Closing the circle in this series on the process guests use to book lodging properties is what WIHP Hotel Marketing calls the Second Moment of Truth – the arrival of the guest at your property. We have already discussed the four-step booking decision process, how the guest becomes aware of your property (the Discovery or Stimulus step), how guests make the decision to visit your website (the Zero Moment of Truth), and the process of deciding to book with your property (the First Moment of Truth). In this article we consider the guest at your property (and beyond).

Ready to share?

How do you get word of mouth recommendations that will bring more guests?

If review sites and social sharing are the sources of discovery, then we definitely want our guests to have a positive experience, and to share that experience. How do we go about doing that?

1. The Positive Experience

People usually have a good experience when it meets or exceeds their expectations. Conversely, when the experience falls short of their expectations, it isn’t usually a good experience.

How are expectations set for prospective guests? Proceeding through the booking process we’ve been discussing, some expectation is created by the initial recommendations or reviews. These are refined further by the visit to your website and booking process. The Second Moment of Truth is when the guest arrives at your property and learns whether or not those expectations will be met.

What can you do to set expectations?

You can not do much to affect the word of mouth recommendations, but you can affect online reviews. You can respond to the reviews to

• thank guests for positive comments,
• clarify any misunderstandings, or
• explain (and show sensitivity to) any problems.

Photos have the most impact, both because they tell the story most completely, and because they can be viewed quickly. On your website you can set expectations by making sure the photos accurately show what the guest should expect. Naturally we all want to show our property to best advantage, and to use the best photographs we can in order to do so. However, if your rooms are on the small side, and you use and extreme wide-angle lens to make them look a bit larger, you are setting the expectation that the guest will have a larger room than you are actually providing. This is a recipe for the guest to be disappointed.

Make sure the website information is current. If you no longer provide an amenity, make sure your website doesn’t say you have it. If you’re close to an area attraction, certainly say so. If you’re not too close, don’t pretend you are!

Make sure your service exceeds expectations, wherever possible. You already know how to do that! There is no substitute for a guest who checks out saying, “You’ve thought of everything!”

2. Getting the recommendation

Ask for it! If you send a follow-up email, be sure to include a gentle request for a review on TripAdvisor (or any other site you feel is appropriate). Don’t be rude, or hit the guest over the head with it. Please don’t try to make them feel guilty (“If you don’t review us, we’ll go out of business”), but do ask, and ask nicely.

Let people know about your presence on the networks they are on (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Goole+, or whatever). Ask them to follow you. Ask them to recommend you. That said, don’t forget to check the rules of the review sites you request guests to use – some discourage asking for reviews, and even penalize you for rewarding positive reviews.

Not only do their recommendations reach their friends (who may remember to check them again when they plan their next trip), but they also will appear in searches for a long time to come. One of the aspects of posting things on the web, for better or for worse, is that you have no control over how long they remain available on a site operated by someone other than you.

Going around again

The cycle has the excellent potential of repeating itself. Potential guests discover your property through reviews, social media and word of mouth. They investigate further with search engines, reviews and maps. Once they have the basics, they visit your website, where your excellent site quickly convinces them to book. Once at your property, the experience is so good that they can’t wait to share it with their friends, family, and other connections. Those people learn of your property, and the cycle begins again.

By having a good presence on social media (the platforms where your target demographic(s) are found, of course) and on review sites, encourages discovery of your property. Good search engine, local, maps and review presence encourages the investigating guest to dig deeper and visit your website. A site that shows the guest the three things they are looking for (value, location and comfort) encourages them to book. And a great experience (supported by a website that has accurately presented your property – especially in the areas of value, location and comfort), encourages the guest to share that experience with the next potential guest.

This is the fourth article in a series examining how B&B guests proceed through the decision process for booking a stay. Based largely on research from WIHP Hotel Marketing, the first article describes the four-step process for booking, the second describes how a guest discovers your property, and the third examines how to provide information to get the guest to your website. This article discusses how to get the conversion – to capture the booking – once the guest has come to your site.

What is the purpose of your website? Have you ever given that some thought? Is it to (a) show off your beautiful property, (b) get people to call you for more information, (c) get people to call to book, (d) get people to book online, or (e) other? For most lodging properties, we would venture to say that the primary purpose is to get people to book online, and, secondarily, to call to book. Is it doing those things well?

The Guest Arrives at Your Website

Our guest has decided where they want to go for their getaway, they have discovered your property (and, probably, up to 10 others), they have done some initial research and learned a little about your property, and have now arrived at your website. WIHP calls this the First Moment of Truth.

What happens in the next few seconds will determine whether you get the booking or not.

What is the Guest Looking For?

Again, WIHP’s research indicates that the prospective guest is looking for three things:

• Value
• Location
• Comfort

They also found two other things that are very important: Quality websites sell better, and better booking engine design results in more bookings.

How should your website be designed?

A search on “web design mistakes” will yield many articles on poor choices in website design. Some even contradict each other. As mentioned in our previous post, Acorn Internet Services has prepared a series of checklists, accompanying their Smarter Innkeeper Series, to assist with selecting a web design company and/or SEO firm. The first article in that series includes a checklist to ask your prospective web developer, and makes a good list of things you should be planning to address with your website.

There are lots of examples across the internet of websites that are attractive and effective. For some examples, view the portfolios of design firms in our industry, such as Acorn Internet Services, Whitestone Marketing, or Insideout Solutions. While you probably don’t want your site to look just like another site, you’ll notice some similar elements on each site designed by these professionals. Large, high quality photos of the property, the rooms (comfort) and of the food (and other amenities, if appropriate). Clear, straightforward, navigation. Clear statements of rates and what you are getting for them (value). Clear descriptions of location and nearby attractions or points of interest.

If your website looks less “polished” than the competition (who may not be your neighbor, but in another location, entirely), you are not encouraging your visitor to book. If you aren’t showing them the things they are looking for (value, location and comfort), you are making it harder for them to find the information they are seeking.

Finally, if your booking engine makes it difficult to see what they want, and to easily and conveniently proceed through the booking process, you are making it less likely that they will complete the booking process (you can validate this using Google Analytics and checking to see where the visitor leaves the booking system, but that is a topic for another post).

What should your website do?

The guest has chosen about 10 properties to consider, and will visit the websites of all of them. Each will have 3-7 seconds to answer their questions. The questions will primarily be (1) is this property a good value? (2) is this property well-located for my planned activities? and (3) is this going to provide a desirable level of comfort?

There may be other questions in the mind of an individual guest, but virtually all prospective guests will be asking these three questions. Consequently, your website must answer them, and answer them quickly.

1. Your design must look professional and current (the portfolios of the industry web design firms listed above will show you what is both professional and current).
2. Your site must load very quickly (this is a priority for Google, and the slower it loads, the less time a guest will wait to see if you answer their questions).
3. Your photos must be professional, beautiful, and must show the comfort and the value the guest will find at your property.
4. Your rates must be prominently displayed, so the guest can easily see the value you are providing.
5. Your location – especially your proximity to the most commonly visited attractions and points of interest – must be easy to find.

