[thelist] Hotels

[john at johnallsopp.co.uk]

Hi

Hotels. How do they work then?

Let's imagine for a moment you have a hotel website to build. You can
build a static site to promote it. Then you add a room booking system
that takes a booking, tells the customer it's not booked until you get
confirmation, and then emails the hotel owner to make the booking.

Obviously, it would be better if it were live. But getting a hotel to
maintain the records of which rooms are booked when is a non-starter.
So it has to be integrated with their internal booking system. Anyone
any thoughts or experience with that kinda thing?

Then, how do most hotels get their bookings? Through aggregators
maybe? Presumably if I typed in www.hotels.com I'd get to choose a
hotel somewhere and maybe book a room, then the www.hotels.com system
would talk to www.myhotel.com and book the place. From myhotel.com's
point of view, do I register with lots of those booking services or
just one? If lots, I presumably have to create lots of interfaces or
file formats to keep them happy. Or is there a centrally agreed format
for such things?

Or, do some hotels eschew all that and just take bookings direct and
pocket the saving?

Presumably there are a few hotel website and booking systems I could
download and implement. I'd tend to prefer to write my own, but maybe
not in this case.

Anyone had any experiences with this kind of thing?

Cheers
J