How to Choose Your Best Online Booking System
thank you for joining us today for our webinar on how to choose your best online booking system today is January 12th uh and I am Nick Frye manager of Business Development with tourism Nova Scotia for those of you joining us for the first time and our familiar tourism Nova Scotia is a division of communities culture tourism and Heritage we work with communities in the industry to attract visitors to the province and increase tourism revenues we do this through experience of sector development business coaching marketing and visitor servicing so today uh the webinar will be available after the fact so you know if we run over 11 o'clock that's okay you can head to your meeting and just come back and review after the fact if you think today's webinar is really great and you'd love to share it please do so the link will be available um after the webinar is completed there is closed captioning enabled and uh if you don't want to do that you can change that on the options on the taskbar we'd also encourage you to um post any questions in the bottom in the Q a any presentation is much better with really great questions so we would encourage you to ask any questions throughout the webinar also if we mention any software or anything that is um relevant to your business we'll also share those links sold out to the facts you don't need to worry about writing it down or going to check it out during the webinar uh we just want you to have the opportunity to really focus on on the content at hand and this webinar hopefully you signed up through digipore and if you didn't we'd really encourage you to sign up for digipore it is offered in partnership with digital Nova Scotia and it's a One-Stop shop of interactive services educational opportunities to help tourism businesses develop digital marketing skills and access prevent professional support and improve your online presence this is a where you sign up to apply for the Tdap grants this is where you sign up for webinars this is where you go and look up a topic on tip sheets and um it's a really valuable resource offered nowhere else in Canada for tourism businesses so I'd really encourage you to check that out if you haven't done so already so today our presenter is gide adasalo and G day is the president of micro Hills uh G-Day comes with over 35 years of experience and they really have a passion to help their clients accelerate their digital transformation and we all could use an enhancement in our digital skills and we know the industry really needs to transition so this is a such a very important um webinar today so really excited to have Judy here and um so again they have established Information Technology uh professionals with over 30 years of experience providing services to tourism Logistics production environmental General Services non-profit and Human Resources options so they really have a lot of skills and I'd like to invite gday now to take over the screen and share his presentation thank you thank you hi everyone my name is gide adisalu I'm the president of micro Hills we pride ourselves in our ability to support our businesses in their journey to digital um in their digital transformation Journey today we will be talking about how to choose your best online booking system and the focus is going to be on accommodation business so let's jump right into it um we're gonna initially going to uh look at um what are your objectives for this for this session uh because of the time short time we have I will appreciate if you uh just type in the chats what you think you want to gain from this session and um my colleagues are going to look through them and share with uh with us um you can put in your aim and what you're looking forward to to gaining from this session um in terms of uh how we're feeling today I I appreciate that you you know you all turn up to and to to join this session I'm really excited to uh to present and discuss this um bunny um challenge with with as many businesses as possible as are here today and I would like to also fill out how you're feeling are you are you all feeling great today um you can you feel free to indicate are you feeling high are you feeling low are you just there you know just coasting along um well it's a great day here in um in Halifax brighter sunny day but at the same time it's cold however while you are that um Please be aware of your emergency exit wherever you are um just to be sure you're you're safe if there are drills planned in your building Please be aware of that where I am today there are no drills planned and so if I hear any alarm I know it's going to be something I I have to listen to and if anyone is um not feeling too well during this presentation feel free to let someone know and um most importantly let's have fun during this session I'm not sure if you have started to share your presentation yet but I'm not seeing yet oh okay um um what my presentation is shared already um yes this would be just similar to what we did earlier just the share screen at the bottom oh okay I I thought I'd continue to share I didn't know it stopped oh that's great yeah so did you all hear what I said initially in the introduction oh yeah we could see you we could hear you we just uh we just did my presentation's the ones still on the screen so you just need to share yours so we can keep going oh oh great great okay there we go foreign sorry for that um breaking transmission okay so um we still don't have it oh so you have to um you have to go to screen share and then it will say do you want to take over screen share because you're going to take over the screen foreign sixth one in on your bar okay um they stop sharing custody transcripts um yeah stop sharing and I'm going to uh share it again share okay you're sharing um yeah so can you see my screen now we cannot oops yeah what about now no so I guess I need to stop share and now you can share okay there we go it's first time sorry that's the first time that's ever happened okay there we go sorry about that