10 Best Booking Engines for Hotels in 2023

Hotel Tech Report | Last updated September 23, 2023

125 PRODUCTS REVIEWED

3649 HOTELIERS SURVEYED

A hotel booking engine is basically the shopping cart and checkout flow for your hotel's website. The guest learns about you on your website and when they click 'book now' that's where your booking engine comes in trying to convert as quickly as possible and upsell guests to spend more while they're booking. It's where transactions happen and having the right system in place could literally make or break your hotel's profitability so it's important to choose wirely.

That's why we by surveyed 3649 hoteliers across 121 countries to create this in-depth guide and help you find the best fit booking engine for your business. Inside you’ll find everything you need to know including product rankings, feature comparisons, price benchmarking, integration interoperability and more.

Hotel Booking Engine Shortlist

Here are 10 of top Hotel Booking Engines that are covered in this in-depth guide:

1. SiteMinder — Fast loading and beautiful checkout for your hotel website.
2. Profitroom — Beautiful booking experience to convert more bookers.
3. SHR Group — AI based booking engine learning guest behavior and improving.
4. Bookassist — Popular hotel booking engine with independent properties.
5. Net Affinity — Elevated designed booking engine to showcase your property's brand.
6. innRoad — Simple and elegant booking experience powering small to mid sized properties.
7. Cendyn — Full featured merchandising platform battle tested with large properties.
8. Vertical Booking — Adaptable graphical user interface and upselling tools to increase conversions.
9. HotelRunner — Mobile first booking engine designed with smartphone bookings in mind.
10. Sabre — Hugely popular SynXis platform preferred by leading hotel chains.

Browse rankings

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PRODUCT BUNDLES

These Product Suites Also Contain Booking Engine

Other solutions that offer an integrated booking engine add-on module with their core product offering

Property Management Systems

20 products offer Booking Engine modules

Cloudbeds

4.5 (840 reviews)

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Cloudbeds’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Mews

4.5 (393 reviews)

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Mews’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Oracle Hospitality

4.4 (406 reviews)

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Oracle Hospitality’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

WebRezPro

4.7 (187 reviews)

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WebRezPro’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

ThinkReservations

4.8 (328 reviews)

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ThinkReservations’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

ResNexus

4.8 (201 reviews)

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ResNexus’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

innRoad

4.4 (265 reviews)

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innRoad’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

RMS

4.2 (269 reviews)

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RMS’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Stayntouch

4.6 (165 reviews)

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Stayntouch’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

RoomRaccoon

4.7 (185 reviews)

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RoomRaccoon’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Semper

4.6 (47 reviews)

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Semper’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Guestline

4.5 (148 reviews)

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Guestline’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

HotelKey

4.6 (27 reviews)

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HotelKey’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Planet

4.0 (105 reviews)

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Planet’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

NewBook

4.8 (15 reviews)

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NewBook’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Mini Hotel PMS

or read reviews

Mini Hotel PMS’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Hotel.care

or read reviews

Hotel.care’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

WebBookingPro

or read reviews

WebBookingPro’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Agilysys

or read reviews

Agilysys’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

CultBooking

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CultBooking’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

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Hotel Management Software

7 products offer Booking Engine modules

Cloudbeds

4.5 (927 reviews)

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Cloudbeds’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

RoomRaccoon

4.9 (516 reviews)

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RoomRaccoon’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

ResNexus

4.8 (207 reviews)

or read reviews

ResNexus’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

innRoad

4.5 (140 reviews)

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innRoad’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

RMS

4.3 (200 reviews)

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RMS’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Guestline

4.5 (113 reviews)

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Guestline’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Amenitiz

4.1 (17 reviews)

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Amenitiz’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

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Channel Managers

4 products offer Booking Engine modules

NightsBridge

4.8 (31 reviews)

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NightsBridge’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

update247

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update247’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

DIRS21 by Tour Online AG

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DIRS21 by Tour Online AG’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

WebBookingPro

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WebBookingPro’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

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Hotel Reservations Systems

3 products offer Booking Engine modules

SHR Group

4.6 (33 reviews)

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SHR Group’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Busy Rooms

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Busy Rooms’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

BookLogic

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BookLogic’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

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Booking Engine

2 products offer Booking Engine modules

vioma GmbH

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vioma GmbH’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

GauVendi

4.8 (12 reviews)

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GauVendi’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Meetings & Events Intelligence

