Helping Future Guests Find You

By Scott Thomas | Published: November 15, 2011

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?

share Helping Future Guests Find YouThe 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.

Posted in Directories, Reviews, Social Media, Websites | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Attracting B&B Guests: How does that work?

By Scott Thomas | Published: November 8, 2011

A few of you may have noticed that we seem to have taken a bit of a hiatus over the past several weeks. In fact, our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast had a very busy summer, and there wasn’t much time for About the Inn writing. Now that our busy summer and fall foliage seasons are behind us, it appears things will be back on a more even keel, and we hope to be able to publish more regularly.

How do you attract B&B guests? In the past several years, most smaller lodging properties have become aware of the importance of attracting guests through an online presence (oddly, though, some still seem to question the need – or maybe they question the long-term viability – of an internet presence). Gone, or nearly gone, are the days of buying print or television ads in huge volume, in hopes that a few visitors will be enticed to become guests.

For the smaller properties, in particular, this is a good thing, as few can afford the high prices charged for print advertising, let alone the several additional orders of magnitude for television campaigns – all for ads for which there is little hope of tracking their success, and for which industry analysts say the return on investment (ROI) is very small indeed.

So, then, all a small business needs to do is find a way to slap up a small website, and all the marketing is done, right? Unfortunately, many small properties seem to have adopted exactly that strategy, and are beginning to pay the price in reduced occupancy.

Print media (with the exception, to some degree, of direct mail), and for that matter television, tries to sell by sending an uninvited message to a large, but generally arbitrary, audience. The primary reason online marketing is more effective, is because the prospective guest is looking for you. They are, by definition, part of your target market. They are seeking exactly what you are offering: some type of lodging for a temporary purpose.

How do you reach the prospective guest?

It seems like an over simplification, but in order to get the prospective guest, seeking lodging like yours, to connect with your property and make a booking, you need to be found where they are looking. Which means that you need to know where they are looking, and be found there.

Where are they looking?

We usually begin by assuming that the guest has decided to come to your area, and needs to find lodging. This is because there are many, many different ways the prospective guest may decide to come to a region. However, you can play a role in this, by getting information about the area in front of the guest – either by more traditional means such as print or television, or by having that type of information on your web site.

Once the decision is made to come to an area, the question of lodging must arise.

According to WIHP, a hotel marketing firm, there are four distinct steps in the process of deciding on a lodging property: discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested), zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel), first moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed). There is little doubt that these steps apply more or less exactly for smaller properties, as well.

Let’s look a bit more closely at these four steps:

1. Discovery or Stimulus

How does the prospective guest find out about a lodging property they may want to consider? WIHP’s data indicates that the most likely source of information is friends or family, followed by online travel agents (known as OTAs, including Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Booking.com, and the like), then TripAdvisor, and then, to a much lesser degree, other sources like Facebook, Travel Agents, Magazines, etc.

Because we’re interested in the smaller lodging properties, we would suggest that bed and breakfast directories could be included with the OTAs, at least for the guest who is interested in considering bed and breakfast lodging.

2. Zero Moment of Truth

How does the guest research the lodging property he/she is interested in? The data from WIHP indicates that nearly 73% will use search engines to find the hotel. Did you pick up on that? Most of our search engine optimization is around industry-specific keywords, but most of our prospective guests are searching by the name of the hotel!

Of the remaining 27% or so, guests will search map pages (9.6%), review sites (7.3%), travel guides (3.0%) and social media sites (0.8%) to find the lodging property.

3. First Moment of Truth

Once the guest arrives on the property’s website, you have between 3 and 7 seconds to help them decide to stay at the property. The average visitor will have looked at 10 other property websites, read reviews, checked rates, and verified the location on a map.

WIHP says the guest wants to know:

  • will this save me money?
  • will this save me time?
  • will this make my life better?

For the property, this translates to:

  • Is this the best value I can get?
  • Is this located near the points I am interested in?
  • Is the comfort going to live up to my standards?

How your website stacks up in answering these questions for the guest determines whether or not they will book.

4. Second Moment of Truth

When the guest arrives they will either be pleased with their selection of your property, or they will be disappointed. In either case, the results are likely to be posted on social media and review sites, and shared with friends and family. In exceptional cases, they may even appear in blog posts.

