5 Essential Steps to Take Before Creating Your Online Booking System

The popularity of online bookings is growing quite quickly. During 2023, guests booked 719 million nights of short-term rental housing in the EU through the most popular online booking systems like Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group, and TripAdvisor. This is an increase of 20.5% over the same period in 2022. If your travel company still doesn’t have a booking system, it is time for a change, but first, let’s explore 5 steps to take before the launch. 

Define Your Needs, Wants, and Goals

Before taking any type of project to the second stage, it’s extremely important to understand what you want and what your organization needs. Without clearly defined goals, you can be sure the whole project will turn into a mess with an unexpected, unwanted, and ineffective solution. The perfect scenario is to create a ‘needs’ list and sort them into two columns, must-have and nice-to-have. This practice can help you see what your business truly needs, improve time management, and increase the success of the project. Next, recognize the goals and add them to the list to clearly distinguish between those two columns. Having extraordinary features is great, but functionality is king. Choose features that solve real problems and streamline your operations; don’t invest in those that just look nice in theory.

Understand What Customers Want It to Look Like

Knowing how they want the online booking system to work and look is essential to making the online booking system reliable for your customers. We can usually see systems or online services with many functions and perfect interfaces but without a user-friendly environment, which can discourage potential and current customers. Simplicity and accessibility are the core of a successful online booking system. To make everything work out perfectly, start with your team and interview every department about their needs. Ask about their key requirements for the booking system and which of them aren’t being met at the moment. Additionally, perform market research, compare the systems of your competitors, observe the latest trends in the travel industry, and read client reviews. Align the results of research with the company’s overall goals to have a holistic perspective on how the effective development of your online booking system should look.

Discuss the Budget

Now that you finally have a clear vision of the needs and goals of your online booking system, it’s time to start one of the most controversial and problematic topics – budget. Choosing software for the booking system isn’t ideal: features matter, but budget matters too. While standard systems may seem cheap, consider hidden costs like commissions that eat into your profits. Explore all costs to pick the best fit for your business. 

If you plan to cooperate with the outsourcing company, you should decide which type of contract you want to conduct. To find out which outsourcing contract can work the best for your project, read our article, “Exploring Outsourcing Contracts: Comprehensive Analysis and Comparison,” where we explain the pros and cons of each contract in detail. 

Choose the Software Type

The online booking system you choose can significantly impact your business. While ease of use is important, it’s crucial to consider the level of control you have over the booking process.

Cloud-based booking systems offer convenience: easy integration with widgets for your website. However, this ease comes at a cost – reduced control. Users often get redirected to the booking platform while leaving your site.

Consider a custom solution from the outsourcing company for more control and user insights. This allows you to analyze customers’ behavior throughout the booking journey, leading to better conversion optimization.

Clarify Core Functionality and Processes

The last step is to understand how your online booking system’s main processes will work. Do you want your system to be easy to use or have a more difficult but wide range of functionalities? How will reporting perform? What does your travel policy look like? These questions can seem difficult to answer, but let’s try to simplify them. 

Usage features

As we said before, simplicity is the key to success, but this topic is a double-edged sword. In the travel industry, customers can be crucially different, creating a problem with usage. For non-technology-oriented customers, an easy-to-use platform can be perfect, while for others, a platform without any advanced features, which can make it difficult, can seem limited, leading to the search for a better one. It’s essential to know the main information about the majority of your target audience and make decisions based on it. 

Importance of Reporting

Robust reporting in online booking systems is crucial. It provides data-driven insights on reservations, customer details, and financial health. You will be able to see your bookings more clearly and have more power over changing other features and policies if you have access to an extensive report. This enables analysis of trends, identification of areas for improvement, and optimization of pricing strategies and marketing campaigns to drive more bookings. 

Travel Policy Conditions

Advanced policy configuration is a must-have for an online booking system. This lets you define important details such as offered services, transaction values, locations, transportation, meeting points, and more. Without these settings, you run the risk of violating the requirements and potentially receiving a fine. A flexible system ensures your policies are clear and helps you avoid unnecessary financial burdens.

Wrap-up

The popularity of online bookings is growing rapidly, emphasizing the importance of adapting to this trend. Understanding customer preferences, identifying key requirements, and conducting market research are the essential steps to ensuring a user-friendly and effective system, and choosing the right software type, whether cloud-based or custom, can significantly impact your business. Lastly, clarifying the main processes, such as usage features and the importance of robust reporting, will contribute to the success of your online booking system. By streamlining the booking process and attracting more customers, your travel business can thrive in the digital age.

HYS engineers are experts in online booking systems, among other things. We can deliver a solution that perfectly fits your needs, timeframe, budget, and business ideas. Invest in developing the online booking system to keep up with the latest trends. Start your journey with HYS Enterprise right now!