If your site answers these questions for the guest, and does it quickly, and if your booking engine makes the booking process clean, simple and easy (including on mobile devices!), you will be capturing the booking you are seeking.

Our first post in this series provided an overview of how guests find and book a lodging property, based on research from WIHP, a hotel marketing agency. The four step process assumes the future guest has selected a destination area and then proceeds through the steps of (1) discovery of a particular property, (2) seeking information about the property to see if it is a good prospect (the zero moment of truth), (3) the guest on your website (the first moment of truth), and (4) the guest at your property (the second moment of truth). Our second post discussed the process by which a guest “discovers” (or learns of) your property as a possible place to stay.

Our topic today, then, is the “Zero Moment of Truth,” or the time when the guest has decided on a location to visit, has learned of your property as a possible place to stay, but has not yet seen your website, and wants to find out more about your property.

Another 7.3% seek information from a review site (such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.). After that the numbers fall off radically for travel guides (3%) and social media sites (0.8%). Just a side note – if you’re counting on your social media sites (Facebook, Google Plus, etc.) to provide the information, at the current time you’re reaching less than 1% of those who want to find you.

We would ordinarily expect Google to be the most commonly used search engine, so we won’t be surprised to find that it is. Although many articles remind us not to forget Yahoo, Bing, and others, and other articles talk about Google losing market share at the expense of Bing, in particular, these statistics don’t match up with the results of WIHP’s research. They found that 89.8% of searches leading to a property’s website came from Google, while Yahoo and Bing brought 4% and 3.6%, respectively.

Before booking, the average guest will have viewed 10 different hotel websites over 6 days, and will have visited the one they ultimately choose at least 3-4 times. This is where your competition truly exists. Your goal, at this point, is to be one of the sites (perhaps the top site) the guest will consider, and to get them to visit your website.

We talked about how to help yourself be found on TripAdvisor in our previous post, and much the same advice would apply to other review sites (though no others provide the exposure in the lodging market that TripAdvisor does). Consequently, our focus here should be on search engines – particularly Google – and map sites.

How do guests find information through search engines?

Try it yourself. What search terms would a guest, knowing the location and the name of your inn, use to search? If you’re having trouble, pick a place you’d like to travel, find the name of a property there, and try to find out more about the property using your favorite search engine. Then use those search terms for your own property and location.

What do you see in the results? In the case of our Freeport Maine bed and breakfast (while signed in to Google, which may affect the results), I see our website, then our TripAdvisor reviews, then a couple of B&B directories, a news article we are mentioned in, etc. Verify these results while logged out of Google. They may also differ by your location, so you may want to have someone repeat the search using a different location.

One thing you’ll see in all (or nearly all) the search results is a description of the page the result will link to. Although Google, at least, reserves the right to re-write the description, you can “help” by putting a well-written description META tag in the head section of a page. If your description provides an accurate summary of the content of the page, it may well be the description that is used in the search results.

Bear in mind that just because your own website is the first result in the search results, that does not necessarily mean your guests will click on it first! They may choose one of the B&B directories, TripAdvisor, or something else. Our goal is to provide information for our future guests in all of these sources, so they’ll find it regardless of where they look.

Getting found on search engines (search engine optimization or SEO) is a topic that would make an extensive series in its own right. Fundamentally it breaks down into on-page SEO (signals on the page that help the search engine determine how to index the content), and ongoing SEO efforts (such as building incoming links to your website, dealing with local listings, maps, etc.). We are planning to break out this topic, and part of the next post in this series (on the First Moment of Truth) relating to your website, itself, into a short series of its own. Consequently we’ll just hit some of the high points here. Bear in mind that our brief discussion of SEO is not meant to say it is not important. Just the contrary. It is so important that it deserves a more complete treatment than we can include in this post.

In an excellent series entitled “The Smarter Innkeeper”, Acorn Internet Services has devoted two of the three topics to on-page SEO and ongoing SEO (the third point is on the web design itself, which we cover in our next post). In each post is a checklist of tasks you can perform (or have done for you) to make your website more easily found by the search engines and to make it more likely to be indexed for the relevant search terms. The checklists are written as something you might ask your web designer or SEO firm, to be sure they don’t miss anything, but they will do very nicely as a list of the tasks you should plan to perform, as well.

Both of the two SEO checklists make reference to creating and maintaining local listings. In addition to any local listings sites, such as Chambers of Commerce, innkeeping associations, area marketing groups, etc., the search engines have their own local listings pages. Properly setting up and maintaining these pages will help you be found – especially on the mapping websites.

What about maps?

If you have followed the steps on the SEO checklists, and your local setup is correct, you do want to be sure your location is correctly specified on mapping sites. Most will allow you to claim your listing (you did that long ago, didn’t you?), then to edit the location if it is not correct. Again, most will allow you to specify business name, phone, website URL, etc., as well as other details, much as the local sites will. Keep in mind that the search engines have a specific format for business names, addresses and telephone numbers, so you want to follow those formats and keep the information the same from place to place. If the information is not identical (for example, saying “B&B” in one location and “Bed and Breakfast” in another), you run the risk that a search engine (which is only a computer, after all) will think they are two different businesses.

When your guest searches on a map, it is likely that they want to know how close (meaning how convenient) you are to a particular location. To help them out, tell them how close you are to various attractions. There is no substitute for making it easy for the guest to find the information they are seeking!

If we’ve done all these things, we’ve made it easy for the prospective guest to learn more about our property before they come to our website. In fact, if we’ve done our job well, we have whetted their appetite to see our website! We’ll talk about what happens on the website in our next post.

In our previous post we introduced the four step process (identified by WIHP a hotel marketing firm) of a guest finding, and staying at, a lodging property, then feeding the beginning of the cycle again by telling others. In this, and the next few posts, we will break down the components and see how you can more effectively help future guests find you.

As a refresher, the four steps are

1. Discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested)
2. Zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel)
3. First moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and
4. Second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed – which will sometimes result in that reaction being shared)

We’re going to focus on the first topic in this article: How does a prospective guest discover your lodging property?

The semi-automatic reaction in today’s world would be that, of course, a prospective guest learns about your property through a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, or others). That is not what the data indicates. The results of WIHP’s inquiries indicate that the guests are most likely to learn about a lodging property from friends or family, an online travel site, or TripAdvisor. Specifically, their statistics indicate that nearly one-third of people who learn about a property discover it from friends or family (32.7%), followed by roughly a quarter who discover it from Online Travel Agents (OTA’s – 27.9%) and TripAdvisor (23.1%). Other sources have far smaller influence (see the infographic on WIHP’s site).

If you think about how you would find lodging for your getaway, this makes a good deal of sense. Most of us, I suspect, would decide first on the destination (“I want to go to Maine” or “I want to go to France”), not on the lodging property. Only after the destination has been selected (at least tentatively selected), and we’ve checked to see that there are things we want to do or see there, do we move on to the details of making the travel arrangements.

