Take Online Bookings

Have you considered the potential of taking bookings online?

If your operation involves taking and managing bookings then offering an online reservation as part of Your Cloud has many advantages.  The common ways of providing online bookings tend to involve a combination of using generic booking sites or custom written web scripts.

Talk to WebVantage about how to use your cloud to offer online bookings in a way that gives you the flexibility to operate your business the way you choose and the piece of mind that comes with a solution based on industry proven technology. 

Featured product - Booking Management System

How will adding online bookings to my cloud benefit my business?

It is integrated into your back of house operation

One of the main problems with current online booking solutions is that there are limited options to connect them to your back of house operation.  You often find that you have to assign availability blocks to the online system while still managing a back of house reservation solution.

We can show you how to build a booking and reservation solution into your cloud and have a completely integrated solution.  

Just imagine it, this is how Your Cloud with online bookings could operate:

• Customers access your website, search for availability based on up to the minute allotment data, and book instantly.  Money would be credited directly to your merchant facility.
• Agents create bookings through the agent portal, also built into your website;  
• Staff enter walk-in and phone bookings through a secure web-based administration portal;
• Management can see the status of sales, availability, agent performance in real-time through the administration portal;
• Remotely based staff who run the services (like tour guides and instructors) access up to the minute information such as manifest data, taking into account all last minute bookings.

It does not advertise your competitors

One common option available to operators wanting to take bookings online is to use a generic reservation website service.  This however means you need to divert your potential customers away from your own website and to one what also advertises your competitors' offerings.

Essentially you are spending money on marketing and potentially advertising your competition!

WebVantage believes that you should be able to keep people on your website which has only the external links that deem appropriate.  This way, your potential customers stay on your website and are only distracted by other offerings after they have spent money with you.

You maintain control over your business

Another concern of generic booking systems is that they often charge high commission rates, just for offering an online booking service. A seemingly low cost option can end up costing many thousands more over the life of the system.

What if the booking system within your cloud not only was embedded into your website but it also allowed you to take control of your agent channels? We can integrate a fully funcitonal agency portal within your cloud, allowing you to assign access to your agents who can then use your website to create bookings for their customers.

You would then have full control over which agents you do business with, whether they are paid in full or deposit only, and the negotiated commission rate with each. You would then also have real-time performance and commission reporting for each agent, greatly simplifying financial reporting.

It is secure

Often online booking systems are created by taking a free piece of shopping cart software and implanting it into a website. While this may seem like a simple way of setting up desired functionality, however often security implications of taking customer information and handling credit card data are not fully understood.

Just like your computer, software you use inside your website needs updating. There are many websites using very old shopping cart systems that have never been updated. These are ticking timebombs and are waiting for the information entered into them to be stolen and sold on the black market.

Don't let your website end up here!

When WebVantage helps create your cloud, the technologies used will not only be secure, they are provided as a managed service. Engineers familiar with the range of threats to data security will maintain the integrity of your online services. While nothing is ever 100%, you can rest easy knowing that if a security risk is found, it will be fixed quickly.

Next steps...

So if adding a booking system to your cloud means that you keep control over your customers' booking experience, are not being hit with high ongoing comission charges, are able to mange agent channels the way you want to and is kept online and secure by a team of experienced engineers, then doesn't it just make sense?

Talk to Webvantage today about adding a booking system to Your Cloud today.