[smtm]

yield management is the exercise you do when your - the individual hotel's - distribution system is set up perfectly and humming along. The biggest gains for hotels happen actually when they set their mind to it that they want to shift the source of their business away from the OTAs to more direct business: direct can be the online booking tool on their own hotel website, mails, repeat customers, phone calls. yes even phone calls, that should be one of the goals when setting up a mobile hotel website.

To achieve this hotels should invest in a decent website, start blogging with a voice that they cultivate over time and go for better rankings in the SERPs. That, plus a humming hotel operation with systems in place to handle the direct business is the way to go.

This way even smallish properties can run circles arround bigger competitors. The bigger hotels have a hard time to copy this, as they are not as agile, and need meetings to figure out a "social media strategy".

Figure I know quite a bit on how to make hotels way more independent of OTAs as a booking source: this is actually the core of my SaaS offering: http://www.igumbi.com . It is an online pms, revenue/ yield management system and has a online booking tool for the hotel website. JSONP based and no sucky flash or iframe.

The most important aspect of the yield management architecture I find to be the use of nesting. It's a very flexible, value based approach on assigning fixed capacties to sellable allotments. This robust inventory algorithm, devised by MIT's Belobaba, is the thing that executes the yiled management settings. And I totally agree with the use of loyalty programs and direct chstomer interaction. That's why we also have a mailchimp list integration, so it becomes virtually a no brainer to keep your mailing list up to date in he daily business operations

[paulgb]

Just a heads up, you and your clients are taking credit card information over unencrypted HTTP.

Here are two examples of clients that are accepting credit card info over plain HTTP: http://vox-hotels.com/ http://www.sonnseit.at/

[smtm]

Hey thanx for pointing that out. The booking tool is actually tied in via https and the transmission back to the system happens via https. I need to pester my clients to set up the cert for their domain. I will also the insert a another step in the dialogue - to collect that info.

[base]

I own a small hotel in Europe and we are looking for a PMS. Does your software sync the availabilities with the major booking sites? Is your software in English?

[smtm]

Yes the software is fully translated into English (The marketing site not yet). Syncing with booking sites works via an Austrian channel manager. I have two other channel manager tools in the pipeline, will be out later this year.

[rubyrescue]

who is your typical customer?

[smtm]

Small independent Hotels, Apartments & Fincas. Mostly in Austria, Germany, recently Spain and Switzerland. Properties between 1 and 30 units. Typically they are looking for a management approach that helps them to handle the reservations remotely. 1-4 Staff are dealing with the reservations.