Different Types of Booking Engines

Booking engine is a much needed application in travel portal that helps to make online reservation successful. These booking engines are very helpful for travel agents to make more business. Hotel, flight, car, bus booking engines and vacation packages are the widely used booking engines in travel industry. Let’s have a look at introduction to each booking engine and their uses.

Flight Booking Engine

A flight booking engine is an online portal whose main purpose is to facilitate online airline ticket booking. Today all airlines use their individual, customized flight booking engines which are developed by specialist organizations like Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo and Worldspan. Flight booking engines are multi-lingual and are linked to multiple websites and airlines throughout the world, which give access to agents for effective bookings. These websites are regularly upgraded which keeps them abreast with the latest information and technology. Flight booking engines are also equipped with other related features such as marketing tools, consulting services, non-air product sales and so on.

Hotel Booking Engine

Today, a high percentage of travelers book hotels online either individually or through an agent. Due to this reason, a hotel booking engine is required which is capable of handling the traffic that gets directed to the website and indeed attracted to it. Such a portal should be capable of providing hotel bookings throughout the world. The most economical and lowest tariffs should be made available on both B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) levels.

Car Booking Engine

With so much reliance on online transactions today, it should not come as a surprise that car booking engines are so well-developed. Car booking engines help to boost the sales of companies which are dedicated to renting and hiring of cars. These portals give car rental agencies a global presence by making them accessible to clients all over the world. Car booking engine software solutions are provided by software developers throughout the globe.

The advantages of using this sort of software are:

• Minimal investment for using complex tailored systems
• Successful business with reduced technical requirements due to dedicated support services
• Car rental brokers can easily establish an online reservation system
• Ultimate control on reservation status, amendment or cancellation of  reservations, and voucher printing

Bus Booking Engine

Having only physical offices for ticketing for bus travel is not enough. Travel agents need a strong online presence for selling bus tickets. Various developers offer software solutions to travel agents for development and maintenance of bus booking engines. By using an online bus booking engine, one can:

• Facilitate secure, automatic sale of tickets
• Allow users to amend and cancel bus tickets
• Create routes and allocate them on a vendor-wise basis
• Allow customers to compare rates for cost-effective travel
• Handle multiple currencies in booking transactions
• Real time inventory booking

Vacation Packages Booking Engine

The most critical component of a vacation is booking. With so much preference given to online bookings, vacation packages booking engines have a big role to play in vacation planning. It is possible for agents to develop their customized web-based booking engines supported by professional software experts. By using a vacation package booking engine, it possible to:

• Give customers a clearer picture of what they are paying for before they actually book the units
• Provide availability calendars to help agents and customers plan a vacation effectively
• Deduct inventory in real time
• Set seasonal windows
• Integrate accountancy systems
• Provide options involving multiple tour operators
• Allow for rates comparison to get the best deals
• Integrate hotel, air, car, and bus bookings in a single transaction