Hotels

 Self-Catering

Visitor Accommodation

RoomFinderScotland.co.uk

Scotland

Guest Houses 

Bed & Breakfast 

Online Booking

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, we'd like to set out our position on the various online booking issues and explain how our system works. If you are interested in exploring the possibilities, then please take a few moments to read through this section. If you have any specific questions then please feel free to contact us directly and we'll do our best to help.

Some of our clients already make use of online booking services and if you have signed up to one of them then it probably makes sense to stay with them or, at least, limit the number of such services that you use.

For those who do not have an online booking service, we have developed our own which you can sign up to and which is as easy to use as we can make it. And here's the good news - it's free! We don't take any commission and nor are there any setup costs or additional charges.

As an incentive to your potential guests, you might want to consider offering a small percentage discount to anyone booking through our system or to those who mention RoomFinderScotland when they make a direct booking with you. There are clear advantages for you in doing so and the option is there in your account profile if you wish to make use of it. You can log in and set this up yourself at any time.

As you will be aware, most booking systems operate on the basis of trust. For telephone bookings you might ask for credit card details; but this is essentially to establish a basis of trust between the two parties. Strictly speaking, of course, it does constitute a legally binding contract. It is typically an informal 'understanding' and you don't normally do anything other than note the details which, of course, may or may not refer to a valid card.

In the context within which we operate, most 'online' booking systems will work in pretty much the same way. In other words, they will not attempt to debit the cardholder's account or verify the card's authenticity. In the event of a subsequent dispute, then it would be for you to resolve it in the same way as you would had the booking been made by post or over the phone.

You'll appreciate that there are a number of potential pitfalls in booking accommodation online. The main one is that it is not possible (except in sophisticated and expensive systems, normally only found in very large organisations) to check the absolute availability of the accommodation other than from the figures that you, the accommodation provider, supply. Clearly your guests need early confirmation that the booking has gone through and that the accommodation is, in fact, available to them. Of course, this puts the onus on yourself to check your email regularly to see if bookings have come in and to update the online booking system as and when any other bookings are made.

At all costs we want to try and avoid the situation where the guests have booked online, in good faith, only for it to emerge that the accommodation is not actually available. There are a number of ways to try and prevent such an occurrence:

• make a point of mentioning any particularly busy periods - for example, local festivals and so on - in your listing description so that guests will be encouraged to book early

• you might consider keeping one or two rooms 'spare' - in other words, if there there are actually four rooms available you might only list three of them in the online database; this gives you a 'buffer' in case of unforseen circumstances

If all this sounds as if we're stating the obvious then we justify it by saying that we're simply concerned to provide as good a service as possible for your guests and our clients. Both our reputation and yours are put at risk if the system is seen to fail and these issues need to be considered carefully if you want to take out the online booking option.

How the System Operates

Firstly, we should point out that users can access the online booking system from our website if you have enabled the option. If you have your own website, however, then it's a simple matter to add a few lines of code so that users can also access the system from your website as well, and we would recommend that you give this some serious consideration. Please contact us for further details of how this can be done and we'll supply the code for you.

A few words, then, about how our booking system operates. The process looks like this:

1. the user fills in accommodation requirements and dates on the online form and the details are sent to our server

2. our software checks availability with the database, calculates the cost and returns the details for the user to view

3. at this point the user can accept or decline the booking

4. if they wish to accept and confirm the booking, they need to fill in an online form which includes their credit card details

5. these details are now encrypted and sent over a secure internet connection to our server - look for the 'padlock' icon in your browser

6. our software will carry out an arithmetical check that the card number itself is a valid one. It is important to note that this is a basic check only, and does not indicate anything about either the authenticity of the card or the identity of the cardholder

7. our system will (if the number is validated) return an acknowledgement and confirmation of the booking details to the user

8. the system will automatically update your room availability to reflect the new booking

9. the software will also generate an automatic email to you which will include all the booking details. It will not send the credit card details to you, however, because a plaintext email would compromise the security of those details and we can't allow that to happen. If for some reason you need a copy of the card details, then please contact us directly and we can arrange for them to be transferred in a secure manner

10. the onus is now on you to send a separate confirmation of the booking as soon as possible so that your guest can be reassured that the booking has, in fact, gone through successfully

Note 1: It is crucial to note that our system essentially collects credit/debit card details in a secure manner; it does not debit any charges from the cardholder's account. Nor do we collect payment on your behalf. It is up to you, the accommodation provider, to make any arrangements for applying a deposit and/or settling the final amount with your guest, usually on departure.

Note 2: Please be aware that the system will calculate the maximum price for the accommodation and pass this to the user. This is only relevant where a range of prices has been specified in your accommodation listing; the system will simply use the higher of the two. You will need to confirm the actual total when you acknowledge the booking via email.
 

 
[ Home ] [ Contact ] [ User Login ] [ Advertise ] [ Visitor Info ] [ Disclaimer ]
 

All original material on these pages copyright © 2002-2008 RoomFinderScotland