Connect your rooms, rates, and availability from ResRequest to online travel platforms so you can sell Direct, via OTAs, and via Travel Agents. Connecting to these online travel platforms is valuable as they specialise in electronic marketing and selling your rooms.
ResInsite takes your ResRequest data and transforms it into pre-built tourism charts. Developed and supported by Travel Trackers, this application is ideal for business stakeholders who need to see business trends and make decisions that improve operations and increase revenues.
If producing content-rich, interactive itineraries that inspire your guests to travel is key for you, WETU is your answer!
WETU is the place to store and distribute your content for and to your travel partners, and it’s a quick way to get noticed. It only starts there, imagery and videos stored in WETU that are relevant to bookings are automatically added to your WETU itinerary, making your customer eager to convert.
Here is our favourite part… You can create a gorgeous WETU itinerary from ResRequest in seconds, with an easy ResRequest integration. In two clicks, your sales team can open their ResRequest booking, in WETU.
Paul de Waal, WETU CEO believes technology doesn’t sell travel, great content does. “You have a small window of opportunity to engage and communicate with your customers using your best content. Travel is back on everyone’s mind and this is the time for suppliers to be putting their best foot forward with their best content so that what we see is worth selling,” says Paul.
Launched in 2009, WETU came to be after Paul saw a massive opportunity to help the travel industry store, organise and share its content.
Today the WETU platform seamlessly, efficiently and quite beautifully arranges, organises and curates the complex, complicated world of different languages, cultures, time zones, suppliers – all perfectly wrapped up in a variety of streamlined itineraries, brochures and catalogues.
“People are bombarded with information, they want one place to go to that they can trust with accurate, informative and exciting content”, Paul explains.
How WETU can help you
“It’s time to get intentional with what you put out in the world,” says Paul. “Suppliers who load their best-quality content to WETU are the ones that stand out from the sea of same and really leverage our incredible trade reach.”
Let the numbers speak for themselves
WETU has 1396 itinerary building clients (50+countries) and is available in 15 different languages. WETU statistics from January 2020 (before Covid):
Take a look at some WETU itineraries
For more information about our integration to Wetu visit our Online Help guides or Contact ResRequest Support to sign up.
Did you know that 4.48 billion people use social media worldwide? So it’s fundamental to have a social media presence for your hotel because of the huge potential in this space.
Guests today not only use search engines but also troll social media to make informed decisions about their next vacation. Looking through online reviews and posts from other travelers to help guide their decision as to whether or not they will book with your accommodation or not. Hence it’s essential that you have a solid social media marketing strategy that will entice guests to frequent your accommodation and also recommend you on social media.
So just posting random content and pictures will surely do the trick, right? The answer to this question is an emphatic, NO! Managing your accommodation’s social media is beyond ‘just posting’.
If this is your first time creating a strategy for social media or perhaps you want to rethink your approach, then you can read our previous blog post that guides you through 5 ways to improve your social media strategy.
This blog post will help you discover ways that you can better engage with your audience and help you increase your exposure through social media.
Have you ever felt ignored? Right or wrong, it creates a negative association that stays with you, and chances are you are reminded of it when you see that person again or even hear their name. The same applies when guests leave a comment on your social platforms and there’s no response.
A golden rule that all social media marketers should follow and never break is, ‘you must respond to all comments made on your page’. Even if you have a few hundred followers, never break this rule. Engagement is key, and if you want to position your brand positively, respond to all comments, but also ensure that your response time is quick.
This is often the most overlooked aspect of social media marketing. Make use of high-quality photos across all your social media platforms because this will convey consistency, professionalism and sets a good reputation for your brand. Highlight your guestrooms, restaurant decor, food, wildlife, show pictures of your guests enjoying their experience (make sure to get consent from your guests before posting), and perhaps even tagging your guests on social media, this will increase your exposure and family and friends of the guests will take notice and hopefully plan a trip to your accommodation in the new future.
Stay engaged on your platforms, and use high-quality photos to accurately depict local attractions and essential features your accommodation may offer, which will in turn easily influence search results.
Hashtags play an important role in improving your brand’s visibility and help grab attention on your social media platforms. A hashtag helps to highlight the social media post to the audience. Hashtags have no boundaries, so people from all over can connect to you without any barrier.
