Most hotel reservation software looks the same in a screenshot. A grid of rooms, a row of dates, some colored bars. The differences show up on the first busy Friday, when the phone is ringing, a guest is at the desk and someone has just asked to move their booking to a bigger room. This is what to check before you pick one.
Start with how bookings reach you
List where your bookings come from: the phone, email, people at the desk, your website. Then list who takes them. A two-room guest house with one owner has very different needs from a 40-room hotel with a front desk, a back office and a manager who works from home on Mondays. The software has to fit the second list as well as the first.
Look at the calendar first
You’ll look at it all day, so it matters more than any other screen. Check that you can see every room at once, that bookings are color coded by status, and that you can move a booking to another room by dragging it. iMagic Hotel Reservation has a simple and an advanced calendar view, and statuses such as Booked, Not confirmed, Confirmed, Checked In and Checked-Out. You can also define your own.
Ask how it stops a double booking. The answer should be that the room is shown as taken, not that you need to be careful.
Rates and tax
Small hotels often have messier pricing than the software expects. Check whether it can charge per night, per person, per week, per month or a mix. Check that it handles seasons, with several in one year. If you charge VAT or GST, check that it calculates inclusive tax correctly, and that it copes with a second tax if your area has one.
Extras need a home too. Laundry, towels, a mini bar and breakfast all end up on the bill, and the software should add them without you doing sums on a calculator.
Customers and payments
A good system builds a customer record from every booking, so a returning guest is a search away and not a new form. It should show what each guest still owes, record deposits and payments, and print confirmations and receipts that show the charges and payments for you. Check that you can put your own logo and terms on them.
Staff and access
If more than one person takes bookings, check how that works. iMagic Hotel Reservation can run on several PCs on a local network, with one PC holding the shared database. Each PC needs its own license. You can also give each person a login and decide which functions they can use, and the software records which user made each booking.
Desktop or cloud
The desktop edition is installed on a Windows PC, and your guests and bookings live in a database file that you back up. It needs an internet connection for a short time, to download and activate it. The Cloud Edition runs in a browser on a PC, Mac, phone or tablet, so there’s nothing to install or update, and it suits you better if you want to check bookings from anywhere. It’s a subscription priced by the number of rooms, and iMagic quotes on request and can show you a demo account. Cloud Edition explains the trade-offs in more detail.
What the price covers
Work out what you’d pay in a year, not what the first month costs. For the desktop edition that means one license per PC at $399 per year for one PC and $798 for two, with support and updates included, and no cost per booking. Check the same things for anything you compare it with: per-booking fees, charges for extra users, and whether updates cost extra. The Purchase page has the current prices.
Questions to ask any vendor
- Can I try it with real bookings before paying?
- What happens to my data if I stop using the software? (iMagic exports reservations and customers to CSV files for Excel.)
- How does support work, and how quickly do people reply?
- What does a second PC cost?
- Does the software need a particular version of Windows? (System requirements for iMagic are 1 GHz with two or more cores, 4 GB of RAM and 24 MB of disk space.)
Try it with real bookings
A demo with made-up guests tells you very little. Put in the bookings you have for next week, take one over the phone, move a booking from one room to another and print a confirmation. If that feels slow or confusing, it will feel worse in the middle of a rush.
Download the free iMagic Hotel Reservation trial, a fully functional 10 use evaluation, and enter next week’s bookings to see how your own calendar looks.