The main advantage of an online booking engine is to have a chance of increasing the number of online reservations without paying high-amount commissions. Additionally, the online booking engine is able to collect data helping drive business development enabling hoteliers to make informed decisions.

In online hotel reservation systems, it is very important to be able to make reservations with secure payment in real-time and manage the confirmation process of them. Additionally, mobile compatibility, multi-language options, payment with various currency, and promotional discount features are other key features.

An online hotel booking engine works as plugging on the hotel's official website by processing secure real-time reservations. The reservation data is then transferred into a central reservation system which can be manageable by hotels to operate the booking process.

You need to ask yourself the question of what you necessitate, and then ask hotel booking software vendors if they can meet what you need. For instance, if you manage a resort hotel chain which hosts international guest, your booking engine should be capable of managing rates easily and suitable for IP based pricing feature.