LONDON - BookingTek launched Meetings Maker, which enables hotels to make their meeting rooms, catering, and equipment bookable and payable on their own website. It is the first Oracle MICROS Opera-integrated direct meeting booking and payment system.
Meetings Maker recently rolled out to 50 Marriott International hotels with more to follow. It integrates seamlessly with a hotel's existing property management system (PMS), and enables hotels to take PCI-compliant credit and debit card customer payments for meetings online. Bookers can search, view, book, and pay for meetings in an average of three and a half minutes.
Meetings Maker is the first real-time meeting booking and payment solution to integrate with Oracle MICROS Opera, the leading PMS. It automatically pulls all meeting information from Opera, including room, catering and equipment availability and pricing. It then makes this information available to bookers online in real-time. It significantly reduces the cost of handling simple meeting inquiries which typically make up 70 percent of all meeting queries.
When a customer makes a booking on a hotel's website through Meetings Maker, all the customer and booking details are instantly dropped into Opera populating all the appropriate fields, just as if the booking had been input by a staff member. All the payment details are also automatically and securely passed through to Opera.
Meetings Maker can access the hotel's Opera customer database using secure identifier codes. This removes the need for an additional customer database which improves efficiency and security.
Matthew Stubbs, CEO of BookingTek, said: "We're proud to have worked with Oracle Hospitality, and to be the first company worldwide to bring a fully integrated solution to market.
"Hotel chains understand the pressing need to launch direct, real-time booking for meetings online. They know that online booking is more convenient for customers and it saves huge amounts of labour and administration at the hotel. The average booking time for a customer with Meetings Maker is just three and a half minutes.
"To date, the challenge has been how to find a way to make sure online meeting bookings integrate seamlessly with the hotel's PMS and Sales & Catering systems. Hotels have always been reluctant to run multiple customer and inventory databases because it risks double bookings. Meetings Maker with its instant read-write Opera integration finally solves this age-old problem."