uh there's some new technical difficulties so no matter two or three years in we're still learning thank you and now we're here we go I'm out okay yeah can you see my screen now it's perfect thank you okay um so you can see the um my fourth screen on how to choose your best online booking system yeah it's perfect great um I want to apologize for for the break in the transmission um and the for the for the each there yeah it's funny enough when technology people also experience um problems handling computers they they just have a way of conniving and making us look like we're not really the experts but yeah it's all good we're gonna just jump right into the um into the uh discussion today we're gonna try to help you to understand the process for selecting the best booking system for your business it's easy to just jump into the market and pick up um a software but we're gonna go through what you need to do um to be able to do that so in this presentation we're going to go through your business requirement analysis and we're going to go through um the selection criteria like the functionalities and scalability compatibility cost analysis um vendor information to help you to be able to select the software that best suits your business requirements and after that we're going to talk about how to implement the software and how to make it work for you um in your business so let's jump into the preamble it's it cannot be over emphasized the fact that you need to understand what you really need in a software how you want the software to help your business and the best way to start is by identifying your internal and exynos stakeholders and looking at these stakeholders you will be able to know what are the requirements of my stakeholders your internal stakeholders are mostly uh your staff um you know at different roles and also you know your your management team and external definitely you have um your supporting team maybe you have some accounting firm or legal teams or some I.T or government and legal um or you know or like all other agents that work with your company and understanding your business process is very critical to being able to pick that software that is best for your business looking at your business you should be looking at the operational part of your business that's the part that helps you to provide a service that that your business is known for and also the supporting part of your business uh by supporting I mean your accounting department your Logistics Department your um procurement Department you know they don't directly provide a service but they help the operational part of your business to provide it and of course the management the management are looking forward to Reports most of the time they want data to be able to make decisions and then you need to understand your data requirements understand what are your critical data what are those data you cannot do your business without um and what are those data that you know you can just do without and then understand how to keep this data how to manage them of course the ownership of the data is very important like um who Updates this data who is authorized to change it who can delete it and of course you want to know um what is the reporting um or requirement for your business both for internal use and for external use you might be sending reports to uh for for taxes um for uh to your bank and to some other authorities of course you have to look at your existing platforms and how your new software is going to interact with your existing platform your platform I mean um your existing infrastructure if you if you have uh a cloud system you're using already if you have some internal Hardware that is installing your business and of course if you have some systems that you're running already like your Human Resources management system or accounting system uh your Logistics system um you know and all that of course you need to have a budget in mind um so you can be realistic in your process of getting the best of software now let's jump into how to do what is expected during business analysis and of course when you're done with your business analysis the big decision is going to be do I build a new software or do I buy one um building a new software is that it takes a lot of time it's uh it's it's so much expensive and um however you're sure to have something that is tailored to your business and covered everything your business wanted but when you buy you have to make some compromise you you probably will be able to get something that doesn't totally cover your business operations but maybe that covers like 80 70 of what you do and but it's quick it's faster and um most of the time is cheaper than than building a fresh one so looking at your processes most businesses have four to six mega mega process processes you then need to break up these processes into um the major processes and these major processes also have sub uh processes and activities and tasks breaking it down this way will help you to understand your data requirement at every level of your process and also help you to um understand your system requirements at every process we're looking at the accommodation booking business to here today um one of the major processes out there is booking you know but below booking there are other activities uh that comes after booking um you know payments um checking of customers um um you know checking your accommodation um rooms and spaces and ensuring this these are available and ensuring they are cleaned and they are ready uh looking at your inventories and and all that all those are other processes that you can identify now if you're able to identify your processes and identify systems that you you require to run them when you're going to have something like this um there are a number of models um or or Technologies um methodologies used to um run a business model but for the purpose of choosing the best software I I decided to pick the data flow diagram it did a float diagram will help you to analify what's uh the