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Hi All

Sorry if this has been asked before but did a search and couldn’t find a conclusive answer:

What’s the best approach to taking reservations for a hotel with EE? I’ve got a client who wants a simple system, around 10 rooms available each night.

Ideally people should be able to reserve a room and give CC details but not be charged. (I suspect that might be a PCI compliance nightmare though - perhaps it’s better to take a booking fee when they book? My client mainly wants people to have given their CC details as in his experience people are more likely to just not turn up otherwise.)

That room should then be maked as unavailable on the site, and the client should be able to log in and see an overview of who’s booked, add bookings themselves manually, cancel bookings etc.

I’m guessing EE must have been used like this before… Any ideas?

Or can anyone recommend third party SaaS solutions? I’m presuming there must be good systems that would integrate with the site (even if in an iframe), and perhaps work on commission?

Thanks loads for any help!

Hi Frank,

The solution, I’m sure is possible with EE but will require some custom programming to accomplish.

‘Out of the Box’ EE doesn’t have support for this, you will need to mold the framework to your will.

My recommendation would be to use something like SagePay - which you can integrate directly via EE and XML posts etc.

I suspect you are going to need to be able to have quite a high-end understanding of EE to be able to build something like this. If you are not able to do it yourself, there are plenty of ‘EE Professionals’ that could assist.

Regards,

Carl.

Hi Carl

Yep I guessed it would be do-able. I’m not sure the budget for this project would stretch to huge amounts of custom coding. Was thinking there may be modules to handle this kind of thing?

Or if anyone knows a good SaaS to outsource it too that’d save me a lot of work!

Hi Frank,

See my thread here: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/168223/

Seems like my system and yours could be similar. You might find that approach helpful.

Graham

Ah that’s interesting - thanks. I’ll have a think about how that might work for mine.

At the moment though the idea of outsourcing it to something hosted elsewhere does have some appeal… Am wondering if I want to be solely responsible for a hotel’s booking system…

I’ve build something a while ago where visitors could book a gardner.

Not sure if it helps anything, but this is how it works:

A standard EE calendar is shown on a page. All available dates are clickable (i.e. weekend days aren’t clickable, dates in the past aren’t clickable and “booked” days aren’t clickable).

When you click an available date in the calendar, the visitor is being redirected to a simple booking form which asks for customer details and has the chosen date in a hidden field. Upon submission, an email is being sent to the site owner.

When the site owner receives the email, he calls or emails the customer for confirmation and then enters the details of the booking as an entry in a weblog/channel, with the entry date as the date of the booking.

When the EE calendar is shown, it goes through the weblog/channel entries and counts the number of bookings for each day. When a date has the maximum number of bookings, it will no longer be made clickable and will be highlighted with a different color so the visitor will be able to see the available days easily.

It required some php, but wasn’t that hard to accomplish. Your situation is a little bit different because you probably don’t want to use a form which sends an email to the site owner. I’m not sure if this will work, but you probably want to use a SAEF instead.

Thanks for sharing that - great to see some different approaches to this kind of thing (as there always are with EE). I guess I’d need to figure out how to include taking CC details or payment and then adding the weblog entry once that’d gone through. But there should be a way to accomplish that…

In our experience there are too many factors for a Hotel reservation system to suit everyone’s needs. We have had both single hotels and hotel chains, but we have had good experiences working with http://www.levo.com.au have a fantastic product you purchase once, host on your own server and they install for you.

http://roomrez.com I believe take a cut of each transaction and are another good hosted solution that has been around a while.
Both systems work with popular hotel inventory management systems. These are important as they can allocate rooms to the website and online retailers like expedia, travelocity and lastminute sites.

I can’t see how a EECMS plugin that is as sophisticated as these systems would be available?

Thanks for your comments. RoomRez looks interesting - not much info on pricing etc on their site, but I’ll drop them en email to find out more… Thanks!

Thanks, I know there are a lot more systems out there. I’m just reporting on the ones I have experience with.
As for integration I usually put together a form on my website template that submits to a new window with roomrez system results.

Don’t forget also that a one off reservation system investment is often the best for these systems. Don’t quote me but I believe Levo was about $15k

Sell the investment this way
A standard room @ $150 per night x 10 rooms x 365 nights = $547,500 revenue
If the reservation provider takes a 5% cut that’s $27,375 per year!

The hotel will see that as a $30k yearly investment in the website, money that could be invested in your skills or online advertising.

That’s a good point. I might have another word with my client - investing upfront might be the way to go… Thanks again!

We have been shopping around for a client, you might like this solution also.
Siteminder is a class leading system that works with expedia, lastminute etc allowing a hotel to allocate their rooms and pricing from a single place.

They have put together a great booking system that will work with the siteminder system called the booking button
https://www.siteminder.com.au/siteminder/bookingbutton.html

That looks very cool too! I’ll definitely look into this further - looks like a nice system. Thanks so much!

You may want to try rEEservation add-on