Influencer marketing is a profound way to reach new audiences and boost your brand awareness. Most travellers in this era are young and tech-savvy, and leveraging partnerships with travel influencers can help hoteliers reach a wider audience and boost engagement and bookings.
Research shows that today’s consumers trust peer recommendations over and above all other forms of marketing, so making use of social media influencers can be of great benefit to your brand.
The added benefits are that most influencers are on highly visual platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, and these are excellent sources for compelling and engaging content. Partnering with an influencer can be a cost-effective method to boost your content creation thereby having a direct impact on your online social presence.
There are many ways to skin this cat, and there’s no holy grail when it comes to social media marketing and each approach and strategy will differ from brand to brand within the same industry. So finding the right strategy will involve trial and error, but the most important thing to remember is to be consistent and follow through with all interactions on your platforms.
Meet Bob, an extreme “hodophile” (One who loves to travel). After his most recent trip to Africa, enthralled by the beautiful landscapes and captivated by the majestic “Big 5”, he couldn’t help himself but trawl to your website to plan his next trip to Africa.
However, his booking experience has left a bitter taste in his mouth, after finding the process to be slow, and difficult to view on mobile – as a result, Bob, unfortunately, decides to abandon his booking.
Just like Bob, there are many users/customers who experience the dissatisfaction of a poor booking experience. One thing that is crucial to note, is that your guests’ first experience of your business begins with the success of their booking experience.
So just how can you tap into this opportunity and turn it into a success for your lodge?
The place to start is with our booking widget, ResNova.
ResNova is our booking widget, which enables you to embed your ResRequest availability and rates anywhere on your website. It offers two formats so you can show your information in either a calendar matrix or a quick search…or both!
You have choices when it comes to deciding how you would like to set your widget up. You have the option of simply showing availability, or enabling the full booking process.
You even have a list of payment gateways that you can choose from, to ensure your guests can make payments during the booking process.
Our most recent development on ResNova, means that it is now built with technologies that provide a sleek and stable booking experience. Just like Bob, most of your guests will access the internet using their mobile devices and with our latest development, we wanted to ensure that their user journey is optimal and user-friendly.
Our new features include:
To learn more about ResNova, and our latest features, contact our support team or visit our Learn Online site.
Your guests are super excited about their holiday with you. Help them by giving them the option to check-in online, saving them time and queues when they arrive. Plus, our online check-in is a contactless way to source guest details and preferences, so you can plan the best welcome for them. In this blog we’ll explore these features available to you in our Guest Services module released with version 7.33. Guest Services Everyone wants a quick and streamlined process, and guests are eager to do what’s needed to reduce time with administration check-in before their travel date.
This means that prior to arrival is the perfect time to gather as much contact information as possible (without overwhelming them with data capture fatigue!). Most travellers also know that giving you their contact details and signing necessary indemnity documents prior to arrival, is a standard operating process required by any lodge or hotel. Your reservation team can include a link in the reservation documents sent to the person who made the booking. The link points to your Guest Services page. From this page, the guest then has the option to create or edit a guest list or to check-in a guest for a booking.
Our new Guest Services module provides you and your team access to our guest-list, guest check-in, and automated workflow functionality, to optimise your contactless check-in process. Here is a summary of the functionality these features provide:
Our guest list provides a way for you and your team to collect guest details long before they arrive at your property. The guest list functionality lets the booking contacts compile their own guest list and room group, provided they can verify the booking details. While compiling a guest list, booking contacts also have the option to easily link a guest record (or the entire list) across multiple itineraries.
Remind your incoming guests that they can check-in online, prior to their arrival by using our automated workflows. Set up the date and time the check-in reminder should be sent to your guest ahead of their arrival so they receive a reminder email which includes a link to your online check-in.
Your guests can check-in as early as 7 days prior to their arrival. Guests can find the online check-in in their reservation document or via the automated email reminder. Information added during the check-in process is stored on the guest’s profile, along with a guest registration document which includes a record of the indemnity agreement the guest agreed to during check-in. For guidance, our support team will be delighted to help you work with the guest services module.
Feel free to contact us us with any queries you or your team have. We are here and ready to help.
