In this installment of Reservation Software Tips, I want to go over planning. This is something so few people do and it leads to problems down the road.

Every hotel or motel is different. You have your budget variety all the up to 4 stars. The higher the price, the more features. Naturally, if you’re running a bargain basement spot, you probably don’t need much, if you need software at all. But if you’re the creme de la creme…you want to plan…big time.

What does that planning amount to?

Well, for starters, there are the rooms and other services available. Your better class of hotel will probably have most, if not all of the following:

Studio
One Bedroom
Two Bedroom
Honeymoon Suite
Executive Suite

For both single and double occupancy.

So the first thing you will have to do with your software is make sure that all the rooms are setup. You don’t want a potential customer asking for a room and finding that particular type isn’t in your inventory even though the room itself actually physically exists.

That can be embarrassing for both of you.

Then you have your tax codes, standard, exempt and non taxable. You want to make sure they’re all in the system as well.

You’ll also want to enter any packages that you offer into the system. Most professional software will allow for packages. These are totally customizable in most cases. For as many packages as you have, you want to make sure there is a rate in the system.

Next, you need to enter in all the different payment types that you accept such as cash, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and so on. The last thing you want is to have somebody hand you a credit card type that you accept, but it isn’t in the system.

If you work with travel agents, you’re going to want to make a list of them and put them in the system as well. Many hotels have special arrangements with travel agents and you want the correct one to get credit for each booking.

One thing that a lot of people neglect is their system preferences. For example…

Do you want to auto generate a guest code for each guest or put one in manually?

Do you want to make a guest name be required? Some people want their privacy and wouldn’t appreciate this option.

Do you want to allow double booking?

Do you automatically want the person’s credit card details saved to the system for the next time they book so it doesn’t have to be reentered again?

And so many other things that you REALLY should decide BEFORE you setup your software.

How do you want your invoices to read? What info do you want on them, not on them?

By planning all this out ahead of time, you make the actual setup and running of your software a piece of cake.

In the next issue, we’ll go over some more great tips.

Author Bio: In the meantime, check out Reservation Master, which you can actually try FREE for 30 days. http://www.travelreservationsoftware.org

Category: Travel
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