Recent content by joels

Hmm that's a really good point. My usual way of working with Facebook promotions is to just link URL's from Facebook, promote those, and then have all the detail put in the actual URL - not Facebook. I guess that achieves what you mention here, but didn't know that google doesn't index any of...

Hm I wish I could do this! But dropping the OTAs means essentially being unlisted from TripAdvisor, unless users somehow figure out how to clear their dates and refresh. Without any OTA connections, if they add in a date, it will clear us away. I'd not care about that as we are very popular...

Very interesting! I'll use some of that. I think I have the OTAs more or less functionally configured OK for our purposes now. The main issue is dragging guests away from them as much as possible. I'm trying to push a bit with our TA business account using notices and special, and I'll push...

I see. I did a few things like this last year and I remember many days of pain of trying to sort out certain OTAs not syncing the pricing correctly. Maybe remind me how I can expect it to work. ResKey can't sync the pricing to myAllocator right? I'm fairly certain the OTAs get their pricing...

Fair enough! I'm paranoid, but in reality anyone connecting the online dots can figure this out already. I'm Joel and I run a slightly up-market B&B in China. Also been a long-time lurker and occasional user on this forum, which is where I happily discovered ReservationKey and have pushed it...

Oh sorry ! I think I was confused, when I said tripconnect, I meant TA instant bookings. Yes they are 100% going to move towards that, why not?? They can potentially knock out a lot of competition. I've stopped with the tripconnect CPC ourselves now. Hard to justify and too many bizarre...

Hey John, Yes exactly ! This is why we first ever considered hooking into any OTAs in the first place. Suddenly unless we showed availability, we no longer existed in TA, even with a paid crappy business account.

First a bit of historical perspective: So a long time ago,(5 years) our 9 room place managed to reach the top of TA, with over 5000 hotels on there. Business was good and we were typically nearly always up to capacity with a small dip in the winter months. Then many new places began popping up...

we had a young girl come in recently at 11am to check-in, and upon hearing that check-in was at 14:30 but we'd rush it as much as we can and get something ready asap (likely by noon). She went into a fit of anger accusing us of being terribly disorganized, since she booked a long time ago and we...

So, as we are in China, we get really annoying chinese government types walking in very frequently, often with their inability to contain several comments and thoughts on our design. If I was Chinese they would never think to bring it up, but as I am not, they will always point out to the best...

Just a recap, many many months later.. We are fully waist-deep in Reservationkey, and have also just recently set up myallocator to help with the odd additional channel synchronization. It's awesome. The whole thing couldn't be better. Sure, the payment thing hasn't worked itself in perfectly...

ah interesting... Reservation Nexus seems to be the full solution, front and back end support. Not sure if they will handle enough CC processing that I can get away with continuing normally in cash here as I do now though. I'm not sure if this is especially complicated compared to most...

So a bit of background first: We are in China, we have no ability at this point to charge credit cards (a few months away) and decided to go with ehbox.com as our booking engine in order to streamline everything and be with a partner that seemed focused on small cooler hotels/BnB. What we...