A hotel reservation system is a program that keeps your rooms, your bookings, your guests and your payments in one place, and keeps them consistent with each other. That sounds dull until you follow a single booking through it. Here’s one, from the first phone call to the receipt.
What it holds
Four things sit underneath everything else. Rooms, which can be ordinary rooms, apartments, studios, halls or lodges, or whatever else you define. Rates for each room, including seasonal rates and any taxes. Customers, with their contact details and history. And bookings, which tie a customer to one or more rooms for a set of dates.
Because these are stored once and linked, changing one thing updates the rest. Move a booking to another room and the calendar, the bill and the room report all change.
The enquiry
A guest calls and asks about the second weekend of next month. You open the calendar and see which rooms are free. Rooms already booked show as taken, so you’re not paging back through a diary. If you’re not sure yet, you can record the booking with the status Not confirmed, then change it to Confirmed once the deposit arrives.
Taking the booking
iMagic Hotel Reservation uses a step by step booking wizard, five steps from the booking dates to a final summary. You pick from the list of rooms available for those dates, then either search for the guest if they’ve stayed before or add them as a new customer. You can add extras such as laundry or towels, and you can book more than one room in the same reservation. The bill is calculated for you, with seasonal rates and tax applied.
The last screen is a summary. From there you can print or email the confirmation, which can carry your logo and terms.
Deposits and payments
When the deposit comes in, you record it against the booking. The system keeps track of what’s been paid, by which method, and what’s still owed, so you can see who owes what at any point. Nobody has to dig through receipts to work out the balance on the day of departure.
The stay
Over the stay the booking’s status changes, from Confirmed to Checked In and then Checked-Out. Charges added during the stay, such as a mini bar, go onto the same bill. At checkout you print a receipt showing every charge and payment.
Behind the scenes the system keeps a record of which user made each booking, and who can do what is set by the logins you give your staff.
After the guest leaves
The booking stays in the guest’s history. The next time they ring, you find them with the customer quick search and their details are already filled in. You can also build an email mailing list from your customer records and export customers and reservations to CSV files for Excel.
The reports use the same data. There are reports for occupancy, payments, in-house guests, checked-out guests and unconfirmed reservations, plus graphs that show how bookings change over weeks and months. If you use the cleaning lists export, housekeeping gets a list from the same bookings.
What it isn’t
A reservation system is separate from the booking form on your website. The system holds your calendar. A website booking service takes bookings from guests and needs to know what’s free. iMagic Hotel Reservation can send your availability to a booking service, or show it on your site with the Online Guest Calendar, so the two stay in step.
Seeing it on screen
If you’d like to see these screens before trying anything, the screenshots show the calendars, the booking wizard, customers and reports. The full feature list lists everything above and more.
Download the free iMagic Hotel Reservation trial, a fully functional 10 use evaluation, and take one booking through from the enquiry to the receipt.