AXSES has launched a booking engine plugin for WordPress. WordPress is growing as a content management and marketing platform for hotels and tourism companies. It has come a long way from its early blogging days, but blogging is still an important feature of the service. WP also has many plugins and services that are attractive to travel marketers. These include easy to use Social Widgets, SEO plugins, contact forms, blog responder, chat and so forth. There are many design templates that can also be used to quickly create a professional-looking site along a particular theme, like families, romance, etc.
We have been watching hotels, using this resource, and feel that it is the right time to offer an arcRes bookings widget plugin for hotels that want an easy and effecting booking engine that can allow users to get instant quotes and make bookings or just reserve hotel rooms and activities.
The arcRes is a good match for WordPress. It provides flexible inventory and payment options and can work for WordPress merchant gateways. It also provides a credit card guarantee system which is becoming very popular, as many hotels have excellent discount rates with local banks. Credit Card Guarantee is a standard used by the majority of international hotels for hotel and activity reservations. It is very suited to small hotels who don't have a need for Internet merchant accounts. It is quick to implement and easy to manage. Credit Card Guarantee is used by major Online Travel Agents (OTAs) for hotel reservations. These include Bookings.com, the Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and by many hotels chains, as well as independent hotel and tourism operators.
Both reservation requests and real time confirmed bookings are available and managed by arcRes.
arcRes is a full feature booking engine that is also a content manager and publishing system. It manages specials, packages, add-ons, numerous rate plans, family plans and themes marketing.
arcRes content is published to the AXSES network, to social sites, Web 2.0 properties and to affiliate travel site. It provides effective and low-cost marketing for hotel and tourism brands to a network of over 1000 sites and subscribers. arcRes also powers AXSES dotMobi marketing via the http://smartphonetraveller.com platform. It publishes brand rates, images, content and bookings capability to Facebook. It publishes specials to Twitter, Google Shopping, Craigslist and many others.
The WordPress Bookings plugin means that any hotel on WordPress can now use arcRes for their WP brand website, and at the same time take advantage of its extensive marketing coverage.
Get the arcRes Bookings plugin for WordPress at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/arcres-booking-engine/
Use arcRes to publish to Social Meda and travel sites http://specials.arcres.com
Get more info on latest version of arcRes http://arcres.com/upgrade
Quick Review of WordPress for Tourism
We have been experimenting with WP for several months. Our Global marketing site, http://Adventure-Travel-Destinations.com is build with WordPress. It uses auto-blogging and we have built RSS feeds that push all of our client special, packages and deals out to Adventure Holidays Specials on the site. We have found it requires a degree of effort and time to understand its many features and plugin options. We recommended it as a platform to hotels who have a WP professional available to help in installation and management. As noted By Alex in Blogessive "While working with it as a website CMS will not allow too many customizations for entry-level developers or users, in the hands of a pro WordPress is ready to perform miracles".
We note some issues with the all-in-one SEO plugin, which appears to conflict with manual entries. In our own case, the development and installation was out-sourced and we are now bringing it in-house on our own server. There are issues with the auto-blogging and we believe Google is flagging sites with auto-blogs and duplicated content. In our view, this is affecting the Page Rank of WordPress sites with the WP auto-blogging plugin and we do not recommend using this plugin. Hotels should build unique content on their sites. Even in blogging, make your content original, not copies of news, but news in your own words and with your own special insights and interpretation.
arcRes Links
http://TourismMarketingPlatform.com | http://BookingsWidget.com | arcRes Bookings plugin for WordPress
No comments:
Post a Comment