3 open source tools for managing hotel reservations

The tourism industry has been gaining momentum for decades. In fact, many countries' economies and political stability rely on tourism and travel industries. Macau, for example, generates $26.6 billion annually from tourism, which accounts for 44% of its GDP. A subset of this economy, the hotel industry, is a powerful element that's expanding globally and growing exponentially.

Whether you're a seasoned hotel manager or you've just entered the hospitality market, these three hotel booking engines can help.

Rezgo

Do you value customization and integrating open source into your current system? Try Rezgo.

Rezgo is a web-based reservation system that's designed specifically for tour and activity operators. It provides tour management solutions (such as online booking engines) and supports integration with popular booking engines such as Expedia and Travel Advisor. Rezgo focuses on increasing business efficiency, with no limits on users, bookings, or features for its products. Rezgo's open source booking engine is available for inspection and download at GitHub. It is built with PHP using the Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework and AJAX. You'll find Rezgo easy to work with if you're comfortable with XML API development, PHP, AJAX, and CSS.

Rezgo's open source booking engine emphasizes accessibility and customization. It includes responsive design, search-ready pages, and support discounts and referral codes. With Rezgo's flexibility, you can control and modify the look and feel of your customer booking experience. In addition, features like online and mobile booking enhance customers' booking experience by providing multiple booking platforms.

The uniqueness of Rezgo's open source booking engine is its integration within the broader systems of Rezgo. The open source booking engine includes all the existing features of Rezgo's baseline service.

QloApps

QloApps is an easily accessible open source hotel booking and reservation system. It launches hotel-booking websites with cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). QloApps's highlights include management of both online and offline booking in one place and administrative flexibility in room reallocation and payment methods.

QloApps allows hotel owners to manage both online and offline bookings by aggregating all relevant information in one system. The system synchronizes rooms, rates, and availability on a single platform. The offline booking system reduces manual and handbook management by allowing back-end booking by an administrator.

On the user end, QloApps innovates with customer experience and payment methods. Customers can book multiple rooms at multiple hotels in one shopping cart with a customizable web design. Additionally, the partial payment feature allows customers to book a hotel without full-amount payment. QloApps integrates existing payment options such as PayPal to its module, and it allows hotel managers to showcase the interior, amenities, customer reviews, and other accompanying information of the hotel on the booking page. The testimonial feature is especially unique to QloApps, which allows positive reviews on the front page to illustrate the quality of your hotel's customer service.

QloApps is friendly and easy to use for newcomers in the hotel industry. With features like refund management, it provides built-in tools that are prevalent in hotel management. If you're thinking about launching a hotel business or in the early stages of using hotel booking engines, check our QloApps and its demo. If you're a seasoned manager, check out how QloApps turns one QloApps website into a hotel marketplace by connecting travelers to several hotels instantly. The QloApps marketplace is especially helpful if you're managing unique properties and hotel chains.

Solidres

If you're a Joomla and WordPress user, Solidres is designed for you. It features a wide range of Joomla templates and WordPress themes options. One of its strongest features is having multiple reservation assets from accommodation and restaurant management to sightseeing tours and activities. Solidres prides itself on “customizability, interoperability, and flexibility”—some of the same grounding principles that guide open source communities.

Its features depend on whether you're using Joomla or WordPress, but versions for both platforms include:

1. Commercial features that include tools such as user plugins, Google extensions, and Module Statistics.
2. Templates from Joomla and WordPress that are easily accessible for Joomla and WordPress users.
3. Payment gateways that support more than 16 different payment methods and financial integrations.
4. Core features such as standard tariff, media management, and currency exchange.

Solidres's built-in "tariff" feature is one of its most unique tools; it presents a detailed disclosure of room/amenity rates with other rate information that may be relevant to your guests. By having a complete and detailed section for tariff information on the booking page, you can avoid customer confusion (even potential lawsuits) about fee disagreement. Solidres's tariff system not only includes basic price info but also allows you to configure tariffs to match different customers. For example, you can set a different tariff on Solidres's platform base on customer group, date range, charge type (per room per night, or per person per night, or package per room, or package per person, to name a few). The flexibility of the platform allows you to change the tariff base in response to customer need, and customers can select their rooms with different services on the front end.

Overall, Solidres offers comprehensive features—but it works only for Joomla and WordPress users.

As open source principles gain momentum in the business community, many more open source hotel booking engine solutions will emerge to suit the needs of your hotel and business. Using open source tools to manage hotel booking is not only a functional change but also a cultural shift in how your business operates. By leading your hotel with open principles, you will not only be a "first-mover" in the hotel industry, but also tap into the creativity, flexibility, and energy that open source can bring to your business.