This indicates that, whether based on recommendations of friends and family, or other sources, the destination is selected first, then the accommodations. Why is that important? It greatly affects two things: (1) they type of search people make to find your property (more on that topic in our next article), and (2) the specific information your website should contain (for example, if you have relevant information on activities in your area, your site may come up during the search for information about the area).

With this in mind, how can we increase the likelihood that prospective guests will find us? Let’s look at the three ways they tend to locate a property, and see where we can make it easier for them to find us.

1. Friends and Family

Family is, well, family. But the definition of who is a friend, and the way we make/find friends today, has changed significantly with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google+ and many other platforms. A few years ago friends were people we knew in our neighborhood, or met at work or within other social settings. Today we add to that our online friends, whether or not we have ever met in person or spoken by phone. Our network of friends is many times larger, and far more widespread, than ever before.

So the question becomes, how do those family and far-flung friends learn of our property, so they can recommend it to our prospective guests? Perhaps they have stayed at our property in the past, and have shared their impressions with friends and family. To the extent they haven’t stayed with us, in most cases they have heard about our property from someone who has stayed with us, or is otherwise interested in our property.

How can we improve our reach to these people? We can think of at least a couple of ways.

First, encourage every guest to share their story of how they enjoyed their stay (hopefully this will be positive comments). If they will share with their network of friends and family, offline or online, it has the potential for a huge reach, and will help to reach those prospective guests.

Second, encourage them to submit reviews on one or more review sites. Be a little careful, as some sites (Yelp comes to mind) forbid you to ask for reviews, while others, like TripAdvisor, encourage you to do so. In addition to these well-known review sites, most bed and breakfast directories allow reviews, and reviews can be placed directly on Google and on several of the OTA’s. Even a “Like” on Facebook or a “+1″ on Google will help pass on a favorable impression of your property (and may help with search presence).

2. OTAs and Directories

As mentioned in our earlier article, we think that, for the bed & breakfast or small lodging property, online directories should be included with OTAs as a source of discovery. How can you use these tools to help your prospective guests find you? In this case it should be somewhat evident, but here are our thoughts:

• Be sure you are listed on the directories which place well in search results for your area. Most directories show up well in most areas, but some are better than others in specific areas. Go to Google, Bing and Yahoo and search for lodging in your area. Try “bed and breakfast your area”, “your area bed and breakfast”, the same substituting “b&b” for bed and breakfast, do it with and without the “&”, and substitute “lodging” and “hotel”. See what directories appear on the first page of the results (even if it is their listing for a competitor). Be sure you’re on those directories.
• If you’re not already, consider getting on the OTA’s. Bookings through them come at a high price (commission), but the exposure you get may be worth it. You can negotiate a specific arrangement with a Global Distribution System (GDS) provider, or work through some booking system providers, like ResNexus or RezOvation. Tnooz publishes daily reports on which travel sites have the highest market share in different markets. Choose OTA’s with strong penetration in your target markets.

3. TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has its own way of doing things, and many innkeepers are not happy working with them. Regardless of your views of their system, TripAdvisor is a fact of the innkeeping life today. The best thing to do is to try to work with their system, to help your prospective guests find your property.

First of all, be sure to set up your property information in the TripAdvisor Management Center. You don’t have to like the way it works (we aren’t particularly fond of it) to use it. Make sure your information is current and correct – especially your contact information. As an aside, be sure your business name, address and telephone number are set out exactly as they are in your Google Place Page.

By default, TripAdvisor includes basic information on your property, but no link to your website, and no phone number. To help prospective guests find you, our second suggestion is to consider getting a Business Listing (paid), which will result in TripAdvisor displaying your telephone number and a link to your website. This is especially valuable to the mobile user, who can just click the phone number to call you.

While innkeepers of smaller properties are sometimes reluctant to spend the money it would require for a TripAdvisor business listing, and for the commissions on OTA sites, or even for some of the directories, if the objective is to increase visibility and therefore help your prospective guests find you (and through that process increase your occupancy), these are the areas where the prospective guest is looking, so they are also the areas most likely to produce results.

Based on data from its sister company’s directory (Destination Nexus) Reservation Nexus bills itself as the most popular and most used all-in-one reservation system for US bed and breakfasts and inns. With all due respect, data from a sister company (only), and excluding data from much larger directories, makes that conclusion just a little suspicious. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that ResNexus is one of the top reservation systems, both in popularity and in features.

Because of its popularity, the apparently large set of features, and its effort to position itself as the top reservation system available, we were eager to give it a try at our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast. Since one of the claims made by ResNexus amounts to a claim that you will get more online bookings than with other systems, we decided to go ahead with a full month’s trial, rather than just a brief demo of the product. That also allowed us to more fully explore its features, and to take advantage of its advertised “Red Carpet Service.”

Overview

Like many modern reservation systems, ResNexus is a web-based system. Most of these fall short, either because they don’t attempt to be a full-fledged property management system, or because they have not implemented a full-feature set as is found on more complete systems. That is not the case with ResNexus. Virtually every feature provided by the best systems has been implemented in ResNexus, and new features continue to be added. That said, there are still occasional perplexing design choices that make you wonder what the developers were thinking, and the pricing structure leaves something to be desired.

User Interface

Most of the user interface (web pages) seems to have a logical flow, and is relatively easy to navigate, so while the comments may seem negative, it is because most of the user interaction is so good that the rough spots are particularly jarring. In evaluating the user interface, we consider the layout of the screens (here, web pages), ease of navigating the program, ease of entering or modifying guest information and reservations, the usability of “snapshot” or calendar views of bookings, and the availability of sorted and filtered lists of guests (for marketing purposes).

The “go to” page is the calendar view, which is accessed in ResNexus by clicking on the Reservations menu item. By default the calendar displays 45 days, but can be configured to show 30, 45, 60 or 90 days. To move forward or back, you click on the month (or year) you want to view.

One curious design issue arises near the end of each month. In the default (45 day) view, with about 5 days or fewer left in the month, you see the last few days of the month, the next full month, and the first few days of the following month. However, if you need to see an entry from just a few days earlier (where, for example, the date is the 28th, you see the 28th through 31st, all of next month, and the first several days of the following month, but you want to see something from the 25th of the current month), it is not as easy as you might think. If you click the current month, you get the same view you have before clicking. If you click the earlier month, you’ll see all of that month, plus the first few (perhaps 15) days of the current month, but you can not view the 25th. The solution is to change the display to show 60 days, but that is hardly a rational approach. If a 45 day view is an option, the system should work properly without changing the settings. You can also check to box marked “Show all days”, but again, this is not intuitive.

The calendar nicely displays single letter day-of-the-week designations, and marks minimum stay requirements by putting the minimum number of days in red above and below the days of the month to which they apply. Color-coded marks show the status of a room, though we had trouble finding a legend to explain them. Orange “X” marks indicate blocked rooms, a green “+” is booked offline (entered by the innkeeper) and a blue “+” is an online booking. An arrow pointing down indicates a checked-in guest, pointing up it means a checked-out guest, and a $ indicates payment. A great feature is that the checkbox for the room and date is highlighted in pink if an online guest is in the process of booking that room and night. This is a great way to help avoid double bookings!