When you consider the likelihood of these results, whether positive or negative, being shared with friends and family, as well as the review sites and social media connections, you can see that these results will also become part of the Discovery or Stimulus phase of someone else’s search for lodging property. That makes it imperative that the experience be a positive one.

WIHP has provided a video infographic to illustrate these points clearly and concisely. The YouTube version is below.

In upcoming articles we’ll be looking at the ways we can reach the prospective guest in each of the decision-making phases of the booking process.

Posted in Directories, Social Media, Technology, Websites | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Custom Button Icons for Apple’s iDevices

By Scott Thomas | Published: August 18, 2011

This is a guest post by Sarah Dolk of Adobe Nido Bed & Breakfast in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I had some fun last night. I had read in a blog about how we can create a custom icon/button/logo for our business that Apple device users (iphone, ipad, and touch), can download to their desktop as an image bookmark, thus creating a simple link to our website for the device user. Wow. So I did it, and I’m going to tell you why and how.

idesktop Custom Button Icons for Apples iDevices

Now that Apple has been named the “Top Company in the US” (be it only for a few days this week), I would think that should spark more people to understand the importance of Apple’s portion of the mobile market.

Although a button can be created for any website on these idevices, the custom icon is more desirable, has a more “finished” appearance, and is much less likely to get accidentally deleted from the user’s desktop, especially if it’s attractive to the eye. The default icon created when there is no custom icon/button present on a website will be just a random square piece of the website’s window. Here is a custom logo from the BBC and a default logo from the innkeeping.org website:

paiisample Custom Button Icons for Apples iDevices bbcsample Custom Button Icons for Apples iDevices

How is this custom button good for an inn or b&b? Let me count the ways…

1 – Branding. Having people find your inn’s website and download the visual image associated with your inn’s website as a bookmark to their mobile desktop so they see it every time they are on that devise is priceless. It is a contestant reminder of your property.

2 – Saved for later. Even if you are not chosen right at that moment for a stay, you were saved for later and that may very well be when the booking happens. You have an advantage if the user, at a later date, sees your button again and the interest in your property is rekindled.

3 – Ease of use. The Apple user who downloads your icon button does not have to open a browser to go to your website, they need only to click you icon button on their desktop and boom – they’re there!

4 – It shows you’re hip. Attracting the Gen X and Y guests is really a must for any inn that wants to thrive and survive in this fast paced ever-changing decade. When this generation sees you are marketing to them, they will respond positively.

5 – Being mobile friendly. Even though the mobile market is small, the Apple share of the mobile market should not be ignored. After all, Apple users are not afraid to drop some bucks – they bought an Apple product, didn’t they? While this is something only available with Apple’s mobile browser (Safari) right now, there is no reason to believe it won’t also become available for Android devices in the future. Everyone likes a one-click path to somewhere!

That was enough reasons for me. I wanted it, so off I went to discover how to do it, and it was very simple if you have access to your web files.

First – you build an icon to match your website using whatever graphic program you use. Use your site’s color scheme, your logo or a part of it, something that represents you well as a visual. Keep it simple. You don’t have to have text in the icon, because the Safari software will pull it from your web page title and label your icon for you, (and the user can change to it what they want anyway).

The button doesn’t have to be fancy or have dimension and drop shadows. The Apple iOS will add dimension or a “glow” to your icon for you. But if you do want to get fancy there is code that can be added that will stop the iOS from messing with it.

The icon should be 57X57 pixels if you will just be adding one standard “fit all” icon, but if you want to get specific – and I did – start out with 114×114 (for iphone 4), and then reduce size and save a 72×72 version (for ipad) and 57×57 (for standard iphone and itouch). It must also be a .png file – very important!

threesizes Custom Button Icons for Apples iDevices

Next – store the logo(s) in the root folder of your website (suggested), or provide the path in your code to where you put the image file, i.e., an image folder on the website, or Picasa, Flickr or whereever it is.

Place this code in the head section, (above the </head> code), on the page(s) you want to be book-markable with your custom icon. Here is the code that is specific for different apple devices:

<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”yourimage.png” />
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” sizes=”72×72″ href=”yourimage.png” />
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” sizes=”114×114″ href=”yourimage.png” />

Remember to use the full path and filename of your image in place of yourimage in the above code.If you don’t want the Apple iOS to apply the special effects, use apple-touch-icon-precomposed instead of apple-touch-icon for the link rel value.

