Manage Family & Group Online Bookings with Guaranteed Interconnected Rooms

Booking a family or group stay in a hotel has always been difficult online. It has traditionally involved a phone call or email to the hotel requesting interconnecting or adjoining rooms. We wanted to remove that barrier, to make it simple for guests to search for and book interconnected rooms at a time that is convenient for them. 

Interconnected Rooms Booking Functionality

That’s what our new booking engine functionality does – it secures the interconnecting rooms at the time of booking. It does it on the hotel property management system, so the rooms are guaranteed.

We faced two main challenges when building the technology into the P3 booking engine. Firstly, we needed to be able to guarantee that the guest would get two rooms that would be interconnected. This requires the booking engine to have the capability of seeing room types and the availability of actual physical room numbers and understanding which room numbers have interconnecting doors. 

Our booking engine is now able to assign specific room numbers to a reservation to ensure that two interconnecting rooms cannot be taken by any other reservation agent for the same stay period. 

Typically, hotels offer a discount to families who are booking interconnecting rooms. The first room is charged on an adult/child occupancy rate, while the second room is charged on a child-only occupancy rate. Traditional booking engines and PMS systems cannot handle this, so a reservation agent would need to make a manual price override on the reservation to give a family discount. 

What we’ve done is build a discounting function into the booking engine that can mimic the same group family discount that reservations agents offer over the phone.

Enhancing the Guest Journey for Family and Groups

The pioneering interconnected rooms functionality is designed to enhance the guest journey for families and other groups, making it easier to guarantee their booking without the need to contact the hotel reception.

Our booking engine can identify and secure interconnected rooms in your hotel’s property management system at the time of booking, eliminating the risk of human error and avoiding families or groups arriving at their destination to find that their rooms were not reserved in the desired configuration.

This also removes the need for your guests to either phone or email a hotel with a request for connecting rooms, which reduces the work of your hotel staff, who otherwise would have to manually complete the task for your guests.

Currently, only a few very large major hotel groups, such as Hilton, facilitate booking interconnecting or adjoining rooms online within their in-house proprietary booking systems. Therefore, we are the first independent booking engine provider to offer this functionality to hotels and hotel groups of any size. In addition, the service can be integrated into Oracle Hospitality’s OPERA property management systems.

The interconnected room functionality along with the housekeeping app tool is part of the latest features on P3’s all-in-one hospitality e-commerce platform, which provides an enhanced guest experience and facilitates hotel operations.