ResNexus allows you to import a spreadsheet of guest information, so you can have some historical data, though, like most such systems, the import ability is limited to names and contact info, without historical reservation data. You can create guest lists, for mailing, email, or informational purposes, though it may take some trial-and-error to get the information you want.

Rate Capabilities

Booking systems should allow for different rates for each room, seasonal rates, specials or discounts, packages, additional items to add to a reservation, and have a way of handling bookings for multiple rooms, such as a group booking. If larger properties are also to use the booking system, the group booking capability becomes even more significant, and there should also be the ability to create rates by room type.

ResNexus provides for setting up individual rooms, and most settings seem geared to that model. However, you can also set up “Classes” of rooms, so that all rooms of a particular class can be viewed together.

ResNexus also allows for adding packages (from the website, it appears that this may be only a feature of the “Auto-Pilot” version, rather than the “Classic” version) as well as upselling items (items are all designated as “Retail”). One problem we encountered was that our packages usually involve booking multiple nights in particular rooms, plus several add-on (Retail) items, with some rates adjusted so that the package price is predefined. Currently ResNexus can only do parts of this setup. We could set up a package so that all rooms could be booked, with appropriate add-ons and number of nights, but then the price is the same across all rooms, unless you use the default room rate. An alternative was to price each room individually for the package, but then we could no longer enforce a multiple night stay for the package.

Guest Communications

Modern booking systems allow for a number of guest communications to be sent from within the system – usually as emails. The most common are confirmation emails, cancellation confirmations, reminder and follow-up emails, invoices, and marketing emails. We feel that all these items, with the possible exception of marketing emails (due to the common use of stand-alone email marketing programs, such as Constant Contact and others), are sufficiently important that they should be included in the booking system.

ResNexus offers a Classic package, and, for an additional monthly fee, an Auto-Pilot package. Manual emails (which are customizable) are available with the Classic package, while automated emails are available only with Auto-Pilot.

While we understand there is some additional cost in handling the automated emails, most of the products which compete with ResNexus offer at least automated reminder and follow-up emails at a lower price than ResNexus. ResNexus (Auto-Pilot) also offers marketing emails based around birthdays and anniversaries, monthly newsletters, etc.

Reports

To evaluate performance, properly report taxes, and track marketing results, reports are a key source of information for the innkeeper. Different booking systems provide for different numbers and types of reports. Of course, if the system doesn’t capture the information in the first instance, it will never be able to report on it. At a minimum, a booking system should be able to generate reports of reservations for the coming month/day/week/year, revenue for specified periods of time, occupancy (total and by room) for specific periods of time, and revenue by date (and by room). Many innkeepers also require reports of gift certificates sold or redeemed, housekeeping issues, and additional financial reports, such as taxes collected.

ResNexus offers a large array of reports, covering most areas an innkeeper would expect or desire. Sometimes the data presented is not intuitive from the names, so exploring the reports is definitely recommended, but you are very likely to find what you are seeking. We would like to see the reports, especially the financial reports, be exportable to a spreadsheet (like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org’s Calc), so you can do your own analysis on the figures, but many innkeepers would be quite happy with the default reports.

Accounting

Most booking systems provide some way to use the revenue data in an accounting or bookkeeping system, such as Quickbooks or Peachtree. In a few cases, the revenue data is directly linked to the bookkeeping product, but most booking systems export the data to a file, which can be imported into the bookkeeping software.

ResNexus says that their financial data can be posted automatically to Quickbooks if you use Authorize.net to accept online credit card payments, and if the processor will provide the Quickbooks integration. That’s a fancy way of saying that your bank or credit card processor may provide the integration, but ResNexus doesn’t provide it from within the reservation system. There also does not appear to be a way to export the data from ResNexus to be used either in Quickbooks or in a spreadsheet.

Online Booking

Modern web-based booking systems generally provide their own online booking interface, and rarely interact with other online booking systems (such as Webervations or Availability Online). By contrast, most stand-alone guest management systems will interact with third-party online booking systems, even if they provide their own online booking module as an option. A significant drawback to not interacting with other systems is that the property is precluded from taking advantage of group booking and availability opportunities, unless they pay an additional fee for a second system.

The default setup for ResNexus is to place a booking button on your website, linking to pages on the ResNexus site, which have been colored to follow the colors of your website. While the colors are true to your site, the look and feel is quite different. Nevertheless, these pages are very useful, showing photos of each room (whether available or not, designating the occupied rooms for the date selected as “Occupied!”). While ResNexus feels that linking to booking button to their pages is the most effective way to use the system, it is possible to set up a JavaScript calendar on your page and pass the date information to ResNexus.

The online booking aspect of ResNexus creates only a confirmed booking, so some innkeepers may be disappointed if they would prefer a request for a reservation, instead.

Pricing

ResNexus pricing is based on the number of rooms, per month, with a discount for annual prepayment, and they do offer discounts for referring other customers. For the Classic edition, a 7 room B&B would pay $85 per month, or $850 per year. If you need automated reminder and thank-you emails (and the other automated marketing emails) that come with the Auto-Pilot edition, a 7 room B&B must add another $40 per month or $400 per year, for a total of $125 per month or $1250 per year (based on the prices on the ResNexus website at the time of this writing).

Additional Features

One of ResNexus’ distinctives is their Red Carpet Service. They aren’t kidding. They helped with a walkthrough of major features, they set up the look and feel of the online booking pages, they set up most of the room information and pictures, and more. This really jump-starts the transition process for an innkeeper. As time went on, they called regularly to teach, give advice, answer questions, and just to see that the system was working for us. Frankly, they spent so much time with us that we had to wonder how they will handle it if they continue to grow, as they will clearly need more well-trained staff to handle the volume of support and setup duties.

ResNexus offers a return on investment guarantee, that you will receive enough reservations between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. (your time) to pay for itself each year. That’s an impressive guarantee. While ResNexus doesn’t say this directly, the implication is that you’ll get more online reservations with ResNexus than you were getting with something else. We put the ResNexus booking button on our site, but also left another link to our old online booking engine, just as a comparison. We did receive a good number of bookings from the ResNexus button, but we received just as many from our old system during the same time. Most likely those would have used the ResNexus booking button if there had only been one choice. During the month of our test, we received more bookings than the previous year, but we also had more site visitors than the previous year. The increase in bookings was in proportion to the increase in visitors, so while we do not mean to say that the ResNexus guarantee isn’t valuable – it looks like it is very valuable – don’t expect miracles, either.

ResNexus also provides “True Seamless GDS” for those who want GDS connectivity. Rates are competitive, with a setup fee, monthly fees, but no commission payable to ResNexus other than a flat $15. Reservations made through third parties (like travel agents) who charge a commission, also result in commission charges.

