Zalion - Hotel Channel Manager | Integrates with Fokus Hotel PMS software.

Fokus - Hotel Channel Manager Integration.

Our hotel management software 'Fokus' has a 2 way integration with AvailPro™, Siteminder™ and QuickYield.™

Having an integration to a channel manager will help you achieve better occupancy levels, avoid the cost's of over booking, whilst saving time having to update those online booking agents.

Here's how 'Fokus' used with a Channel Manager could benefit your hotel.

Let's imagine a typical hotel that's not using a channel manager, they have a website and use 3 online agents such as Booking.com™, Laterooms™ and Expedia™.

The Problem!

Each day, staff will have to check and maintain inventory for sale on their website and the online agents, if a booking is taken on the website or one of the agents, then staff have to rush to remove that inventory from the other agents to avoid a possible over booking scenario.

Now imagine that just after the booking has come through from an agent, a guest comes to the reception desk and asks for something awkward, like a quieter room, you get involved to resolve the guest's issue, which you complete with a happy guest, and then the phone rings, it's an enquiry for 2 rooms during the summer holidays and one of the rooms needs to cater for a disabled person, the potential guest is not ready to make a booking yet and says that he / she will decide and let you know.

What's just happened? You have just spent 10 minutes helping a guest and then another 5 minutes helping a potential future guest, you have just let 15 minutes pass, without reducing or closing out the inventory on the other agent's websites, YOU MIGHT HAVE EVEN FORGOT ABOUT IT BY NOW! What if your shift end's soon after? You now have had more rooms up for sale online than you physically have to sell, If that room sells, you may have to outsource or move a guest to a better room at another hotel, it may involve taxi's, you will certainly have inconvenienced a guest that may never return again. Worst still, that guest may become a regular guest at your rival's hotel.

To avoid the over booking scenario, some hotels will lower the available inventory on each agent. Therefore if one agent sells all it's rooms that you allowed it to sell, the next potential guess gets the impression that you have sold out and moves on to another hotel. YOU'VE JUST LOST A SALE!. Imagine you only have 1 room left on that agent but in truth, you have 2 or more rooms left to sell, if the next guest wanted to book 2 rooms, YOU'VE JUST LOST A SALE!.

Even if you had a dedicated reservations clerk, to log in to each agent's website portal manually this can still take a few minutes per agent, typo mistakes can also happen, a reservation's clerk would also not be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week either. Then there is the cost of wages.

The Solution!

Because Fokus control's your inventory, it gives all your inventory to each of your online agents and your website, If you take a booking over the phone or by email, once entered into Fokus, your website and all 3 online agents are each updated instantly!

If an online agent sells a room, the other online agent's are updated, as is your website, then the reservation that was made, is passed straight in to Fokus for you.

No 'Forgetting' or 'Panicking' to update or remove room inventory.

Because you no longer have to update online agent websites which can feel like you have to do, every 5 minutes, because your not having to input agent bookings in to the computer from your emails, you are able to give your time and full attention to greeting your guests.

No 'Stress'

More Benefits of having a Booking Engine

Hotel's generally want to offer their regular clients a better rate than the advertised rate, or they may want to target local businesses and offer them a corporate rate.

Having an integrated booking engine means that you can offer a discounted or special rate to your regulars or local corporate businesses by giving them a discount code that they enter when making their booking, this discount might be 10% off, or free breakfast or 4 nights for the price of 3. This makes your regulars and corporate clients feel special, that they are getting something extra, so they will keep coming back.

Another scenario, is that hotel's will try and set their online agent rates higher than the rates published on their website, this is usually because of the commission that online agents charge, this can cause problems with your agents under rules of rate parity, quite often a guest will find your hotel on an online agent and then go and look at your website to see if is cheaper. But, it should be the same, chances are, the guest is at your website, they will then most likely stay there and book anyway, saving you commission.

Extra Channel Manager Tools

Rate Screener / Parity Checker

You can now see all of your competitor's rates in an instant, giving you the key information you need to set the best possible rate and maximize your revenue. You can choose the hotels you wish to monitor.

With RateScreener, you can see where your hotel stands in relation to the competition on a daily basis, as well as ensuring rate parity across all channels, for both your own hotel and your competitors.

NextRate

This tool works a bit like the Rate Screener tool, but also suggests a recommended room rate based on demand and pricing of your competitors, you can simply choose to accept the suggestions, ignore or manually change rates. This tool will help you increase the yield of each room.

Facebook Page Booking Engine

The facebook page booking engine is a widget that sits right on you facebook page, fans can book directly from within facebook, they can share their experiences right on your page, you can even have a preferential facebook rate if they have liked your page, which in turn gets virally spread around facebook, thus creating more exposure for your hotel.

Partners that we integrate with...

We currently integrate with the following partners who all provide a channel management service in the hospitality industry, we are also looking at adding new partners all the time, let us know if there is one you would like us to work with.

Some of our partners offer us preferential rates to our customers, so if you are not yet using a channel manager, or you are prepared to switch, we could get you a better rate. Just contact us for a quote.

sales-enquiries@zalion.com

Zalion Ltd, 3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street, LONDON. EC2A 4NE

Tel: +44 (0)3333 350 118

How 'Fokus' plus 'Channel Manager' can save you money!

Case Study

We found that one of our customer's hotel's was having to manage inventory manually on seven different extra net's (online agents), each time a booking was made on one of them or directly at the hotel by phone, the receptionist's duty was to log in to all the other agent's and reduce availability, she would have to log in to Booking.com, then LateRooms, Hotels.de, Mr & Mrs Smith and so on, this could take up to half an hour, during this, the phone may ring, guest's may come to the reception desk and some inventory updates could get missed. As you may have guessed, when the hotel was nearly full, is was easy to accidentally take additional bookings causing the hotel to be over booked!, this can cause problems and usually costs the hotel money.

We found that this was a common occurrence in hotel's, most hotel's simply offered less that the full inventory to each extra net to avoid the risk of being over booked, usually resulting in underselling causing a reduction in potential occupancy levels and of course, lost revenue.

Having a channel manager can offer the following benefits...

* You can offer all your inventory to all your extra net channels that you work with.
* Avoid the risk of over booking by inventory not being updated quickly enough.
* Reception staff are more productive and are less stressed.
* You can get reservations from your website commission free.
* All inventory is updated centrally in one place.
* Can be integrated with Fokus, so no typing in reservation details from emails.

We can help get you connected with one of our partner's channel manager today!

CONTACT US