Behind the BookSure scene

We have started on a new feature in Booksure where a guesthouse can create a list of 5 other guesthouses as their “Referral Friends”. When you are unable to accommmodate a booking request and Decline an enquiry/booking, you will have the option of reffering the guest to one of your Referral Friends. The guest will get the normal email notifing them that you have declined their enquiry, but there will be an additional note on the email with a link to the selected Referral Friends website.

So hopefully this will result in more bookings for all our members.

Note that this is differrent to our signup referral system (http://www.booksure.com/refer-a-friend.html) where you earn R500 for each guesthouse that signs up and mentions you in the ‘Referred By’ field.

There are a couple more things we want to add to this that will be coming in the next few weeks that will improve this process even more. One of which is a new look to the login area.

Joel

Many guesthouses have realised the massive potential of the Internet. Unfortunately, they have yet to benefit properly from this. This is due to various factors, but the there is one factor that stands out more than most.

Before I get into that, what do 3rd party sites offer?
Essentially two things. Search and Booking with secure payment attached.

When a potential customers wants to buy a product online, they go to Google or Yahoo! and type in their search. Be it Books, CD’s, a financial service, etc. Google then presents the potential customer with results ordered in relevance. So the guest ends up at the place where they wanted to be, buying the product they wanted to buy.

In the guesthouse industry however, this is very different. After the guest searches for “accomodation in hermanus” in google, the guest is presented with pages from various 3rd party websites, not the websites for guesthouses in hermanus. Currently Google is bad at getting guests the results they actually want.

Yahoo on the other hand, produces very decent results. And believe me when I tell you, if Yahoo! is doing something better than Google, Google will soon improve. And vice-versa.

So, of the two things third party sites offer, Search and Payment, it is only a matter of (short) time before this functionality is redundent due to Google and Yahoo!.

So this leaves Payment.
For this honour of allowing payment, 3rd party sites take 10-15% of the booking value. As guesthouses cannot really afford to loose out on this amount of money, they pass it on to the guest.
What guests are discovering to their annoyence is that an additional 10-15% is added to their bill when booking via these sites. Discovering the true rate apon arrival often ruins a persons stay at an establishment.

As has happened to the airline industry (as well as many others), guests are going to start booking direct rather than pay the extra 10-15%. Couple this with the certainty that Google and Yahoo! are going to get better rapidly at pointing the guest to the guesthouses website, the fate of 3rd party websites is written on the wall

Joel

As many of you might know, we are currently working on what we call the “BookSure Community”. The BookSure Community effort is comprised of many facets, some in place, but most still to come. A small part of this is to included BookSure as a company in this community and to provide some more insight into the people behind BookSure. So today we are introducing the BookSure blogs featuring myself, Lee and Maree.

Joel