Tourism Associations and availability seacrhes

Excuse the cumbersome title.
I've recently become re-involved with our local tourism association and am on a sub group looking at the groups website and how we improve and take forward. As the likes of book ing do tcom get bigger and bigger it seems to me that one functionality that would be great to have on our website is the ability for guests to search by date for available rooms. This involves all (or as many as possible) businesses having their availability online and there are many that don't have this, and of those that do they all use different booking engines, so not easy to tie together into one function.
We could have just an availability calendar with a simple click on / click off for rooms and dates, and I would be happy to write this function myself, but then anyone who has a booking engine would have another calendar to keep up to date.
I would be grateful for your experiences in this area or any suggested solutions we could look at.

Many different reservation/availability calendar systems may be able to supply a basic iCal feed (i.e, a url to a .ics file), which could be linked through a Google Calendar or something like that. Something to look into, perhaps.

I only understand bits and parts, but I would be interested in hearing about any options that would allow a group of properties to show availability in one place, without breaking the bank.

I don't know anything about it, but I've noticed that on the ResKey Website tab there's an "Associations" button on the left menu and it says this:
If you are a member of an association using this system, you can link your availability to an association summery availability page. This enables you to go to one website to quickly view availability of all linked properties in the association.
So it sounds like it only works for a group of ResKey users.

Arks said:

I don't know anything about it, but I've noticed that on the ResKey Website tab there's an "Associations" button on the left menu and it says this:
If you are a member of an association using this system, you can link your availability to an association summery availability page. This enables you to go to one website to quickly view availability of all linked properties in the association.
So it sounds like it only works for a group of ResKey users..

Click to expand...

Sounds pretty nifty.

Ask Cambs - she has a set-up with Harrogate.

We are just revamping ours - but what we did initially was went with eviivio as the majority of members were with them and the people that didn't got nothing which wasn't super.
If people are with booking.com you can get a "while Lable" solution from them ie its a button but its booking.com behind it.
For people with nothing - its tough im afraid. - though could you maybe get something from Free to book for them? would just need the booking button code - but they would have to update it.

Our RTO (regional tourism organization) recently signed on to JackRabbit (which I first heard about on this forum). It's a searchable aggregator which reads a number of different reservation systems in order to provide a list of availability and prices for a given set of dates. When a prospective guest clicks Book Now from the list of options, the system sends them directly to the property's site or booking page. No transactions take place within the JR system.
The nice thing is, since it reads different booking engines (including ResKey), you don't have to maintain multiple calendars. It also includes a bare-bones online booking engine -- free -- for properties who don't already have online bookings.

happyjacks said:

Our RTO (regional tourism organization) recently signed on to JackRabbit (which I first heard about on this forum). It's a searchable aggregator which reads a number of different reservation systems in order to provide a list of availability and prices for a given set of dates. When a prospective guest clicks Book Now from the list of options, the system sends them directly to the property's site or booking page. No transactions take place within the JR system.
The nice thing is, since it reads different booking engines (including ResKey), you don't have to maintain multiple calendars. It also includes a bare-bones online booking engine -- free -- for properties who don't already have online bookings..

Click to expand...

I want to kiss you!!!
That is exactly what we need, I hadn't even considered that possibility. Having multiple calendars to maintain or forcing people to swicth booking engines is exacly what's killing this project at the moment.
Thank you.

Highlands John said:

happyjacks said:

Our RTO (regional tourism organization) recently signed on to JackRabbit (which I first heard about on this forum). It's a searchable aggregator which reads a number of different reservation systems in order to provide a list of availability and prices for a given set of dates. When a prospective guest clicks Book Now from the list of options, the system sends them directly to the property's site or booking page. No transactions take place within the JR system.
The nice thing is, since it reads different booking engines (including ResKey), you don't have to maintain multiple calendars. It also includes a bare-bones online booking engine -- free -- for properties who don't already have online bookings..

Click to expand...

I want to kiss you!!!
That is exactly what we need, I hadn't even considered that possibility. Having multiple calendars to maintain or forcing people to swicth booking engines is exacly what's killing this project at the moment.
Thank you.
.

Click to expand...

Highlands John said:

I want to kiss you!!!
That is exactly what we need, I hadn't even considered that possibility. Having multiple calendars to maintain or forcing people to swicth booking engines is exacly what's killing this project at the moment.
Thank you.

Click to expand...

Kisses always welcome!
It's not live on our site yet as we just signed the contract but I was on the subcommittee vetting options, so if you have any questions, let me know.