information requirements for your business what are the processes and what are the data and the database um that's required that is required and you will be able to connect all of them together and thereby giving you some idea of how a system is support is supposed to support your business in this example you have uh one of your major uh information here stakeholder is a customer and customers are going to interfere you know interact with your processes most of the time booking and you know issuance of receipts they want to check in and all that but this process is also connect to your database your customer database your your transactions and your inventory so looking through all this it's the whole idea is for you to have clear understanding of what you really require in a software for booking now we have gone through how to um create our requirements in a software what specifications we need what are we looking forward to getting in the software and the reason for that is is like you know just walk into a car shop and say I want a car I want to buy a car salesmen are very smart and they're just going to sell you anything but it's different when you walk into a car shop and you go like um I want a 30-seater bus um that is got um 3 000 power HP or you know power and I want some air conditioning in it I want um some heating system I want lighting I want you know you have some specification so it's difficult for a Salesman to sell you what you don't want the same thing with software if you go out there in the market there are thousands of booking systems and if you ask a Salesman he's going to try to sell you anything so if you are equipped with your business requirement it's easy to ask for what you want now one of the things you want to look for after understanding your business process and requirement is the functionalities there are hundreds of functionalities there you can have in a software do you want to manage the content by yourself do you want to have some promotion and discount codes as part of your booking system do you also want to have a checkout system and some search engine optimizations so people can find yours easily or you want some Advanced e-commerce um search engine optimizations and Reporting tools or embedded email marketing um featuring you know or Integrations with your with your existing software like your Human Resources software or accounting software or you want a multiple payment system which includes um different kind of credit cards PayPal um Visa Mastercard and you want the ability to scale um up and um you want some navigation systems and online help you need to have the functionalities that your business requires ahead of time before picking up um a software and you you will understand this from your looking from the previous step we looked at looking at your business you can look at the data requirement looking at um reporting requirement of your business so you you will be able to know what functionalities are critical to you you also want to look at you want to look at the scalability at some point are you going to be needing additional functionalities in your business what of if your business strategy changes for you know I remember during coffee period we have um hotels not not being able to accept visitors normal Travelers anymore and they were in some cases adapted to hospitals or or locations to uh to help victims of kovic and if you're not prepared for that it's it might be difficult for your business if your software is not prepared for that it might be difficult what about growth if you are normally having a hundred 200 uh visitors in a in a week and then something happens or you're looking forward to doubling that is your system going to be able to handle it are you going to have to buy another one whatever if you want to diversify if you have just the hotel booking system before now and now you want hard restaurants um facility to your to your accommodation booking do you have to buy another software to do that or is your existing software able to provide you know restaurant facility what about government policy changes and regulatory requirements so you need to ensure that soft the software you're buying or you're acquiring can be scaled when things changed compatibility is a very big issue um if you're looking at the best software for your system for the booking accommodation booking the existing platforms must be able to work with it if you have um a Microsoft setup in your system operating system or you have a Linus operating system in your existing existing software or you have some clusters of software you're using before you need to ensure if you're acquiring a new software it will be able to work with them what about the technical requirements of your new of the new booking system doesn't require you to buy a new operating system or buy a new firewall to make the system work all these also are going to affect your costs and you want to ensure the new system is upward and down it's got the upward and downward compatibilities what that means is that if the version changes are you going to be able to use your existing data um with a new version of the system or when you have an upgrade will it be compatible with your existing data or are you going to have to throw it away and get a new one systems are getting more complicated these days and there are the number of compliance issues that are coming up you want to ensure your systems a new booking system you are trying to acquire is compliant we have payment card industry um data security standards PC the SS PCI DSS which is uh a very hot issues at the moment it's about um you know safety security of data to ensure that data you got you get from your customers are safe and that they don't get into wrong hands especially the card data and in attempt to protect customers and their information and and payment information there are a number of policies compliance that how they are now um General data protection regulation the the CCPA at HIPAA the decr are all the regulations that we are all uh