Introduction Hotel Booking System (HBS)

HBS (Hotel Booking System) is a product of GME Technical Services Sdn Bhd, Malaysia. It is used by hotels who has, or do not have a website to accept online booking. The booking program and database are hosted in a high capacity server. But the booking form itself is published in the hotel’s website. Hotel administrators can manage all the online booking with administrator accounts.

Benefits of HBS

1. Free setup
2. Maintain loyal customers
3. Improve search engine ranking
4. Do your own marketing campaign without constraints
5. Keep agents happy
6. All booking fee goes into hotel bank account or payment gateway account, no third party holding the fees.
7. Easy and instant setup
8. Multiple payment options can be set by hotel admin

Free setup

Custom online booking system = USD10,000 (Get it free from HBS)
Dedicated hosting (app and db servers) = USD800/month (Get it free from HBS)
Tech. maint. service (one manpower salary) = USD 1,000/month (Free from HBS)
All you need to pay is USD1 per booking.

Easy and instant setup

1. Sign up
1. Sign up online - 5 minutes, no credit card required.
2. Sign up on hardcopy form and fax - within 24 hours, no credit card required.
2. System Setup
1. If you have a website, copy the embed code to your webpage - 5 minutes.
2. If you do not have a website, buy a domain name, set the DNS. We provide a free website to you. - 24 hours.
3. Room and Pricing Setup - instruction provided - 30 minutes
4. Testing
1. Follow our instruction to test booking form (guest role) - 5 minutes
2. Follow our instruction to do booking clearance (hotel admin role) - 5 mins

Multiple payment options

Hotel admin can choose:

1. Merchant visa mastercard charge option - Credit card information is collected and provided to the hotel administrator for authentication or charging using in-house physical merchant terminal. Hotel may opt to Authorize the card instead of charging the card.
2. Paypal - Hotel owner just provide their paypal ID (email address) and the system will enable Paypal system to charge the guest using credit card or pay using Paypal points(balance).
3. FPX - Malaysia direct bank payment portal system
4. ENETS - Singapore direct bank payment portal system
5. KBank - Thailand direct bank payment portal system
6. CUP - China direct bank payment portal system

Except for the first option, all the other options require hotel owner to apply for an account. Guest payments goes directly into the hotel’s account, not GME account (provider of HBS).

HBS vs Aggregators

Aggregators are websites like Agoda, Booking.com, AsiaRooms.com, etc. They provide online booking service to hotels using their website as the first-point-of-contact to guests.

Advantages of aggregators

Bring new online booking to hotel.

Disadvantages of aggregators

1. Lose loyal customers
2. Lose Search Engine Ranking
3. Unable to implement promotion campaigns
4. Unhappy agencies
5. Money held by aggregators
6. No access to prospects contact information
7. Other constraints stated in agreement with aggregators

Lose loyal customers

If you search the hotel name in Google, you may find the first few listed sites is not the hotel, but the aggregator’s website. Click on it. What do you see? Half the time, another hotel will appear (not the one that you searched for). Quarter of the time, the hotel page will appear, but no booking form. Sometimes, the hotel info will appear but has other hotel promotions in that page. Why do aggregators do that? Aggregators host many hotels, and they have quotas to achieve. They redirect guests who originally was looking for a hotel to another hotel that require more booking.

This reason alone is good enough to re-think your online marketing strategy if you are depending on aggregators. No matter how well trained your staff is, how strong is hotel branding, you will lose your loyal customers is you continue to use aggregators.

Lose Search Engine Ranking

Why does the hotel official site is not in the first page, first result of the search engine if the keyword is the hotel name? We explain this with an example:

If the hotel website do not have an online booking, guests will have no choice but to go back to the search engine result and click on other search results. The search engine see that the visitor spends much longer time in other websites (with online booking) than in the official website (do no have online booking). Therefore, those other websites is more Relevant than the official website. Search engine ranks sort search results based on relevance. Since the official website do not have online booking, it become least relevant.

Unable to implement promotion campaigns

Most aggregators have an agreements with the hotel that states that the hotel may not sell the rooms cheaper than the them. This is a huge constraints to the hotel marketing campaigns. Hotels who uses aggregators normally has 3 pricing (for a particular season and for particular type of room). They are Retail price, Walk-in / VIP / Reseller / promotion price and Agent price (aggregator price). If the hotel do not use aggregators, they can have up to 5 pricing. The additional pricings are Master Reseller pricing and Partner pricing.

Unhappy agencies

Hotels cannot control the room price published in the aggregator’s website. It can be lower than the price that you offer to them. Large aggregators plays arbitration where they can lose money offerring very low pricing to bring in the traffic, but then try to upsell them more expensive hotel rooms or packages once the visitor takes the bait.

Hotels sell their rooms via agents (non online aggregators). The average room sold through these agents is 30%. For some hotels, this can be as high as 80%. Agents find it difficult to sell when their customers can find out online that the room is much cheaper than the agent offer. Therefore, if the hotel use aggregators, their agents will not perform well and eventually stop selling the hotel’s rooms, concentrating on other hotels.

Money held by aggregators

Aggregators collect hotel booking fees. These fees are held for a period of time. Therefore the hotel cashflow status worsen when more rooms are allocated for aggregator’s online booking.

No access to prospects contact information

Hotels only gets the guest information when they check-in. Do you know that with online booking, the system also collect failed attempts, half of them containing guest contact information. These data are not provided by aggregators. If a hotel gets 10 online booking a day, guess how many failed attempts that the hotel can salvage by calling the failed attempts? The number is more than 10. This means the hotel can increase online booking more than 100% if they have access to this data.

Further to this, systems can also capture visitors info, recognize that the visitor is a new or existing customer. Special offer can be provided. Guest online behaviour can be captured. Visitor’s analytics help the hotels improve their conversion rate. Without this analytics, there is no measuring system to do any improvements.

Hotel Online Registration

Hotels can register online at

http://hbs.gmetech.com/frmHBSRegistration.asp