SiteMinder’s Direct Booking Engine Now Allows Hotels to Sell Rooms on Facebook
Online hotel distributor, SiteMinder has made its direct reservation product, ‘TheBookingButton’, available on Facebook, allowing hotels to sell rooms directly on their own Facebook page.
The new Facebook application is free for SiteMinder customers and helps hotels generate tangible revenue from their Facebook page.
Duncan
SiteMinder Partnerships Manager, Duncan Waterman said the integration of TheBookingButton with Facebook – the world’s second most popular website after Google with 700 million plus users – would enable people to directly book rooms on hotels’ Facebook pages, opening up a lucrative new, commission-free selling mechanism for hoteliers.
“Facebook is a very powerful communication and selling tool and this milestone move means that people can now view live inventory and rates and book accommodation on a hotel’s Facebook page just as they would on the hotel’s website,” Mr Waterman said. “Hotels can also use TheBookingButton’s online reporting system to gauge how many reservations have come through their new ‘Facebook channel’.
“We envisage this new selling avenue will generate considerably more business for our hotel clients around the world.”
TheBookingButton is used by hotels on their own websites as a direct, fast and commission-free booking engine. Launched in 2008, TheBookingButton is currently used in over 60 countries, reducing acquisition costs for some hotels by up to 40% from online bookings. The fully customisable BookingButton allows hotels to package rooms to include extras such as breakfast, late checkout and tours to provide a value-add to every room sale.
TheBookingButton integrates seamlessly into hotels’ own websites – and now also their Facebook pages – and into SiteMinder’s Channel Manager which enables hoteliers to list their rooms on dozens of booking sites around the world.
* For an example of the new Facebook application, click: http://www.facebook.com/#!/thebookingbutton
Adding links and content to FaceBook is a pretty well documented process. Getting your FaceBook page to actually take off providing sales and customer value is another topic. Looks like SiteMinder does the same simple tricks anyone can do. They target a webpage that is placed in an iFrame on the FaceBook page. Siteminder has made a special version of their standard booking button screen that fits the space allocated to frames by FaceBook, but other than that….
My guess is that any competent booking engine will provide the same advantages. Certainly, if you use SiteMinder already this would be a good feature, but not something that would be cause to switch services.