A Unique Booking Experience For Rottnest Island Authority

"Within the first 24 hours of launching the new system, we sold double the number of bookings that we would normally sell at that time of year."

This quote is part of a conversation with Deborah Taylor, the Director Visitor Services at Rottnest Island Authority (RIA). Read below the success story of the partnership between P3 and Stay Rottnest in building a customised booking journey for unique guest stays.

WADJEMUP / ROTTNEST ISLAND

Unique Hotel Property in Australia

A popular island destination situated just offshore from the city of Perth in Western Australia, Rottnest Island Authority operates StayRottnest accommodation, offering a range of styles from campsites and cabins to heritage bungalows and large self-contained units.

Since working with P3, StayRottnest is now consistently fully booked, with fewer gaps between stays. The P3 booking system shows the availability gaps in specific units, so people can change their holiday dates and get the accommodation they want.

Read below the conversation between P3 and Rottnest.

What were the reasons for Rottnest Island Authority to look for a new booking engine provider?

"RIA introduced online bookings in 2015. It was a very basic booking engine, but we knew we needed a more functional system that met our customer’s needs.

We needed to find a new booking engine provider that could understand the uniqueness of our project and that could deliver the level of customisation we needed to support our guests’ bookings and the significant spikes in demand for our accommodation." - said Deborah.

P3 as a booking engine provider for Rottnest Island Authority

How did you come across P3 as a booking engine provider?

"Our management team conducted a thorough evaluation of systems capable of meeting our unique business requirements. An out-of-the-box solution wasn’t ideal because Rottnest Island Authority, as a state-agency, had additional requirements such as data security issues and PCI-DSS. 

Oracle Hospitality recommended P3 when we mentioned the customisation level that we required, and that we were seeking an alternative booking engine. We worked on a proof of concept with P3 and the team was quickly able to demonstrate that they could undertake the customisation required by RIA. From the very beginning of the conversations between P3 and Rottnest Island Authority, everything seemed possible to build." - said Deborah.

Tell us about the creation process of your new booking engine with P3.

"We went live on the first week of December 2022 with the P3 Custom Booking Engine, building on the base of the P3 Essential database.

With the level of customisation required, our project was separated into phases. There was a lot of back and forth between the P3 development, design and technical teams, and RIA project team to ensure that all requirements were scoped and understood by all parties.

The P3 team started the design and once we saw the quality of the work and how it looked, we got incredibly excited.

P3 is also building a guest profile module based around their loyalty system. Guests can create a personal profile with their details to autofill this information into all future bookings and they can view past bookings and retrieve future bookings to resend booking confirmations or cancel what is no longer required.

It’s exciting to actually have a system that the biggest complaint is that a guest missed out on accommodation because the demand was too high" - continued Deborah.

What custom functionality were you able to build with P3’s booking engine?

"Stay Rottnest is extremely busy, especially around certain times of the year. Guests who stay with families travel every year to a certain unit or a specific location. We needed to make it easier for them to find an available date.

The biggest piece of functionality that P3 built for RIA was a calendar with alternative dates. This calendar shows users the available dates for all room types and don’t need to exhaustively guess what dates might be available for their preferred accommodation type.

Guests can now filter their booking search by location and/or by the types of units that meet their needs, including adults and children. When they move to the rooms and rates page, they are able to see what is sold out and what is available. If what they want is sold out, they can flick through the calendar and find an alternative date when their unit of interest is available. This makes it much easier for the user to find availability gaps specific to certain unit types. 

This is an absolute game changer for our StayRottnest customers that we were never able to display so easily before. We have seen that many guests would change their holiday dates entirely just to guarantee the unit and location they are looking for." - shared Deborah.

Customised Booking Engine for Rottnest Island Hotel
Booking hotel rooms online with P3 Booking Engine

What are the successful results since you implemented P3’s booking engine?

"We immediately noticed bookings that matched the gaps in availability as customers could scroll through the availability calendar and see what accommodation was available and for how long. We now have a huge demand for short lead time bookings, which didn’t happen before.

Within the first 24 hours of launching the new system, we sold double the number of bookings that we would normally sell at that time of year. We also noticed that 25% of those bookings were actually made for the subsequent 5 months, from December to April. This is phenomenal because we rarely have customers booking short lead time. Within the first month with the new system, 40% of the new bookings were made for gaps during the peak period from December to April and this trend continued throughout the peak season.

StayRottnest is now consistently fully booked, with fewer gaps between stays. The P3 booking system shows the availability gaps in specific units, so people can change their holiday dates and get the accommodation they want.

Additionally, we saw a reduction in the number of bookings made face-to-face or over the phone and an increase in those made online. We are now completely confident that the online booking system is robust and simple to use, that in March 2023, we stopped taking face-to-face bookings altogether and directed those customers online." - said Deborah.

How has the relationship with P3 been so far?

"It has been a wonderful working relationship between RIA and P3 with really positive and open conversations. Working with us has been a really deep learning curve for P3 to come across a unique business in Australia that is state-owned and, in some ways, very different from a traditional hotel model.

P3 has clearly understood the transparency and complexities around selling our accommodations. Phelim and the team are always proactive in approaching us with ideas and suggestions to improve the Rottnest guest booking experience."

P3 built a custom booking engine for Stay Rottnest Properties

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