We through with the first quarter of 2021 and plans to reboot tourism are well underway. We’ve worked hard during these times to make sure that when tourism does officially reboot, you and your team will be ready to welcome guests with open arms (or perhaps an elbow tap).
We know that COVID-19 has forced the tourism industry to find innovative solutions to help us navigate our guests’ experience. Even as vaccines are being rolled out in different parts of the world, social distancing and the wearing of masks will continue for a while to come.
In the past, your accommodation generally involved frequent contact between staff and guests, but going forward, it will be imperative to limit contact, and to help with that, we’ve developed a contactless guest check-in solution. With Covid still lurking about, clients would most likely prefer an online check-in solution, so that the guest can limit contact with the front-of-house team and the respective paperwork.
Our newly developed guest services module offers you and your team access to guest list, guest check-in and automated workflow functionality, to optimise your contactless check-in process.
If you run multiple properties in your system, you’ll love being able to work with simpler rates. This could now be possible by setting agent commissions for each property. Instead of managing hundreds of unique rate sheets (often riddled with typos), you can now set up contracts with your agents as a commission per property.
Rounding in ResRequest takes place when a commission percentage is applied to a commissionable rate. The system currently offers the facility to round rates at the itinerary level. This latest release, however, introduces the option of rounding at a per person level.
This rounding option is set on the rate header and a new option has been added on the reservation documents to allow you to show the per person charge amount details on those documents.
With this latest release, it is now possible to apply multiple specials to a reservation. If a booking qualifies for both a Circuit discount and a Honeymoon discount, both can be applied.
The addition Special Combos, govern which specials can be combined, so they can automatically be applied as the sales team makes bookings.
Our integration with TallOrder POS streamlines operations by posting POS charges to guest accounts. It is, however, very important that these charges are also posted to your accounting system.
With our latest development, ResRequest now detects POS cash sales that are not linked to room activity. These sales are then recorded in ResRequest, which allows them to be included in ResRequest reports. The resulting financial transactions can then also be batched to your general ledger, along with the rest of your ResRequest invoices.
We have recognised the importance of having transparency of any changes that have been made to user access in your reservation system.
On the user access audit report, you can now filter by users, user groups, functions, and type filters (for filtering by the types of changes made, ie. allow cross invoicing, API flag, functions access).
The addition of the user access audit trail will now allow your team to report on any changes made (going forward from this release) to user access.
You will now have the option to add multiple system admins and ensure that key decisions that affect your reservation system can be made by various managers, instead of merely relying on a single System Administrator.
To ensure that your business never misses a beat, put a continuity plan for your team in place today, by adding additional system administrators.
If you need any assistance or guidance with the with our new features, please contact [email protected]
Working in a fast-paced industry like the tourism industry requires any good Hotel Manager to identify ways to increase revenue and maximise efficiency. Thankfully technology has provided many advantages for hoteliers, and none more so than channel management. So what’s the noise about channel management? What are its benefits? And how do you get started?
Channel management is the process of selling your inventory through online distribution channels all over the world. These channels include OTA’s (Booking.com, Expedia), Travel Agents, Metasearch engines (Google, TripAdvisor), or direct channels (Your website).
Ideally, channel management software provides a centralised platform to properties for managing their distribution across different platforms, and as and when bookings are recorded from any one channel, it automatically updates the latest rates and inventory on all the channels.
Imagine that you’re managing multiple properties through many OTA channels and once you receive a booking from a channel, you have to quickly update the availability across the other channels. Furthermore, the situation can get complex if the guest modifies or changes his booking or cancels his reservation. Can you imagine how admin-intensive this process can be, also leaving room for human error.
Through our ResConnect programme, there are connections to Channel Managers and OTAs which enable ResRequest customers to distribute stock on numerous online booking platforms. ResRequest has direct connections to Channel Managers, SynXis, NightsBridge, and most recently we have added Siteminder to the list of Channel Managers that we interfaced to.