um are having to uh to cope with right now when it comes to systems and there are heavy penalties for organizations who are not compliant with this uh with these regulations so you want to be sure that your system is um is compliant most importantly cost analysis you're going to ensure that the total cost of ownership is in such a way that your you know return Investments um it's not it's not it's not it's not affected so so return on investment should be significantly uh higher than the um total cost of ownership total cost of ownership could be tricky um because when you acquire a system sometimes you just pay for the software you don't think about the licenses you need to check am I buying models or am I buying the complete software am I buying licenses for a number of users or a number of installations in my in my establishment and worry about the software requirements costs worry about the hosting am I going to put it in the cloud or having to buy an Hardware to install it what about the maintenance cost and training and support so the true cost of ownership in the long term to that cost of running your um your your booking system you want to have this under check before uh you part with your money vendors are really very critical to the success of having um a a booking system that works that's efficient you want to check if your vendor has got a robust support system that you need do they have a technical expert how are they dealing with the end users and what periods are they available are they available 24 hours or are they available 12 hours or they're in a different time zone from yours um it doesn't matter how nice your system is it's going to break at some point and if you can't get someone to support you when it breaks it could really affect the reputation of your business and affect revenue and um also slow things down you want to check the reviews about about the vendor providing the software and check the user population are they are just uh you know a handful of people using a system or is it is it um a system that is widely used um what is the user Community like do they have forums where you can you know ask questions and get some help they are you know some Cutting Edge technology as part of their expertise you know as part of as part of developing a system what about the partners they work with do they Implement software themselves or do they have partners that you know help to implement the software knowing all these details about the booking system you're gonna be using will help a long way now we've been able to look at our business we've been able to um look at the data requirement of our business and we've been able to be on looking at data requirement we understand the processes we understand the reporting requirements of our business and now we understand how to select a software that best suits our business there is no um one cup fits all in in software there could be some similarities across businesses but businesses always have some unique um processes and requirements that is unique and and makes their business special now you have the requirements in your fingertips you know the software to get now you're going after the software how do you implement it some software booking system out there requires some customization where you have to put in the color of your business putting the logo putting your slogan and some um you know your business requirement like who is going to update your data so permissions I'm all and they're gonna have to also cope with upload of your existing data and um what about the compatibility are you going to have to clean up your existing Data before you put them in the new one are you going to migrate them directly into the into the your new booking system what about training um you're going to have to arrange for that um to ensure when system is installed and it's implemented your your staff and your customers are trained and they're able to use it efficiently and when it is in use you need maintenance and support all these goes into the implementation part of it when it is now implemented and um and it's running it breaks at some point you need to have people waiting out there to fix it whenever it breaks so we've looked at we've looked at um our business requirements we've looked at how to select the best booking system for our business and we've looked at how to go through the implementation um now you need to look at the list of booking systems that are out there and there are different methods of implementation um there are there are software that you can buy right away and um and installing your systems and you can and there are ways you can also automate your existing websites and have plugins a booking system booking plugins in them so one of the um popular website CRM out there is WordPress and they have tons and tons of plugins for for booking systems so you could have you could you can get your website to be automated to have some plugins that will help um um your customers to be able to make bookings right from your existing um website however you can that's why we have a list of uh booking plugins up there like if you do a search you will be able to see different booking systems out there um but when you when you're looking at those booking systems you're already armed with your list of specifications what you want in your business what functionalities will you require and all that on the other hand we have other systems that does not necessarily work on your website or you can have them installed in your business and you can have your customers getting access to them from whatever they are in the world and there are the hundreds of them out there that you can also choose from there's a third category of software which is like um software as a service like what you have with um Expedia uh booking.com um travel advisor you know quite a number of them out there they are basically basically software companies who provide platforms for um businesses um like yours to be able to plug in into their existing system and to be able to reach customers they have um uh a different business model and a lot of businesses are also are also using them but no matter what you have decided to go with um be it your website um automation or acquiring a new software that is specific to your business that does not connect with your with your website or using software as a service like um Expedia or booking.com