Final Thoughts

Most all of our impressions of ResNexus are positive. It is a very comprehensive product, but not without a few speedbumps in the useability area. For the most part, it offers everything an innkeeper needs, and more. Our biggest stumbling block is the price. While ResNexus is far more expensive than less complete products, such as those that provide online booking only, because of adding almost 50% to the cost just for automated emails, it is also more expensive than competitive products like RezOvation GT, which provides comparable features.

If you can live without Quickbooks integration, or if your bank or credit card processor provides it, this is an excellent system, although we think it would be a better value if the reminder and thank you emails were automated and included in the Classic edition at the current price.

There is no question that, when it comes to managing guest reservations and bookings, one size does not fit all. Most systems provide an evaluation copy of the software, or a free trial account. We strongly urge anyone considering purchasing a booking system to evaluate several different products before making a decision.

Book At Once provides a powerful and innovative approach to their software for managing bed and breakfasts and other small lodging properties. For many, their power and innovation will be very attractive – especially in the free version. For others, it just may not be their cup of tea.

Overview

Book at Once is a German booking system, reaching out to become a worldwide provider, and particularly to reach the American, market. Book at Once has also become a vendor member of PAII, as part of its efforts to reach out to the US and international innkeeping market.

One of the most interesting aspects of their product is that it is priced according to the features you select. The basic system is free, and that could be powerful enough for some properties. If not, additional feature bundles can be added for a monthly fee per room, or Book at Once can tailor a bundle to your needs and price it according to the features selected. Pricing for the product is given in Euros per room per month (easily converted to US Dollars or other currency), on the basis of a two year contract. We were given a full system for the review, so if you were to purchase a different option, your features may be different.

The technical design of Book at Once makes it an enormously powerful system – so much so that as you use the system you are left with the feeling that it can do even more than you can see. That leaves great possibilities for future growth.

User Interface

Book At Once Dashboard

In evaluating the user interface, we consider the layout of the screens (or web pages), ease of navigating the program, ease of entering (or changing) booking or guest information, the usability of “snapshot” or calendar views of bookings, and availability of sorted and filtered guest lists (for marketing purposes).

Book at Once opens from a web page with a dashboard that opens in a new window (above). There are icons to take you directly to the Reservation Board, to make a Reservation Request, etc., or you can click on the Book at Once start button (at the lower left corner of the dashboard) to find a more complete menu of available tasks.

The simplest way to create a booking is to click the Reservation Request icon from the dashboard. The process is a bit different than other systems, as you first select dates for the booking, then search for availability. The results show room types available, rather than rooms.

We should note that the setup, which is done via a wizard, prompts you to create room types (such as Standard Room, Suite, etc.), then to create individual rooms, assigning them to room types. If you want to create separate rates for each room, you simply create each room as a room type, then each type would have only one room. This would then allow availability to show the specific rooms available.

The consequence of using rate types rather than room types is particularly significant in Book at Once. If generic rate types are used, when a reservation is created, the room is selected by the system – the user selects the rate type, and any available room in that rate type is selected by Book at Once. Again, if you want to be able to select rooms individually, we would suggest creating a rate type for each room.

Next you select the available rate type and click “Book”. While it isn’t entirely clear on first glance, if you enter a name, city, or Customer ID, Book at Once will search for an existing guest to apply to the booking. If you are creating a new guest record, click the “Continue with New Customer” button.

A new window pops up (left), asking for the name and a few bits of information about the guest, then “OK” closes that window and opens a window (below right) where the rest of the guest information can be entered. We found the information to include items not commonly used in American B&B’s, such as passport information, and we thought it was not intuitive to have the contact info (phone numbers, email, etc.) on a separate tab from the name and address fields. When the required and optional information has been added, clicking on OK returns you to the screen where the rate type was selected, and the buttons say “Book” or “Cancel”. Since we weren’t sure whether the booking was complete at this point, we clicked Book, which put us back to the dates screen, then the rate types, guest information, etc. The result was a double booking.

Once the user becomes familiar with the sequence of entering information, this will probably not be a problem. Yet it seems like an unnecessary point of confusion for the new user, or a user who is interrupted while completing the reservation.

Book At Once Reservation Board

Reservations can be most easily edited by double-clicking on the reservation from the Reservation Board. This brings up the same screens as during the creation of a new reservation, where the information can be changed. If the optional Reservation Board Deluxe module is purchased, changes to the date of a booking can be made by dragging the reservation to a new date. Similarly, rooms may be changed in the same way.
Rate Capabilities

Booking systems should allow for different rates for each room, seasonal rates, specials or discounts, packages, additional items to add to a reservation, and have a way of handling bookings for multiple rooms, such as a group booking. If larger properties are also to use the booking system, the group booking capability becomes even more significant, and there should also be the ability to create rates by room type.

As has already been discussed, Book at Once is based on rate types or room types, rather than on individual rooms with their own rates. Setting up each room as a room type and rate type may be a bit more cumbersome at the setup time, but it will pay off with the desired flexibility for those who want individual room rates and availability.

Guest Communications

Modern booking systems allow for a number of guest communications to be sent from within the system – usually as emails. The most common are confirmation emails, cancellation confirmations, reminder and follow-up emails, invoices, and marketing emails. We feel that all these items, with the possible exception of marketing emails (due to the common use of stand-alone email marketing programs, such as Constant Contact and others), are sufficiently important that they should be included in the booking system.

Book at Once does not include all these types of guest communications, but they do provide a template editor for confirmation emails and for invoices. To their credit, Book at Once includes these in the cost of the product.

Because of its international flavor, Book at Once also provides these documents in various languages, and you can create your own custom templates, as well. While there is a Reservation Confirmation button at the bottom of the screen for editing a reservation, when you click on it, it brings up a screen allowing you to select a template, and a delivery method (email, PDF or OpenOffice document – at least on our computer). Presumably you could define templates for other purposes, such as reminder or follow-up emails, cancellation emails, etc., and they could be sent merely by selecting the corresponding template.

Reports

To evaluate performance, properly report taxes, and track marketing results, reports are a key source of information for the innkeeper. Different booking systems provide for different numbers and types of reports. Of course, if the system doesn’t capture the information in the first instance, it will never be able to report on it. At a minimum, a booking system should be able to generate reports of reservations for the coming month/day/week/year, revenue for specified periods of time, occupancy (total and by room) for specific periods of time, and revenue by date (and by room). Many innkeepers also require reports of gift certificates sold or redeemed, housekeeping issues, and additional financial reports, such as taxes collected.

Book at Once offers reports based on Nationality, Revenue, Cash on Hand, Invoices, Payments and the ability to export a Customer List. The Customer List is exported as a comma separated file, suitable to be imported to a spreadsheet, with the ability to filter the search so that only specified customers are included. The other reports are created as PDF files.

Book At Once Financial Report

When we exported PDF reports we experienced mixed results. In the Revenue report (right) we saw the title of “Forecast”, with no data for Sales Tax. In the Invoices report, individual entries were for “External Tax” but there was no relation of the taxes to the invoices.

