Faster, Easier, Better Booking Engine

Today we are excited to announce some big changes to our Booking Engine! This will simplify the booking experience for your guests and make it faster and easier for them to do what they came there to do - book a reservation!

Also, to make the guest booking experience more consistent and natural, we have added responsive styling to our “desktop” booking engine which means that if your website/booking engine theme is already mobile-ready, you can opt-in to our responsive booking engine. With this enhancement, guests have all the features, functionality, and familiarity of the desktop booking engine from their mobile devices – no more switching to a different mobile booking experience!

An Easier and More Standard Search Interface

Out of the gates, the big change you’ll notice is our Searching interface. Often, this is the first thing your guest will see, and it is Step 1 of the Booking Engine. Because of that, it should be clear, simple, and obvious to visitors how they should proceed to see what’s available and complete a booking! Here is what we’ve done to make this happen:

• • Instead of multiple options and multiple ways to choose dates, we’ve streamlined the selection process to a couple of simple, consistent steps, with only two required steps!
    1. 1. Select your dates
          • • Optionally – specify your guest types
          • • Optionally – review full availability for those dates
          • • Optionally – flip the ADA toggle switch
    1. 1. Search

• • Removed the 2-month calendar and the option to switch to the full availability calendar. Less options means less complexity, fewer choices, and a better, faster booking experience.

• • • • Because rates are no longer displayed on the full availability calendar, you don’t need to worry about displaying complex rates and confusing your guests (i.e. long-term rates, rate discounts, rate restrictions, etc.). Your guests choose the dates they are interested in, they can see what is available and then search to see ALL your different available rates. And the steps are always the same, no two ways about it!The full availability calendar now simply displays availability and is shown in line with the date/guest selection interface. This calendar is still optional on Step 1 but if you currently have it enabled, it will be displayed. Otherwise, you can toggle it on or off and customize the display within rezStream Cloud at Booking Engine > Full Availability Calendar. Please read our KB Article on Configuring Your Booking Engine for more details.

• • Renamed “Arrive” and “Depart” to “Check-in” and “Check-out” to standardize terminology with all the major booking sites on the internet today.

• • Simplified the unit and guest display and selection. This is especially handy for anyone that has many different types of guests, but also follows the industry pattern for guest selection – so your guests will be comfortable making these selections.

• • Enlarged and enhanced the display of the fields for better visibility and easier selection.

Because consistency is key when it comes to making things easy for your guests, we have also modified step 2, selecting units and rates, to use the same concepts that were applied to step 1.

A More Friendly Mobile Experience

More and more guests are making their reservations from their phones and devices than ever before. So, having a consistent experience on every device is critical. We have long had a separate (and not always equal) mobile booking experience. While that option is still there for you if you need it, if your website and booking engine theme are already mobile-ready and responsive, you can opt-out of that separate experience and opt-in to a single, responsive booking experience for your guests!

Opt-in to a Responsive Booking Engine experience in the Booking Engine > Custom URL section of rezStream Cloud! Please read our KB Article on Configuring Your Booking Engine for more details.

The rezStream team is very excited about this release as we know this will result in a better guest experience when booking at your property’s website.  We will also be hosting a webinar in the coming weeks to make sure that everyone can ask questions and see the new, updated booking engine in action. Stay tuned for webinar details and sign-up instructions.

As always, we hope you enjoy this latest update, and thanks for using rezStream!