How Online Hotel Booking Systems Work?

Beside working locally with traveling agencies, hotel chains and many hotels are working over online systems to get reservations from variety of sale channels. Such technology is easy to access, easy to use, trackable and accountable; but how do they work?

I have searched how online hotel reservations system work; however, I could not find much info about it. Here, I’ll provide simple step by step logic about how things work, from my experience in Metglobal. When you want to make a hotel booking online, you need to find a website to do so. You can also find it through Google, Yandex (Yandex Islands), meta search engines (Trivago, Tripadvisor, etc.), Booking.com and many others.

Lets assume that we will make booking through Booking.com.When you visit Booking.com, you’ll see that there is a search on the left. As you can see below, main criteria's are Destination or Hotel, Check-in period, #of rooms and the room (category) picked according to #of adults and children.

If you have any child(ren) within booking, make sure that you selected their ages correctly, because hotels do have rate policy according to child ages. For example, most of hotels in Europe, accept baby age between 0 up to 2, where child age is set as 2 up to 12.

In some countries, travel reason is important. For example, if you are travelling to Germany for leisure,  you will be charged a tax according to length of your stay. If you can provide a paper that you a there for business, you will not be charged anything.



After making a search, there will be hotels having their room results within. Room result might be from website’s own contracted hotels or from another providers. Booking.com provides their own inventory with mostly paid at hotel.

According to the availability of hotels, sometimes they might not provide instant confirmation that you’d expect. In some occasions, due to high overload, hotels can offer on-request bookings, which are not confirmation guaranteed. If you pick this option and make a booking, hotelier will let you know about confirmation of your booking mostly in 24 hours. If they can arrange a place, no problem. If not, you’ll get your refund.

As you can find out by making searches using VPN , depending on the searched IP address (or provided passport country), hotel rates differ. Many hotels around the world, applying restrictions for some nationalities or making rates higher for them.

Depending on the search, if website is working with multiple providers, most likely same hotels will come. Therefore, there must be a matching mechanism merging same hotels and their room results, to provide singularity. To illustrate how, here is a schema below:



Coming back to the room results; this page provides room name(including room category and type), room amenities, room details as well as cancellation policy and board type. The ones in bold are all important aspects defining the final price.

Generally, depending on the provider, each search “session” should be finalized within an hour. This is because, until you made the payment, rates can change, so that they are mostly dinamic (yes, there are also static rates, according to the season trend). In otel.com, after picking the hotel, a counter appears on the right, asking to complete your selection within an hour. This might annoy you, but this is the truth at the back.



If cancellation policy is non-refundable, this means that even you would like to cancel your booking, hotelier will charge entire stay amount. No need to state that non-refundable room results are cheaper than the other results.

If you have a non-refundable booking that you cannot go, you can use Roomer. There, you can sell your booking and save some money. You can also use Roomer to buy hotel bookings with great discounts.

After picking your room(s), you will be asked to enter guest info, then make the payment or asked to make the payment at hotel. If booking is not paid at hotel, you’ll be charged online. In this case, website will be responsible for payment of your accomodation to hotel. When payment is handled, your booking is created.

Nowadays, using online hotel accomodation systems is a convenient way of making hotel bookings. They collect hotels and availabilities instantly from many providers, merge them and filter them as guest pleases. Only thing that guest need to do is checking booking options carefully. Before making a booking, it is necessary to check the following:

• Room category fits guest’s requirements
• Selecting number of rooms carefully
• Stating the reason of travel, if required
• Entering child(ren) count (if any) and age(s) correctly calculating them by checkout
• Checking cancellation policy to ensure having sufficient time for cancellation, if making the cheapest booking is not the case.
• Checking hotel remarks where there may contain important information about the stay