is composed of a central reservation office and member hotels that share room availability information with the central reservation system.
A Good Central reservation system should be reliable, trust worthy, easy to access and can be compatible with other system that the hotel uses for other activities.
