When we book a room with a couple of clicks, it seems like something incredibly simple. But behind that “Book” button lies a whole little cosmos of technologies that help hotels operate without chaos and overbooking.
Hotel booking systems: what they are and how they work
Imagine: you’ve decided to open a hotel. We’ve created a website, uploaded photos, but what’s next? To allow guests to book rooms and ensure automatic synchronization of data, hotels require a specialized booking system.
Let’s explore this in a human-friendly manner.
1. Booking-engine – the “booking button” on the website
This is the calendar and form that appears when a guest selects dates and clicks on “Book.”
Booking-engine shows available rooms, calculates the price, and accepts payments.
Without it, the website is just a website. With it, it’s a real online hotel room store.
2. PMS – the “brain” of the hotel
In PMS, the hotelier manages all the accounting:
- which rooms are available,
- who checks in and checks out,
- payments, reports, and cleaning.
This is an internal working system, without which a modern hotel will simply go blind.
3. Channel Manager — to avoid double bookings
Channel Manager is a “translator” between the hotel and platforms like Booking.com, Airbnb, and Ostrovok.
It ensures that:
- if you book a room on Booking.com, it will disappear from the website immediately,
- if you update the price on your own website, it will be updated everywhere.
This is why you don’t arrive at the hotel and hear the dreaded “Sorry, no rooms available.”
4. Ready-made cloud solutions: a quick start for hotels
Developing these solutions yourself is very expensive. Therefore, cloud services have appeared on the market that provide hotels with everything at once: PMS, channel manager, and a booking system.
One of the most well-known hotel booking systems in the Russian-speaking segment is Bnovo.
Why Bnovo is considered a market leader
- more than 16,000 properties worldwide use their platform,
- 10+ years of experience,
- user-friendly cloud-based software for hotels, hostels, and apartments,
- automated sales, availability, and pricing in one place.
The company’s main mission is to provide hotels with tools that increase sales, save time, and help them operate without errors. Bnovo has everything a beginner hotelier needs, from room accounting to synchronization with Booking.com and other platforms.
5. Why should a tourist know about all this?
Because now it makes sense:
- why reservations are confirmed instantly,
- why the same price is displayed on different websites,
- why good hotels don’t have overbooking,
- and why the price sometimes changes depending on the dates and occupancy.
Behind every reservation is a large technological machine that works around the clock.
In summary
To make a hotel modern, it needs three things:
- booking button on the website,
- internal management system,
- synchronization with platforms.
And in order not to collect all this in parts, many choose ready-made solutions like Bnovo, where everything is already built in.
