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 received works reasonably well, looks quite impressive and allows us to take credit cards at bookings, but even though the invoice makes mention of a deposit, in reality nothing is taken since we can't touch credit cards at all.
So this is really only our backend though, and it is a very sophisticated one that can allow us to work with corporate accounts and agents....and connect us to GDS (not something we are doing). But what it doesn't do is manage any part of our front-end. To do that, we first played with a synchronized excel file (only 10 rooms!) and then moved it all into clerk.im. This was really nice, looked really good, but had a bunch of bugs all over the place that started getting annoying. Also with 10 rooms it seemed that a lot of last minute bumping rooms around into new places was necessary - something that clerk.im was not great at.
Now I'm playing with keepmebooked.com as a frontend, since it handles some things better than clerk.im, is well priced, and is missing a few of those bizarre bugs that were losing us money here and there. Also with keepmebooked we have the potential to use it as our backend. The reason why I have no done this yet is because they still cannot do CC validation like ehbox.com, so I'll be limited to doing email confirmations with no sense from the customer that any money is on the line. The other reason why I'd like to move to this regardless is that I'm tired of the workflow and it's caused many human error mixups already that resulted in lost bookings or unexpected double room bookings etc..
In terms of workflow I mean receiving an email from ehbox about a booking, keying it into keepmebooked.com and then when a phone booking comes (we get lots), going back into ehbox' inventory and changing the available rooms to reflect the new phone bookings. This is all relatively easy, but requires that the person doing this fully know two systems, and the inventory one in ehbox is not that simple. Also that makes two instances for human error to crop up.
So ----- four things.
1) Am I crazy to find this all too difficult? Is this is normal workflow that just needs time for us to get used to it?
2) if I switch entirely to using keepmebooked.com (or something similar) is giving up CC validation or the feeling of leaving a deposit a huge deal? Can I limit no-shows enough with well-worded and clear booking request and booking confirmations emails?
3) Is there a front-end that ehbox can connect to so that I can keep its booking engine/CC validation service and use another layer on top of it to keep my hotel running and do invoicing?
4) OR alternatively, is there another competing product that will easily validate CCs, do the booking engine stuff on the website and also the front-end invoicing and room/guest management??
Lots of questions, and I would be lying if I said we were pros! But I know a few of you have great experience to offer on this so I don't have to feel like I'm reinventing the wheel.
Thanks in advance, and looking forward to all of your thoughts
JS
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 received works reasonably well, looks quite impressive and allows us to take credit cards at bookings, but even though the invoice makes mention of a deposit, in reality nothing is taken since we can't touch credit cards at all.
So this is really only our backend though, and it is a very sophisticated one that can allow us to work with corporate accounts and agents....and connect us to GDS (not something we are doing). But what it doesn't do is manage any part of our front-end. To do that, we first played with a synchronized excel file (only 10 rooms!) and then moved it all into clerk.im. This was really nice, looked really good, but had a bunch of bugs all over the place that started getting annoying. Also with 10 rooms it seemed that a lot of last minute bumping rooms around into new places was necessary - something that clerk.im was not great at.
Now I'm playing with keepmebooked.com as a frontend, since it handles some things better than clerk.im, is well priced, and is missing a few of those bizarre bugs that were losing us money here and there. Also with keepmebooked we have the potential to use it as our backend. The reason why I have no done this yet is because they still cannot do CC validation like ehbox.com, so I'll be limited to doing email confirmations with no sense from the customer that any money is on the line. The other reason why I'd like to move to this regardless is that I'm tired of the workflow and it's caused many human error mixups already that resulted in lost bookings or unexpected double room bookings etc..
In terms of workflow I mean receiving an email from ehbox about a booking, keying it into keepmebooked.com and then when a phone booking comes (we get lots), going back into ehbox' inventory and changing the available rooms to reflect the new phone bookings. This is all relatively easy, but requires that the person doing this fully know two systems, and the inventory one in ehbox is not that simple. Also that makes two instances for human error to crop up.
So ----- four things.
1) Am I crazy to find this all too difficult? Is this is normal workflow that just needs time for us to get used to it?
2) if I switch entirely to using keepmebooked.com (or something similar) is giving up CC validation or the feeling of leaving a deposit a huge deal? Can I limit no-shows enough with well-worded and clear booking request and booking confirmations emails?
3) Is there a front-end that ehbox can connect to so that I can keep its booking engine/CC validation service and use another layer on top of it to keep my hotel running and do invoicing?
4) OR alternatively, is there another competing product that will easily validate CCs, do the booking engine stuff on the website and also the front-end invoicing and room/guest management??
Lots of questions, and I would be lying if I said we were pros! But I know a few of you have great experience to offer on this so I don't have to feel like I'm reinventing the wheel.
Thanks in advance, and looking forward to all of your thoughts
JS