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Of all the e-commerce endeavours globally, online booking has perhaps made the maximum impact. By steering millions of consumers to book hotels, online booking has outshone the good old days of toll-free booking. But how does an internet booking engine really work? How does it manage to serve both hotels and customers efficiently? Here is an insight into the intricacies of this latest tech offering. By Dinkar Farwaha

The hotel industry has undertaken various initiatives in the past to maximise bookings. Prepaid phone reservations were the first major introduction, which helped hotels to generate additional bookings for themselves. Then came the toll-free phone service, which helped further in maximising their revenues. Marketing also played an integral role by offering more visibility to the properties, corresponding directly to better bookings. Most recently, the revolutionary e-commerce endeavour (online booking) is proving to have maximum potential for generating income for the industry.

Online booking engines have provided hotels with a platform, not only to create better revenues for themselves, but also an opportunity to showcase their products to the global market.

But the key question is that how has it managed to design its engine in such a way that it has led to the sudden boom of hotels?

The first and foremost advantage of a booking engine is that it has the ability to provide all the relevant offers and available rooms of a particular hotel-on a single page. Not only is it time-saving for the customer, but the hotel also gains, as the chances of a customer booking a room through such a site tends to be higher. "Booking engines can showcase all the different rooms available in which is more organised user-friendly manner," says Tridib Ghosh, associate director, Golden Globe hotels, the master franchisee for FastBooking in India.

The software that these engines use is designed in such a manner that it provides various booking rooms available in a hotel on allocation or free sale, with or without a retrocession period. Further, it also offers rates subject to a minimum or maximum stay; rates per person, per room, and even half-board. This shows that an engine has the potential to give a better visibility to all the kinds of rooms available in a property at one go.

Further, the multi-lingual feature of an engine also helps the hotel, in the sense that, with more language options, the number of foreign language-speaking customers booking hotels also increases; ultimately resulting in better sales for the hotel. Says Ghosh, "This system helps in detecting the language selected in that customer's browser and hence at every step, provides all the information needed for the booking process. The confirmations and booking error messages are also presented in the selected language."

Moreover, most engines don't demand any advance payment. When a customer books a hotel by entering his credit card number, the reservation is guaranteed, but the card is not debited. He is charged only at the time of check-in or check-out. Further, these booking engines also take steps to ensure security for credit card usage. "When a customer guarantees his booking by giving his credit card number, the credit card number is captured in a security zone, which is immediately sent to the hotel in encrypted mode," informs Ghosh.

Additionally, an engine provides the facility of searching the whole range of available offers simultaneously, in various properties of the group. Ghosh explains, "In case a customer wants to book a room at a hotel which is full, the engine can automatically display available rooms at other hotels in the same group."

The engines can also serve a distinguished advantage to stand-alone properties by helping them to create allocations as well as define price categories for different market segments, therefore maximising business during peak periods.

Additionally, initiatives like GDS/IDS by booking engines help hotels in distribution to online travel agents and major travel websites from a single access point, thereby saving time.

All in all, such kinds of initiatives have made online booking engines a force to reckon with in the booking segment. What emerges clearly is that it is a win-win situation- for both hotels and customers.