Booking engine

The booking engine is the booking form on your own website. Your guest books with you directly in it, with no middleman. You put it on your site with a block of text that you copy under Your property.

Open Your property

What your guest sees

The booking engine has three steps.

1. Dates and guests. The guest picks arrival and departure in a calendar, and the number of adults and children. If you work with age groups, they choose an age for each child. A minimum stay or a day without arrivals is marked in the calendar.
2. The room. For each room type the price per night, the total for the stay including VAT, and the cancellation policy in plain words. When a room is full it says Sold out.
3. Details and payment. Name, email address, phone, country and notes, the extras you offer while booking, and a box for your newsletter that is never ticked in advance. Confirm and pay takes the guest to the payment page of your payment provider. Next to the total it says what is in it (VAT, and the tourist tax by name if your region levies one), and under the button the cancellation policy with the sentence that there is no right of withdrawal for a stay on fixed dates. That sentence is always there, in the guest's language.

As soon as the guest picks a room, we hold it for ten minutes; in the last five minutes a clock counts down. If they click back by accident or refresh the page, what they filled in stays.

An example: Jasper Hoekstra picks three nights for two adults on the site of Hotel La Esperanza, chooses a room and pays. He then gets the confirmation by email (Mails to your guest).

What you set up

Under Your property, in "The booking engine on your own site":

• "The block": the text for your site. "Copy" puts it on the clipboard; paste it into the page where you let guests book.
• "Language of the booking engine": Dutch, English, Spanish or German. With two languages on your site, paste one block per page.
• "Load the booking engine here": the same booking engine with your own rooms and prices, to try it out.
• Under "The look": "Accent colour", "Font for the headings", "Font for the text", "Corners" and "Spacing". A colour with too little contrast is refused when you save, with an explanation. Click "Save the look" and paste the block onto your site again.

Your booking engine version

Nobody puts a new version of the booking engine on your site just like that. It first runs next to the current one for a while, for half of your guests, and we count per version how many searches with a free room became a booking. After the trial it becomes the standard, except for you if your guests booked less often with it: then you stay on the old version, and the screen says so.

Under Your property, in "Booking engine version":

• Per version you see how many bookings came from how many searches with availability, and the percentage, over the last 30 days.
• Choose Follow the standard to move with each new version once its trial is over, or Pin version to stay on one version, an older one too. Click "Save version".
• A pinned version keeps running until you choose otherwise. It only goes away once no property uses it any more.

If there is no new version on trial, only the current one is listed. When a new one arrives, it is announced ahead in the changelog on our site, and the header of Your property says New until you open it.

WhatsApp for the guest

If you connected WhatsApp Business and the copies are approved, step 3 has a second box under the newsletter: "Also send me a copy on WhatsApp". It is never ticked in advance. If the guest ticks it, a phone number is needed; without a country code we take the one of the country they chose. Their confirmation and the messages before their arrival then also come on WhatsApp, alongside the email. They can stop it on their stay page.

Good to know

• While your property is not open yet, the booking engine runs in preview. The guest sees This is a preview. This house is not taking bookings yet. and cannot book. See Publishing.
• Real payments are not available yet. Until then the guest lands on a practice page and no money changes hands.
• No website of your own? Share your booking page.