what's most important is you need to understand what your business requires what is going to help in your digital transformation in your business growth and having those understanding what's your selection criteria is once you have your selection criteria and you have um you understand the particular system you want then it's easy to go out there and and get it so now you have your business requirements you have um your selection criteria you have selected your software you have installed it it doesn't end there you need to be able to monitor performance and make um changes um to enhance your business there are a number of um uh um performance metrics you can check about your booking system you can check bounce rates you know page view how do people interact with your website they just get attracted to your to your system um and just go out immediately or do they make a call when they get to your to your system or do they what's the exit rate what is the click-through rate you know you can check all those uh performance details that will help you to tweak your business model um or your marketing strategy to ensure you keep more customers coming and you increase your conversion rate beyond that there are other analytic tools that can help you to also monitor your competitors check the traffic to your computers um check to know what your computers are doing what kind of people are going to your computer's website um you can also check the interest of users what are they looking for are they looking for tourism or just um you know a few days hotel booking or are they are they mostly looking for events and and um idea government policies that are changing that is affecting movement of people are they just business people coming in and out for business meetings all this you can monitor from your from the background yeah Google rankings um and real-time reporting systems out there that can help you to monitor performance once your system is installed because they are behavioral analytics um it's it's map tracking is is one of them that helps you to understand the behavior of the your your kind of customers the data visualization tools will also help you to mine the data like extract data from your system and be able to uh build graphics and and and maps and and you know be able to deduce like extract some information from from your data to improve your business of course business intelligence tools and predictive modeling tools are out there some of these tools I've listed here Google analytics um semrush clicky matsumo Pro Heap and all that they are also there to help you to check what is going on with your booking system if you're not getting the right people um using to use your booking system or if the traffic is not coming your way it's business not really a family like you want this is a um what to do Performance Management so at this point I'm going to um listen to your questions and answers I'm I'm really eager to to get your feedback on how this uh works for you and to help you to navigate through this um tricky um booking stem selection I'm sure there are you know a lot of questions out there oh thanks sweetie that was that was really great there's a lot of really good information there and your technical knowledge was on display so we had um one question oh it came through the chat and it was um one thing I'll also say is that um their g day is going to sign up for the one-on-one session so if anybody wants to um book a 101 it'd probably be very valuable um so the question that came through here was the solution that I'm looking for is as follows a customer can see availability by date by clicking on a portion of our website check availability book now they then can book and in doing so provide information including credit card information it is important that the booking system automatically synchronize with Expedia reservations this sounds like a provider who would provide this online service and a secure environment via a link on our website for a monthly fee is this possible very possible that's one of the um easiest um implementations when it comes to booking system however you you sound like you're focusing on just that part of booking are you also looking at how the booking system interact with your with your accounting system if you are using some accounting system out there like the um Sage or QuickBooks um you know you you need to look at your total business uh structure when when you're looking at that implementation But to answer your question that is possible and that is one of the things we help uh one of the um projects will help uh um um businesses like you to implement so what like what would be an example of a company that like a platform that would do that well so there are a number of um so and just just to let you know they said they're not interested in the booking system interacting with their accounting system oh okay great so there are a number of plugins out there or systems there are so many of them so it's also like I stated earlier there is no one cap at all we need to look at your kind of business are you um a hotel accommodation booking system or is this small hotel you see a big one um what's the capacity of of your of your booking system how many staff do you have there to monitor uh what's going on uh with the booking and to handle it so when we understand those details we will be able to select the best Plugin or software that fits your your business and that's what we try to go through today okay and I would assume um I mean I think that the the main goal would be to um have staff monitor it as little as possible that's the whole that you know I would think that's the um