This brings up another concern about the way taxes are handled in Book at Once. Although the setup allows you to create your own taxes, which can be independent or cumulative, nowhere in the pricing, room definition or tax screens are you able to associate the tax with the product sold. The same applies for extras that may be sold as add-on items. In most American regions, there will at least be tax associated with the room, and perhaps another for additional items sold. In many cases there are additional layers of state, county and/or city taxes, which would be different for lodging than for other goods sold.

The object-oriented design of Book at Once makes it likely that it can be enhanced to provide very robust reporting, so, while the current reports are fairly superficial, we would hope that this will be an area slated for improvement.

Accounting

Most booking systems provide some way to use the revenue data in an accounting or bookkeeping system, such as Quickbooks or Peachtree. In a few cases, the revenue data is directly linked to the bookkeeping product, but most booking systems export the data to a file, which can be imported into the bookkeeping software.

We were not able to locate any means of exporting financial data for import into an accounting program. It may be possible to devise a search filter on the customer list export, so that the correct data is exported there. If so, with some additional data manipulation it may be possible to import that information into an accounting program. Data can be imported (with the correct modules installed) for use in a spreadsheet.

Online Booking

Modern web-based booking systems generally provide their own online booking interface, and rarely interact with other online booking systems (such as Webervations or Availability Online). By contrast, most stand-alone guest management systems will interact with third-party online booking systems, even if they provide their own online booking module as an option. A significant drawback to not interacting with other systems is that the property is precluded from taking advantage of group booking and availability opportunities, unless they pay an additional fee for a second system.

For example, BBOnline.com shows availability (using Webervations) for all properties in a locality who use Webervations. If a property uses another system, their availability will not appear on BBOnline.com unless they purchase a subscription to Webervations, and keep it up-to-date, as well as their own booking system.

Book At Once Online Booking Widget

Like most web-based booking systems, Book at Once has its own online booking widget (in fact, when we first tested it, it had three varieties of widgets – as of this writing we were not able to verify whether or not this was still the case), that can be embedded in the property’s web pages. From the administrative pages, the system provides code that can be cut and pasted into a web page, creating a booking request widget.

We walked through the Booking Widget to get a feel for the process. Like many, the widget itself asks the date and number of nights, then pops up a new screen where additional information is requested to complete the booking.

The new screen provides a list of available room types and rates, and the user clicks the “Book” button next to the one they want. This must be confirmed twice, then personal contact information is to be supplied. Finally credit card information is requested. In the set up process, this can be made mandatory.

While a few systems allow for the submission from the web to create a request for a booking, allowing the innkeeper to decide whether they want to accept the request, most create a confirmed booking. Book at Once follows the majority, in creating a confirmed reservation.

Book at Once also offers a separate Online Booking Wizard, which can be incorporated into a web site, or even into a Facebook page. The charge for this wizard is by transaction, at 0.95 Euros per transaction.

Additional Features

Book At Once iPhone app

Book At Once is also keenly aware of the power of social media and mobile applications. Consequently, they not only have an active Facebook page and Twitter account, but they also provide a Facebook app that allows you to take reservations from your Facebook page. They also have an iPhone app that allows you to manage your bookings, and indeed your Book At Once system, from the palm of your hand. The iPhone app is available via the iTunes store for US $9.99.

Pricing

Somewhat unusual for online booking systems, Book at Once offers a free basic system. Using only the free components would leave you with online availability, but only email requests for reservations can be accepted. There are also limits on how the program works, limits on some of the pricing capabilities, invoicing capabilities, and reporting capabilities. Each of these (and a few others) can be added as individual modules, each priced on a per month, per room, basis.

Your preferences will dictate the package you would purchase. Book at Once says their Plus package is the most popular, while we feel most properties would want either the Plus or the Premium package. If a seven room B&B was to purchase the Plus package, the price would be 2.50 Euros per room per month (about $23.07 per month or $277 per year, at current exchange rates). The Premium package would be 3.50 Euros per room per month (about $32.30 per month or $388 per year).

Final Thoughts

While using Book at Once we were continuously conscious of a feeling that this should be easier to use than it seemed. We read through much of the help documentation (the Book at Once folks have done a great job of translating the program and the documentation into English – while there are occasional locations where German can be glimpsed, for the most part the entire site appears to have been translated), but still found several things that were not explained. These include items discussed above, such as applying taxes to room rates and different tax rates to add-on items, setting up individual room rates, etc., and whether or not emails can be sent automatically, or whether they can only be sent manually.

The features and prices for Book at Once are not out of line with competing products. However, we have some concern about the way some aspects of the program are currently implemented. We would like to see a smoother flow of data entry in creating a new booking, and much more robust reporting. We also think that some capabilities, like sending emails beyond the simple confirmation email should be simpler to set up and implement. Some properties may also want to see the ability to export financial data for commonly used accounting programs.

There is no question that, when it comes to managing guest reservations and bookings, one size does not fit all. Most systems provide an evaluation copy of the software, or a free trial account. We strongly urge anyone considering purchasing a booking system to evaluate several different products before making a decision.

Recently the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) asked me to do a webinar on building a dashboard to aid in online reputation monitoring. I had read a really good article on the topic a year or so ago, so put some of that information to good use, added a bit of my own, and created the presentation.

The presentation (slightly adapted) is below. One note from the audio (which isn’t included) is that at the time of the presentation the TweetBeep.com site was not responding. Since I haven’t actively used it in a while, I don’t know if it is still in operation.

In recent weeks others in the travel and tourism industry have been highly critical of review site TripAdvisor for various shortcomings in its administration of its online lodging reviews (and other reviews, as well). The concerns expressed are world-wide, not simply the complaints of a few, in a small part of the world.

This post is an attempt to gather and synthesize the concerns, to try to identify the core problem, and to suggest improvement.

Recent Complaints About TripAdvisor

In the United Kingdom, Paul White’s Bed And Breakfast Club blog has taken TripAdvisor to task for allegedly fake reviews that have been maliciously posted to damage a property.  Paul suggests that TripAdvisor could have listed hotels give a code to their guests, that could be entered to validate the authenticity of the review.

More recently, Heather Turner, in her Chef Forfeng’s Blog, has questioned mysteriously disappearing reviews that were favorable to a property, vanishing from TripAdvisor. In addition on several innkeeping forums, such as the members-only forum for the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII), or the public Innspiring.com forum, innkeeper problems with TripAdvisor frequently surface. We have documented some of them here on AboutTheInn, as well, calling for greater responsibility from TripAdvisor, among others.

Avoiding Responsibility

Unfortunately, TripAdvisor’s responses to nearly all of these concerns, whether made via blogs and forums, as mentioned above, TripAdvisor’s own Owner’s Forum, or efforts to make direct contact by phone or email, all seem to result in one of two standard responses. The first is utter silence – leaving the innkeeper with the clear impressions that (a) there is no procedure to handle problems innkeepers may have with the review process, and (b) TripAdvisor really doesn’t care if the reviews are genuine or not. The second “response” is the provide boilerplate statements to the effect that reviews are “validated” by a secret process and decisions to post them or remove them are also a secret process, and no further information will be provided. Clearly, the second “response” is no better than the first – no response at all.