1 products offer Booking Engine modules

MiceRate

or read reviews

MiceRate’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Digital Marketing Agencies

1 products offer Booking Engine modules

Net Affinity

4.7 (165 reviews)

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Net Affinity’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Hotel CRM & Email Marketing

1 products offer Booking Engine modules

BookingWhizz

4.8 (31 reviews)

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BookingWhizz’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

Direct Booking Tools

1 products offer Booking Engine modules

Selfbook

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Selfbook’s Booking Engine product suite also includes:

OVERVIEW

What is Booking Engine

Are you looking for a booking engine to improve conversion rates on your website and drive more direct bookings? Whether you're a small bed & breakfast or a large resort, selecting the right booking engine for your hotel is absolutely critical to your ecommerce strategy and ensuring a fast loading, highly intuitive, visual and mobile optimized booking experience so visitors on your website don't leave to book somewhere else.

Finding the right Booking Engine solution for your hotel depends on several variables ranging from user experience and pricing to functionality and support. This guide is designed to help you identify the best Booking Engine vendors, questions to ask on demos, read unbiased reviews from similar hoteliers and so much more. (including our 2023 Booking Engine Guide)

BENEFITS

How can a booking engine improve profitability and efficiency?

Increase Direct Revenue: Using a Booking Engine can result in an uplift in direct bookings through your own website. This brings many benefits, the most significant being a decrease in the cost of acquisition per booking.
Efficient Management & Distribution: Using an integrated booking engine ( which integrates with PMS & Channel Manager) can reduce the time management required to update multiple platforms, eliminates the need to manually input bookings into your PMS system and allows you to control your inventory distribution.
Smarter insights: Access to Booking Data, allowing you to better understand your guests, what and how they like to book along with data to better improve your product offering in line with the customer’s needs.

FEATURES

What are the most important features of a booking engine?

Channel Manager Integration: To ensure that your room inventory across all of your online channels is automatically updated and to prevent issues like overbooking, it’s vital that your booking engine integrates with your channel manager. When a room is booked via an online travel agent you'll want to ensure that it isn't still available on your direct channel. What is a channel manager?
Mobile Booking & Social Media Compatibility: It is absolutely essential that your booking engine works seamlessly on mobile and is compatible with the social media websites that your hotel is listed on.
Data Collection: Your booking engine should provide you with transparent, in-depth insights that will allow you to find demand and booking patterns. Google Analytics isn't robust enough and your booking engine should collect actionable data that passes through to your CRS.
Flexible to Your Hotels Needs: Does the booking engine display the languages and currency that your guests are familiar with? Does it provide online voucher redemption or does it offer wedding and corporate booking modules? These are some questions to determine if the booking engine is flexible to your hotel’s needs. While you shouldn't demand a fully customizable booking engine, you should be able to make it fit the look and feel of your hotel website for consistency.
Set up, Service & Support: Perhaps the most important point of all is service i.e. how you are looked after by your provider. What is their set up, ongoing support and training like? Do they make you feel special? Is your business important to them?
Commission-free bookings: It's okay to pay a fee for bookings that come through third party distribution channels like Expedia and TripAdvisor but you shouldn't have to pay for ones that come directly through your own hotel reservation system, it should be zero commission. For independent hotels your booking engine should drive your most profitable bookings.
Promotions and real time optimization: The best booking engines today leverage machine learning to deliver targeted promotions based on web visitor behavior that ultimately streamline the reservation process. They leverage promo codes to target based on geography and web traffic origination source, etc. Many booking engines in the hospitality industry today even allow special offers like e-commerce platforms where hoteliers can offer upsells and add-ons to a booking. These next gen all-in-one IBEs deliver incredible user experience and make it extremely easy for guests to see exactly what the benefits are of various room rates. This is where you can excel in your direct sales channel when competing with OTAs .
True partnership: a great hotel booking system provider is more than a "vendor", they'll be the coach that bridges the gap between hotel managers, hotel operations teams and the world of data, analytics and UX design to help you succeed. These best of breed partners act as an extension of the team for accommodation providers they work with.

PRICING

What is the typical pricing for a hotel booking engine?

Most booking engines and hotel reservation software today are commission-free and run on a subscription (SaaS) model. After all, you shouldn't have to pay a commission on bookings through your direct channel; however, some smaller properties like guesthouses and vacation rentals opt for this model to offset expenses slow months.

