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Channel Managers Now Updating Instant World Booking’s Calendar

As an update to our previous list of calendar systems feeding Instant World Booking, located at:

http://www.instantworldbooking.com/blog_iw/2009/12/list-of-calendar-management-systems-linked-to-instant-world-booking/

The following is a current list of Channel Managers and Property Management Systems (PMS, or Front Desk Systems) currently connected to Instant World Booking.  This means that all of these 3rd party systems provide an interface to automatically update your calendar on the Instant World Booking network.

If you are currently working with another3rd party system like those described above, tell them you want to be able to feed your availability directly to Instant World Booking.  Typically, services will respond positively to their clients’ requests of this type.

If you wish to check out one of the services listed above, please do so, and tell them you heard about them from Instant World Booking.  Frequently, services will be happy to offer special introductory pricing if they know their partners are referring new business to them.  So, it can’t hurt to ask.

See our updated XML API Guide at:

http://www.instantworldbooking.com/xml/InstantWorldBookingXMLAPI.doc


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Why Instant Booking is Better for Hotels and Hostels?

Many hotels or hostels don’t want to manage yet another availability calendar.  But, why is the instant booking calendar really better than the online request method?  Instant World Booking has discussed this at some length, but for many hotels, the choice continues to be request-only.  There are clear advantages to the instant booking method that far outweigh any administrative inconveniences.  In the end, online requests always end up with some degree of frustration for hotel administrators.   Here’s why instant booking using an online calendar is best in almost every situation:

  1. The vast majority of users searching accommodation on the internet want instant gratification. If they have to wait for a response to a request, they disappear quickly. With instant booking, you capture the booking immediately, before they have time to search elsewhere.
  2. Instant booking has a much higher reservation success rate because of (1) above.
    Some users will submit a request simply to find out what rates are, and have no intention to book soon. This forces the hotel to respond to requests that will never turn into reservations.
  3. A percentage of all users never receive the response email because they are using some free email service (e.g., hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc.) that blocks mail from new senders as spam, and they don’t realize that this is happening. This is a simple fact that affects virtually all online services these days. A user that falls into this category will either disappear or complain that they never received a response. Nevertheless, with instant booking, this is never a problem, since the user receives confirmation directly while they’re still online.
  4. Hotel and hostel managers that are concerned with maintaining a calendar online have many options available to them. If they don’t want to use our interface directly, they can use one of several third party interfaces that feed into our system.  You can contact us for recommendations, or get more information at:  XML feed for availability calendars
  5. The risk of an occasional overbooking is more than offset by the higher level of bookings, income, and benefits mentioned above that can be achieved with the instant booking method.

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