Sometimes, in defense of TripAdvisor’s intractable refusal to validate reviews or to explain why valid reviews are removed, statements are made to the effect that TripAdvisor is actually a very small company and incapable of reading every review. Yet, in Paul White’s article linked above, he refers to TripAdvisor’s claims that human beings read every review. Clearly both statements cannot be accurate.

Making Matters Worse

To add financial insult to the unresponsive injury, TripAdvisor has begun (in 2010) offering a “business listing” to properties, with a sliding scale of very high rates, based on size of property. For this payment, the property gets a “nofollow” link from the property’s listing page on TripAdvisor to the property web site. A nofollow link is one that does not pass any search engine credibility with it. You might think that paying for a business listing would give the property owner the ability to communicate with TripAdvisor and to expect some measure of responsiveness. For the most part, you would be wrong.

On the positive side, TripAdvisor does seem to allow business listing customers to communicate with it. However, the responses they receive do not differ significantly from those given to non-business listings.

No Control Over Management of Listings

In fact, an even bigger problem is the way TripAdvisor allows for “management” of a listing by a business. First of all, a property has no choice whether it appears on TripAdvisor or not. They list properties they find, and that people review. You can only remove your “listing” if the property is out of business. You can sign up for a free account to manage a “listing” (allowing for uploading photos and videos, changing some of the details about the property, etc.). You then have limited ability to edit the listing, and can post management responses to reviews. However, if someone else signs up for a free account, claiming to be authorized to manage the listing, they, too, will be able to make changes. It appears that no attempt is made to verify that the person seeking a management account is authorized by the property.

How does this change when the property purchases a business listing? From all appearances, it does not change at all! Someone else can still claim to be authorized to make changes, apparently without TripAdvisor verifying their authority.

Declining to Correct Errors

What happens if information is incorrect, or worse, maliciously false? For the most part, nothing. TripAdvisor simply hides behind American laws protecting site operators from liability for information posted by others. In fact, even when the false information is posted by TripAdvisor, via its parent, Expedia.com (such as incorrect room rates), it claims it is free from any responsibility for the error, as it was posted by someone else.

The Core Problem

The common theme in all these areas is TripAdvisor’s desire to bury its figurative head in the sand, pretending that it has done no wrong and therefore bears no responsibility for the perceived problems. They avoid responsibility for false reviews by taking the position that they are not responsible for content posted by others, or that the reviews meet the TripAdvisor guidelines (even though they are demonstrably false, or that the guest did not stay at the property).They duck responsibility for missing reviews by saying the reviews were removed for reasons that are kept secret. They claim they are not responsible for errors, as the information is posted by others.

The one message that comes through loudly and clearly from TripAdvisor is, “It is not our fault.”

The small properties, whose continued livelihood depends on favorable reviews on sites like TripAdvisor, are the ones harmed by this attitude. But TripAdvisor’s own reputation suffers, as more and more properties who have been harmed find their voices and speak up.

Some Suggestions for Improvement

Yet the solution would seem to be relatively simple (technical issues may be present, but are surely not insurmountable). Take responsibility. Make the effort. Here are some concrete suggestions:

1. Provide for a system of verified reviewers. PAII’s CEO, Jay Karen, has been suggesting for over a year that TripAdvisor find a way to allow for reviewers to be verified, so that a review by a verified reviewer would carry more weight than an unverified reviewer. Other sites do this. Why not TripAdvisor?
2. If you’re going to accept paid listings, then act like a responsible directory. Give a proper account to the business, so they can manage the listing and limit who can make changes to those who are authorized.
3. Listen to the property owners (or authorized representatives). When they say a guest didn’t stay with them, pull the review until it is verified. If they tell you the information provided by a reviewer or relating to pricing, etc., is wrong, take responsibility to make it right. If you don’t trust the owners, then put a footnote with the information saying, “Provided by the property owner.”
4. Listen even more closely to the properties that are paying for a business listing. They are paying for, and should be entitled to, a right to be treated as paying customers. At least give them a fair shake. Explain why a review is removed. If the owner disputes it, then give them a way to prove its validity to you.

TripAdvisor, we know the guests find the information useful. We just want to make it more reliable. And, if we’re paying for the privilege, then we also want you to respect us as paying customers, instead of as if we were dangerous thieves, trying to steal bookings from unsuspecting guests.

At this juncture, we give TripAdvisor only 1 of 5 stars for responsibility.

The ball is in your court, TripAdvisor. Are you willing to take any responsibility?

UPDATE August 25, 2010:

Earlier today TripAdvisor posted the following on the PAII forum:

We identified a bug that resulted in some of our members’ reviews being removed from the site. While this affected only a small fraction of our community and properties on the site, we value every review and opinion and expect to have these posts republished as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience to our community and the property owners, and appreciate your understanding.

Certainly we’re glad to hear that a bug was found and it was corrected. No question about that. Also good to hear that it only affected a small fraction of the TA “community.”

But this creates a new problem: If it was a bug, that means it was a problem caused by TA and its technical people. Somehow that doesn’t quite square with the responses they had given, saying removing a few reviews wasn’t a big problem and claiming they were removed in accordance with TA’s policies. In other words, TA, were you just giving pat answers before and ignoring the facts, or is that what you’re doing now to try to salvage your reputation?

Besides that, it is nice to know it  “affected only a small fraction” of those on TA, but how many is that? Or are there other reviews that have been removed for other reasons?

Does this fix that problem? I suppose time will tell.

As review sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and others, supplemented by the more specifically-targeted sites like the bed and breakfast directory reviews, become so very important to small lodging properties, Google did not miss out, and began adding reviews from many of these sites on their “Place Page” (formerly Local Business Center) for the business reviewed.

Google’s next step was to add the ability to review a property directly on the Place Page. This was a nice feature for reviewers, but a nightmare for businesses.

Not only was the review anonymous, and entirely without any accountability, but the property owner could not respond to the review – even in cases of alleged fraud.

Today Google announced a very welcome change to that practice, allowing verified business owners to post a reply.

Google does suggest that you “be nice” in your reply, and provides some brief guidelines for responses, that would be well to be kept in mind in responding to any review.

This should provide an even greater incentive for businesses to claim their Place Page to become a verified owner, and monitor it regularly, now that verified owners can respond to Google reviews.

As we have previously mentioned, one of the most frequent questions on innkeeping forums and elsewhere is which property management (or guest management) software (“PMS”) is “best.” Like most things, this is a subjective decision. What is the “best” property management software depends on your circumstances, your preferences, and your priorities.  One size most definitely does not fit all.

If you search around the property management / guest management software world a bit, you’ll quickly see that it is difficult, if not impossible, to find software reviews. Because of Scott’s experience with this type of software (although on a much larger scale), and his ownership (with his wife, Ruth) of a small, seven room bed and breakfast in Freeport, Maine, we are adding software reviews to our information on About The Inn.