uh I think that would be one of the opportunities so the question from uh David de Barras can I book a one-on-one with uh judai and yes once g day and digital Nova Scotia get that set up so why don't we make sure that uh we connect Dave to borrower Dave Devar sorry with um g day once he is connected into the one-on-ones and it sounds like uh you guys have some stuff to discuss so um and I also I guess that Ian vanchak wrote freed a book I'm not sure if that's a um a booking software like one of the plugins you're talking about or something like that but um how about we we leave that one for you guys to discuss offline but we'll make sure we uh connect David with uh with uh day yeah great we we are open to uh to support you in every any way possible we can guide you on what to select how we can help you to go through the selection process and implementation maintenance and support please feel free to uh to to to connect with us uh on one-on-one so so we can look at your business requirements so we had a question g day uh from Catherine Watson and it said are you able to give a view on platforms such as lodify Lord of I is one of those um um many systems are out there um but I I I struggle to understand what exactly do you want from from that system are you you want me to see the reviews whether it's the best system to use or not um I would assume that I mean Catherine you can provide some some follow-up but I would assume she just would like to know what your thoughts are on on that software yes please feel free to to have um to connect with me I can take you through through that um you know the details of that um uh after after the presentation sure and uh one of the questions is are the 101s through zoom and um that's a great question I'm not sure actually what platform is used to connect to maybe someone digital from digital Nova Scotia who's here on the back and maybe I would type in an answer to that question of where what the what I wonder or um are delivered through do we have any other questions for g day right now it sounds like uh you know um unless Catherine had a specific question on loadify maybe like where g day could answer it um maybe it seems like the one-on-one may be the best opportunity to connect on some of these questions um clearly has a lot of technical knowledge around the back end and uh Catherine said shiblical 101 so that's great uh does anybody else have any questions yeah please feel feel free to um to come up with your questions or or well it looks uh yeah it looks like there's no additional questions now as you day so again obviously you can connect with uh day um by their email address um and or the phone number and uh the answer to from digital is that the one-on-one bookings are through calendy calendly at the moment however the DSP meets with the clients it's up to the DSP so however um g day works through that and um so I'm going to now we and so digital Nova Scotia will follow up with with the one-on-ones that indicated they were interested once we get g day set up I am going to attempt g day to take back over the screen so we may have to do some juggling here so let's just see oh look at that thank you uh anything else from ug day before we we take back over yeah I just want to say thank you um for joining this session it's um uh it's a great opportunity to to share ideas and expertise with businesses out there who are looking forward to um improving their business performance um we at micro Hills are passionate about airplane businesses to grow feel free to connect us and get in touch and we will help as much as we can thanks a lot wonderful thank you all right so I'm going to try to take back over I'm not even sure if this will work do you uh just could anybody here let me know if you see my screen now I'm gonna check the chats yep we can see your screen Nick sweet all right I'm just going to finish the presentation then okay thank you so much again G-Day and micro Hills that was excellent um I'm gonna let you know about some upcoming webinars on uh Tuesday January 24th and Thursday January 26th there's a two-part webinar on Cyber Security Essentials for small business so some of you may have witnessed sorry participated in an earlier webinar from Joel Arbuckle with our Buckle media and this is really important cyber security is such an important piece right now so it's a two-part series and that starts Tuesday January 24th uh on Thursday February 9th we have a webinar on email marketing to boost your business it's presented by Maria socho from playground creative agency and I'm really excited for that one because email marketing is such an important piece of that marketing to help connect with your visitors if you thought today's webinar was excellent and would like to share it if you'd like to check out Joel Arbuckles our Buckle media's previous webinars on cyber security please do so at the link below tourismns.ca webinar Dash series just a reminder for anyone on the call that the 2023 doors and dreamers guide deadline for listings is January 13th so that is tomorrow so if you have any questions on that or or anything please connect with tourism Nova Scotia there is a link here in the presentation and it will also be on our website so make sure you get those listings updated and in by tomorrow and I would also encourage you to stay connected with tourism Nova Scotia you can email us at tnsbusiness at Nova scotia.ca for any questions or any ideas on future webinars our corporate website is tourism and s.ca a consumer website where we send all of our visitors when marketing is Nova scotia.com and that's where your listings are found if you want to find out about webinars programs or any relevant information for the industry you would sign up for our TNS news and resources we also have a corporate Twitter account so twitter.com Taurus MNS we also have corporate LinkedIn so we are tourism Nova Scotia I'd like to thank you for taking the time out of your day to join us and I hope you join us for the next webinar thank you so much
2023-01-21 20:51
