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Advanced Features of our New Booking Engine for your B&B Website

BedBreakfastTraveler.com’s latest booking engine for Bed & Breakfast websites offers many advanced features not available from BedandBreakfast.com, Webervations, Rezovations, or other comparable services.  Most of all it’s cheaper than the rest.  Check out our Demos of B&B Booking Engines.

To demonstrate how our online reservations for your B&B website compare with other providers, here is an example of the features currently set up for a typical bed and breakfast:

Online reservations secured with a substantial deposit offer unmatched security at a low cost:

  • 5% commission for reservations confirmed at your website.
  • 35% deposit collected from customers.
  • Zero cost guarantee: If you have no reservations, you have no cost.
  • Full Protection for “No-shows” (when customers fail to arrive) and Cancellations: You still get paid the deposit even if a customer fails to arrive, or cancels late. You may select your own flexible cancellation policy. We have set your cancellation policy so that you receive a percentage of the deposit collected: 50% (i.e., 17.5% of the total reservation).
    In the case of cancellations, you receive this amount, minus commissions, if the customer cancels within 14 days before arrival. In the case of “No-shows” (when customers fail to arrive), you receive full payment of the deposit, minus commissions.
  • Choose any cancellation penalty amount you wish, up to 100% of the amount collected, and a cancellation period of up to 90 days before check-in. Please contact us if you wish to change either of these cancellation variables.
  • Service charge (optional): A small service charge will be collected from customers when reserving on your website (USD 1.50 per room, or USD 0.50 per bed for per-person prices). You will be paid 50% of all service charges collected, and this may be a beneficial way of offsetting your cost. This feature is optional, and you can select and service charge amount you wish, or none at all.

Payments we make to you:

  • We make payments to you: monthly
  • Your payment instructions are on file: Wire Convenient payment options include 1) bank wire, 2) EFT – electronic funds transfer, 3) PayPal, 4) bank check in your own currency, and 5) US Dollar bank check. These flexible options allow you to receive your funds either electronically or by physical delivery. All payment methods are free except the bank wire option, which includes an additional fee for every transaction.
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Why Instant Booking using an Online Calendar is Best for Bed & Breakfasts

We’ve discussed the request-only versus instant booking methods at some length, but for many bed and breakfasts, the choice continues to be request-only. This is fine, however, there are clear advantages to the instant booking method that far outweigh any administrative inconveniences.  We are happy to work with our partners in any manner they wish, but find that on average, online requests end up resulting in some degree of frustration. Here’s why instant booking using an online calendar is best in almost every situation:

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

If you’ve been reading our Intelligence for B&Bblog, you know that BedBreakfastTraveler.com believes in transparency, especially when it comes to pricing of services for your B&B.  Occasionally, we profile other services which compete with ours.  We don’t care so much that mentioning competing services basically amounts to free advertising for those services.  We’re more interested in transparency for you, our consumers and clients.  So, when selecting services for publishing, marketing, and booking your bed & breakfast, please remember to compare prices.  And, don’t overpay!

Rezovation offers services for property management and online reservations.  As a business manager, if price is important to you, please do compare.  According to the Rezovation.com website, the minimum cost for Rezovation GT Online is $50 per month.  But, that’s for just the smallest B&Bs of 1-4 rooms.  If you have at least 10 rooms, the price more than doubles to $110, and for large properties (50+ rooms), may be at least $300 per month, with an added setup fee of $999.00!  Yes, Rezovation GT is a great property management tool for those who want to lay out the cash, but there are many cheaper alternatives for small inn businesses.  Again, the prices quoted here are directly from the Rezovation website

BedBreakfastTraveler.com (by Instant World Booking) offers a premier online booking service, including credit card acceptance.  Booking engines for your website is a particular specialty of ours.  If you have the cash to pay for the competing Rezovation GT service, and want online bookings, there is an additional per-reservation fee up to 30%.  For more on the additional fees see our separate article at:

http://www.bedbreakfasttraveler.com/blog_bb/2009/12/bedandbreakfastcom-pricing/

Now, compare with BedBreakfastTraveler.com (by Instant World Booking).  If you want a fully integrated booking engine for your website, you can choose from many custom options starting at our lowest cost of just 1.9% of total reservation volume.  This is the absolute industry low for a booking engine on your website.

What about credit card processing?  Rezovation GT offers optional credit card processing for an additional monthly service fee and per-transaction fees.  Note that this is above and beyond the fees you are paying to maintain your own merchant account.  BedBreakfastTraveler.com on the other hand offers integrated credit card collection for your online bookings, and you do not even need your own merchant account.

Finally, if you want to connect to the Global Distribution System (GDS), Rezovation GT offers a premium option, allowing you to connect for just $649 + $15.50 per reservation + $250 / yr maintenance after first year.

For an unlimited budget, there are many services out there that can maximize your online exposure.  At BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking), we offer the maximum cost-effectiveness for online exposure.  Don’t pay the high prices unless you’ve tried Instant World Booking first.  If you don’t like your experience, you can always try the others and pay higher prices later.

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