About the Reviews

When reviewing these products we have obtained a demo version, or in the case of web based software, a demo account, and used the product exactly as a new user would. When we review a product we have used for our own property, we are using it with our account and our configuration, so there may be minor differences from a new user’s configuration. We attempt to use the version of the software which is most current at the time of the review.

As we use the software, we evaluate it in regard to several categories: Rate Capabilities (types of rates and how they are supported), User Interface (ease and intuitiveness of use, availability of commonly required information), Guest Communications (emails, statements or folios), Reports (financial, occupancy, tax, gift certificates, etc.), Accounting (export to accounting software), and Online Booking (appearance, update frequency, features, etc.).

Each of these areas include objective aspects (those that are simply present or absent, and subjective features (those more important to some properties and owners than to others). The view of one reviewer (or user) of either the objective or subjective aspects may be quite different, depending on the type of property, preferences of the user, and priorities of the user. Consequently, before purchasing the software you should try it for yourself, rather than relying solely on a review, even our reviews.

The Contenders

In this installment, we’ll consider three products. Two are long-established players in the online booking and property management space, and the third is a relatively recent addition.

SuperInn, from Sark Technologies, is a well-established player in the online booking and web-based property management space.  Webervations, a sister company of BedAndBreakfast.com, is primarily an online booking product, intended to be used with a separate property management system, but a number of smaller properties also use it as a PMS. KeepMeBooked, the newest of the three, comes to the table with a very slick and usable product.

Rate Capabilities

All three of these products allow for individual room pricing. None can really be said to allow for a setup of room types (such as setting a room type of “King Room” and a price structure, then assigning several rooms to the King Room type, so they are all priced the same). All three allow for seasonal rates, and have mechanisms for discounts, packaging, specials, and add-on items. By far the easiest to use is KeepMeBooked, which allows for this setup with a few clicks in a very intuitive screen. However Webervations is the most powerful of the three in handling packaging, allowing not only upsale items (add-on sales), but packages that combine room reservations with additional items, for a package rate.

User Interface

This area looks at the ease of setting up information for the rooms, the property, policies, etc., as well as the ease of creating bookings. In this area KeepMeBooked edges out SuperInn by a slim margin, both because of its more intuitive screens, and the ease of entering reservations and other data, compared with SuperInn very dated technology and cumbersome entry process. Webervations lags far behind in this area, due to being nearly as out of date and as cumbersome to use as SuperInn, but with even less usable calendar view and even weaker guest data. In fairness, Webervations’ shortcomings are due primarily to it being intended to be used with a separate PMS.

Guest Communications

All three can send confirmation emails and most similar communications. Webervations does not create a guest folio (or statement), and while SuperInn does allow printing of a guest folio, it is difficult to navigate to that point. Of the three, only KeepMeBooked does not currently support cancellation emails. KeepMeBooked and SuperInn allow for other emails, with SuperInn supplying the most guest communications, some of which begin to compete with email marketing programs. While some systems charge extra for this capability, to their credit, SuperInn includes them in the cost of the product.

Reports

Although reporting is very important to evaluate the performance of a property, reporting is commonly the weakest part of web-based PMS systems. SuperInn provides far more in the way of reporting than the other two products. In conversations with KeepMeBooked, there are plans to expand the reporting capabilities in future releases. Webervations is by far the weakest, though the few reports it does supply are quite useful.

Accounting

In this area we consider the ability of the system to send its financial data to an accounting program, such as Quickbooks or Peachtree. Some systems have a live interface, while more commonly the data is exported to a file, which can later be imported by the accounting software. As with other areas, how important this feature is to you will determine your attitude about the capabilities of the different products.

None of these systems has a “live” push of accounting data to an accounting package. None really exports the financial data in a way that can be imported by an accounting program. SuperInn requires a copy/paste of the data to create a file, and presumably it can be manipulated into an acceptable format by the user. KeepMeBooked can export financial data into a spreadsheet, which is a slight improvement over SuperInn, but it does not appear that this will be able to be imported into an accounting program without re-formatting the data. Webervations offers no such report.

Online Booking

Since all three of these programs are web-based, you would expect them all to be strong in online booking. SuperInn and Webervations both approach online booking similarly, while KeepMeBooked has a different approach. Both SuperInn and Webervations reflect their older technologies by sending the prospective guest to their website (leaving the property website) to get availability information and complete the booking. SuperInn does a better job of masking the transition by making its pages mimic the look of the property website. A web developer can do the same with Webervations, but it is a bit more difficult.

KeepMeBooked takes a different approach. It uses a small widget – a small booking tool, that is embedded in the property website, and gathers the information from the guest to complete the booking, all the while giving the appearance that the guest never leaves the property website. While the widget could stand some enhancement to allow for packages, etc., it is a very nice tool.

Other than these differences, all three handle online bookings satisfactorily, though neither SuperInn nor Webervations is particularly elegant.

Update: In the detailed reviews (pdf links below), we note that Webervations allows both confirmed reservations or, by changing the configuration, a request for a reservation. SuperInn does confirmed reservations, only. KeepMeBooked has pointed out that, when their product is configured not to require payment online, it also will act as a request for a reservation, or if configured to require online payments, a confirmed reservation is created.

Price

KeepMeBooked lowered its prices just as we were doing this review. For a seven room bed and breakfast, with online booking, the rate is $40 per month. It is less if online booking is not needed, but we feel that is such a major component that we don’t consider that alternative.

SuperInn provides hardly any information about itself on its website, and no pricing information. When we requested the demo, we inquired about pricing and were told the rate for a seven room bed and breakfast would be $60 per month.

Like KeepMeBooked, Webervations pricing is also based on ranges of numbers of rooms. For seven rooms it is $10.99 per month. Before Webervations was acquired by BedAndBreakfast.com, a newer version was being released. That version wasn’t released to all customers, so we have reviewed only the older version. The new version is priced at $29.99 per month for seven rooms.

Concluding Thoughts

If price were the only difference, Webervations would be the overwhelming favorite, as it costs only a fraction of the others. However, its features are by far the weakest of the group. If reporting were the most important consideration, SuperInn would be the favorite. However, it is the most expensive – even more expensive than similar products with larger feature sets, and its technology is dated. If a slick, user-friendly experience is the most important consideration, KeepMeBooked would be the winner. It’s price seems to be in line with similar products (though some offer more features at that price), but it is lacking in reporting and other areas.

As you can see, and as mentioned above, one size doesn’t fit all. Each product has its virtues and its shortcomings. If the shortcomings are not in an area that is important to you, perhaps you can overlook them. On the other hand, if they are important, you may want to consider something else.

In any case, most systems provide an evaluation copy of the software, or a free trial account. We strongly urge anyone considering purchasing a booking system to evaluate several different products before making a decision.

Read our full reviews of KeepMeBooked, SuperInn and Webervations (pdf files).

What is important to you in selecting online booking or guest management software? Leave your thoughts in the comments.