Availability Management and Online Bookings
An important goal of any DMO is to facilitate real-time online bookings for its providers and the key to this is up-to-date information about room availability. This information however is not necessarily available from a single source.
One of the key differentiators of our solution is the range and effectiveness of the online booking options available. There are actually 3 different methods that a provider can use to enter availability into the system. The one they prefer will depend on their individual circumstance but giving a choice greatly increases the participation of the trade in the DMS project.
The 3 methods are:
Allocated Bookings
When the accommodation provider has offered rooms on an Allocated basis, it means that the visitor can book the rooms in real-time without manual intervention.
Indicative Bookings
When the Indicative method is used, then the provider must first confirm electronically that the room is still available for sale before the booking can progress to its final transactional phase. NB. Bath Tourism used this facility in conjunction with Blackberry handsets enabling their providers to participate in online bookings whilst they were away from the hotel.
True Real-time Booking
The ultimate situation with online bookings is reached when the tourist board effectively has access to the entire inventory of the accommodation provider. The most advanced product of this kind on the market is the Frontdesk® system from eviivo and New Mind has partnered with eviivo in order to make this system available to its clients as part of the overall DMS solution.
The eviivo Frontdesk® product is an integrated system that enables a product provider to set-up and sell rooms through a range of online and offline channels without having to make any allocations.
In the Allocated and Indicative methods, the provider logs on to the Availability Extranet and updates the rooms they wish to sell and at what price. The DMS and web sites are then able to sell these rooms, decrementing the stock as they do so. There is no syncing of data to be done here as the updating of availability is a manual process by the reservation manager at the establishment.
Where the provider is operating the frontdesk solution, the DMS polls the frontdesk central availability database. All instances of frontdesk are connected to this so the booking is actually made directly onto the providers own system in real-time – i.e. no data syncing is required for the booking to occur.