IMPLEMENTATION

How long does it usually take for a hotel to implement new a booking engine?

Implementation timelines depend on the provider you decide to work with. A Cloud based online booking system can be set up very quickly, so the implementation time is often determined by how much resources the hotel can allocate to the project. Other tasks that often need to be completed during the set up phase:

Domain setup - your IT company will need to assist with this
Search Box needs to be added to your website - Depending on who hosts your website, either your new provider or hosting company can do this for you.
Training - Often this is completed via online mediums and resources centers Connectivity of existing channel manager / payment systems
Population of hotel profile and inventory

FAQs

Hoteliers Also Ask

What makes a great hotel booking engine?

Hotel management takes constant iteration and improvement to succeed due to the hyper competitive nature of the business. The best booking software and hotel technology providers are also iterating which over time leads to better performance. Load speed is one of the most critical factors when considering a booking engine as it has an extremely high correlation to conversion rates. Additionally, mobile is increasingly important each year and it’s where guest in many markets prefer to book. If your mobile experience is poor, expect them to book on an OTA. Also expect your PPC (e.g. Google AdWords) campaigns to be less effective. Optimization features allow for personalized offers and tactics similar to what you see on OTAs. Things like dynamic pricing, geo-targeting, integrated rate match and rooms remaining widgets materially increase conversion.

How do I know when it’s time for my hotel to move onto new a booking engine?

Compare the average to your current hotel booking system provider and calculate the change in booking volume holding all else equal. This can help in projecting ROI. If your booking engine doesn’t have seamless connectivity with your PMS, CRS and Channel Manager it is likely to have material limitations. That’s not a deal breaker but make sure you know exactly what you’re getting into.

What are the metrics that I can use to convince ownership that we should invest in a new hotel booking engine?

Direct Booking - OTA ratio Before signing on with a new IBE provider make sure you have data on your ratio of direct bookings - OTA bookings. Track success by trying to hold as many other variables constant and watching the change. Booking engine conversion rate: Ultimately the best measure of success is knowing how many people came to the booking engine and of those, how many ended up booking rooms. When switching providers, this is a true test of success. Time to completion: Go into your local coffee shop and offer to buy people coffee for completing a quick task. Request that they go on your hotel website and tell them to book a specific room type on a specific date. Time them from start to stop then ask them how easy it was to book. Repeat this for 20-30 people for maximum results and take diligent notes. This is similar to how you want to improve the guest experience on property by shortening the time required to check-in. Online reservations through your booking system are no different, a great guest experience means a great booking experience and that your guests can make a hotel reservation without hassle. Your reservation system is the first touch point in the guest journey so it's critical that the relationship starts off on the right foot.

How do you make a hotel booking engine?

Making a hotel booking engine can require significant engineering work; a connection between your property management system must be created to feed rates and availability to the booking engine, and the booking engine must be able to feed reservation details back into your PMS. Although you’ll need ample resources to build a proprietary booking engine, you’ll be able to fully tailor it to your needs.

What is a hotel booking engine?

A hotel booking engine is essentially the shopping cart equivalent for a hotel website and it’s sole purpose is to drive and facilitate online bookings via a hotel's website (i.e. direct bookings). A good online booking engine is optimized for conversion by providing a seamless booking process where your guests can view rates and room types and complete a booking as simply as possible. An effective booking engine should map data directly into your property management system through a channel manager in real time. It should take credit card payments in PCI and PSD2 compliant ways by integrating with a payment gateway.

How do hotel booking systems work?

A hotel booking system, or booking engine, is the software that allows guests to make reservations on the hotel’s own website (direct reservations). A great hotel booking system should make the reservation process quick and easy with a beautiful user interface, accurate rates and availability, and integrated payment processing.

What is the best hotel booking engine?

According to HotelTechReport’s rankings, which are based on real user reviews and software specs, the best hotel booking engine is Cloudbeds, which was voted #1 at the 2021 HotelTechAwards. Other top booking engines include Bookassist, SiteMinder, NetAffinity, and Avvio. Sabre Synxis and TravelClick's iHotelier are also popular hotel booking systems.

What is the distinction between channel manager and booking engine?

A booking engine allows travelers to reserve hotel rooms on your hotel’s website. A channel manager feeds your hotel’s rates and inventory to third-party distribution channels, like Booking.com and Expedia, then synchronizes reservations from those channels into your hotel’s property management system.

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10 Best Booking Engines for Hotels in 2023