In a move that will no doubt delight holidaymakers, technology and online strategy company for hotels Bookassist (bookassist.org) has today launched a suite of apps for hotels on Facebook.
The suite allows hotels to offer e-commerce services to fans from right within Facebook. Existing Bookassist client hotels can install the apps immediately and upgrade their Facebook pages to offer full hotel booking capability, as well as other offers.
“The reality is that Facebook user habits are changing rapidly, and business use in Facebook is very much on the rise,” says Dr Des O’Mahony, Bookassist CEO and founder. “The site is becoming a valuable additional promotional and selling opportunity for hotels and they need new tools to capitalise on that.”
The four Bookassist apps consist of a booking engine app, a special offers app, a customer reviews app and in those countries where the service is available, a voucher sales app for fixed-priced vouchers or package vouchers. The apps can be installed individually or as a suite, depending on the hotel’s needs.
All the apps automatically take information directly from the Bookassist extranet system that hotels already use for keeping their rates and availability updated and for managing their customer reviews online, and are therefore maintenance-free on Facebook.
The apps also allow hotels to offer specific pricing and offers to their Facebook fans only, through the use of promo codes.
According to Paul Ferry, senior social media strategist with Bookassist: “We’ve been watching web traffic statistics carefully for hundreds of our hotel clients. The trend we’ve seen is that Facebook has rapidly become one of the top 5 referrer sites, those sites responsible for sending traffic to hotel websites. This is a major change in just the last year alone”.