And – if you want to use one size logo only that’s perfectly OK. Of the three lines of code shown above, use the top line only, which is the default.

I like the idea of people out there having the icon for my inn on their mobile device. Can’t hurt, right?

Posted in Technology, Websites | Tagged , | Comments closed

Analytics: How to track social interaction

By Scott Thomas | Published: July 19, 2011

Perhaps you saw the articles a couple of weeks ago, indicating that Google had officially announced that its Google Analytics product was now able to track social media interaction. As the linked article mentioned, this is a welcome addition to the built-in capability of the Google +1 button to track clicks. However, this bit of news was soon overshadowed by all the buzz surrounding the (as yet, despite being enormous, and frequently discussed) beta of Google+ – the new Google social platform.

Analytics: How to track social interactionWe had seen the articles and sort of filed them away for future reference. A friend got in touch last week, however, asking how to implement this, and indicating that the information wasn’t very clear. After reading the official documentation, we certainly had to agree. However, after a bit of testing, we were able to get it to work, and provide the results here, in case you’d like to use Google Analytics to track various social interaction on your website, blog, or whatever.

What we’re trying to accomplish

To be clear, the objective is to add some JavaScript to our website, blog, or whatever, that will allow us to use Google Analytics to track when someone clicks on social media buttons on the page – such as a Facebook Like button, or a Facebook share link, or a Twitter follow or Tweet button, or any other similar item. For those who enjoy figuring this out for themselves, the documentation can be found here.

For the rest of us, there are three pieces of code to insert (We haven’t attempted to use anything but Facebook and Twitter – though the same principle would work with any; also Google +1 forwards data to GA automatically, so there is no need to do anything special for it), and of course a couple of prerequisites.

Prerequisites:

  1. You will need to be able to add files to your web server, and edit the page(s) you want the tracking to work on.
  2. You must have Google Analytics tracking code on the site (I’m not sure if you have to use async code, but I suspect you do)
  3. You must be using the “New” GA – so it will show Social under the Visitors area.
  4. Grab the ga_social_tracking.js file from Google and put it in the same location as the page to be tracked (or change the path to the js file in the first script tag under Code step 1).

Code needed to make this work:

  1. In the section of the page (I would suggest after the GA code, but don’t know if that is mandatory), add:
    <script src="ga_social_tracking.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>


  2. Where you want the buttons to appear, put


    a. for Twitter
    <a href="http://www.twitter.com/share" data-url="http://www.YOURSITE.com" data-via="YOURTWITTERID" class="twitter-share-button">Tweet</a>


    You can leave off the data-via line if you don’t want tweets to show up in your twitter feed. Obviously change YOURSITE and YOURTWITTERID to the appropriate values. The Twitter documentation allows for other ways to create a Twitter button. This is just one example. Feel free to play with others, but you may have to make other changes if it doesn’t work the same way as this example.


    b. for Facebook


    <fb:like></fb:like>


    This is the simple version for creating a “simple” Facebook “Like” button. For other types, you can see the Facebook developer documentation. Here is one other example:


    Put this in place of the <fb:like></fb:like> section above:



    <div id="fb-root"></div>
    <fb:like href="http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/PAGETOTRACK" send="true" show_faces="false" layout="button_count"></fb:like>


    Then change YOURDOMAIN.com to your domain, and PAGETOTRACK to the path and page you want to have the button track. Do not omit the div with the fb-root id.


  3. Just before the closing body tag on the page, put


    <script>
    _ga.trackSocial();
    </script>

Done and done.

Social activities seem to show up in the new Google Analytics within an hour or so.

Posted in Social Media, Technology | Comments closed

Software Review: ResNexus Reservation System

By Scott Thomas | Published: July 5, 2011

logo Software Review: ResNexus Reservation SystemBased 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).

ResNexus calendar 300x168 Software Review: ResNexus Reservation SystemThe “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 CreateSpecial 267x300 Software Review: ResNexus Reservation SystemResNexus 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 Reports 300x201 Software Review: ResNexus Reservation SystemResNexus 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.

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