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Anyone who has tried to book a meeting or event at a hotel can testify to the hassle it involves.
To begin with, there are so many limitations simply in reaching out to the hotel staff. Bound by strict office-hour restrictions and untended emails, often it takes days and many attempts before one’s requirements are registered by the hotel. Moreover, customers have to personally identify hotels, banquet rooms, provide a list of detailed requirements, follow up for availability, make tentative booking, pay advance, receive confirmation and only then start planning the event. This process is time consuming and harrowing for customers, often dragging on for days, with many uncomfortable twists and turns along the way, leading to frustration and customer dissatisfaction.
Banquet facilities are a matter of pride for hotels. However, they use up considerable resources and space of hotels, and managing them is manpower intensive too. This is a catch-22 situation for hotels. To ensure maximum resource from banquets, hotels need to invest in marketing, specialized staff and training. Yet these measures are no guarantee of assured revenue growth. High staff turnover and lack of trained manpower especially in catering sales, create gaps that scuttle even the best laid-out business plans. Fact is, even after an enquiry is received, it takes an inordinate amount of time for the enquiry to translate into revenue, due to archaic processes. The other problem hoteliers face is the lack of information about banquet performance, which limits their ability to develop suitable growth strategies.
Hoteliers are now waking up to the fact that the traditional approach to banquet management has run its course and newer solutions have to be explored in keeping with the times. This is where, their experience with automated hotel room bookings is turning them towards technology for a solution to their banquet woes.
Banquet booking engines like bookbanquetroom.com are revolutionizing the banquet booking process. For customers, the experience with a banquet booking engine is similar to booking a hotel room. They can simply visit the banquet tab on the hotel’s website, feed in their dates and requirements and receive a list of available options. From this lot they need to choose the one best suited to their requirements, send their request and receive an instant confirmation. What’s more the booking engine enables customization for their unique needs. Integrated payment gateways ensure that the payment process is smooth and instantaneous.
The biggest benefit to customers is the convenience it offers them. They can now book their banquets at any time of the day, from any location right from their mobile phones. It liberates them from the rigmarole of having to call the hotel, speak to its staff and then following up with them, thus giving customers complete control of the event.
For hotels, a banquet booking engine is like having trained banquet staff on call, 24×7. Not only does it ensure that every enquiry is attended to, with the auto follow-up function it keeps in touch with potential customers, ensuring optimal conversions. Its well documented API’s easily connect with the hotel’s POS & ERP systems, reducing the booking process by days or weeks, thus saving hours of searching, configuring and booking, and improving margins on every event.
Finally, hotel executives gain an extensive library of standard reporting formats along with options to pull out customised reports helping hotels make informed decisions on pricing and performance from banquet bookings. Through optimum utilization of banquets, reducing manpower and increasing customer satisfaction, banquet booking engines directly increase revenues and improve profitability.
Says Sarosh Khatib, Founder and CEO, bookbanquetroom.com, “In this digital age when everything is being done within a few clicks of your fingers, booking a banquet still follows the traditional manual
process which becomes very tedious. Ours is a unique booking solution catering to the needs of banquet businesses and end consumers and is set to transform the banquet booking experience to the benefit of customers and hoteliers alike.”
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