For more information on how to set up your ResRequest Channel Management service (we call this module ResConnect), contact our friendly support team for assistance at [email protected]
COVID-19 has certainly made most of us navigate this world with much fear and trepidation. From the paranoia of going to the grocery store to even the anxiety of leaving our homes out of fear of somehow being exposed to COVID. The tourism industry was undoubtedly hit the hardest with travel restrictions placed upon most / if not all countries across the globe. Since then we have seen a gradual lifting of those regulations and so responsible tourism has taken on an entirely new emphasis as we turn our attention to the most effective ways to enable our economies to recover from the fallout of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
To adjust to the “new normal”, the WTTC (World Travel and Tourism Council) together with health experts and other leading associations are working together to achieve effective recovery protocols by developing meaningful action plans that optimise sector-wide recovery efforts, according to the WTTC.
The WTTC aims to publish protocols in phases for the following industries including; Hospitality, Attractions, Outdoor Retail, Aviation, Airports, Short Term Rentals, Cruise, Tour Operators, Convention Centres, and MICE, Car Rental and Insurance. Each set of protocols takes into consideration the guidelines provided by the World Health Organisation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
By implementing these action plans the WTTC aims to standardize safe travel by developing new global standards and a stamp that allows travellers to identify businesses and destinations that are adopting world-class health and strict hygiene protocols.
To obtain a Safe Travel stamp, countries and their destinations will have to share their protocols with the WTTC, who will then validate that they are in line with the WTTC guidelines.
By following these protocols companies are eligible for a safety stamp that you can display proudly on your website, thereby providing travellers with confidence that your destination has taken all steps to ensure they travel safely.
We hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well during this time. We’ve been in touch with many of you as you work through the operational impact of Covid-19 while making plans for your team to be safe and sound.
While most of us are still under lockdown due to COVID-19, we have been working from home. It took us a while to adapt and reduce costs so we could use this time to put our heads down to take massive strides in delivering new product features. We’re still working on all of this, but we wanted to check in with you to show you some of the items we are working on that will be ready and waiting for you when you reboot.
We have crafted a new drag and drop Rooming Calendar for you, with auto room capabilities, perfect for your front-of-house operations.
What is rooming?
Rooming refers to allocating your guests to specific rooms. It’s important to room guests to track arrivals, departures or no shows; to avoid situations where you have to move guests to a different room during their stay; ensure that special requests like a honeymoon room or a family room are accommodated and to automatically charge guest accounts using our stock and POS interface.
So what are the new features in the Rooming Calendar?
Rooming by the lodge staff is typically managed on the Rooming Calendar. Our previous calendar now called our “Classic” calendar, requires a lot of pop-ups and quite a bit of manual work to room bookings. Our stunning new calendar, which we call our “Modern” calendar fits visuals to your full-screen width, so you can see more information than ever before; automatically auto rooms reservations at the click of a button (our absolute favourite Jenga trick) and enables drag and drop should, you want to customise the view.
AUTO ROOM – Automatically room your unallocated reservations in the optimal configuration, to ensure that you get the most out of your availability.
DRAG AND DROP – Shuffle a reservation between rooms by simply dragging and dropping it to the relevant room. Clicking on a reservation item also highlights the valid rooming possibilities in green.
MANAGE A RESERVATION – Manage multiple aspects of a reservation without leaving the rooming calendar screen. Manage guests, view itineraries, check multiple rooms on a reservation in, and so much more.
ROOMING CONFLICTS – Our team has included an indication to alert users of any potential rooming conflicts. This will minimise the risk of overbooking a room, despite multiple people being responsible for rooming reservations.
We all love great pictures, even more, when they tell a story. If your job is to stay on top of everything, you’ll love our new Reservation Manager and Sales Overview Dashboard. The Reservation Manager and Sales Overview Dashboard are the first of many dashboards we’ll be introducing. Graphs on this dashboard will give you visibility into the reservation and sales overview side of your business. The sales dashboard will help measure key metrics, individual team members, and sales activities.
Learn more about dashboards here.
Our new charts will help you analyse the booking trends of your Agents and quickly spot gaps and positive or negative changes in their performance.
You spoke and we listened
Last year we released dashboards as part of our Agent CRM. We received feedback that you would like to include revenue information, our developers heard you, and have added a revenue-based chart so you can monitor how your agents are performing month-on-month.
Product Usage
ResRequest is a powerful system, so how can you be sure that you are using it to its full potential?
The Product Usage Dashboard is a quick and easy reference point, to assess what areas of the system are being used and what you can still tap into.
If you need any assistance or guidance with the rooming calendar and dashboards, please contact [email protected]
