Why Can’t Excel Spreadsheets Compete with an Online Booking System?
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Scheduling reservations, keeping track of transactions, picking tour guides, and managing goods are all part of running a tour business. Even though using Excel spreadsheets is a quick and easy way to handle these administrative tasks, it isn’t the best long-term solution.
Your business gets more complicated as it grows. Starting with a few spreadsheets, you might end up with a lot of them linked together with formulas that are so complicated they give you the willies. Even if you can get past the confusion, it can be hard to show new employees how to use a planning system that only makes sense to you.
The reservation system is now far more advanced and has special features that make it easy for users to use and give them more options for booking, which saves them time and money. Using an Excel spreadsheet has a few disadvantages when compared to the reservation system.
Limitations of Excel Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are difficult to use
There’s no way around it. Put simply, spreadsheets are not user-friendly. Even though they can be changed and are easy to use, when working with a lot of data, you have to move through hundreds or even thousands of rows and columns. It’s hard to make files easy to read and understand.
Not doing a good job of managing a lot of info. When there are a lot of bookings, Excel Spreadsheets can become unwieldy and hard to handle.
As you can see in the picture below, if you want to collect information or data to find figures or just to write a report every month, you have to divide it into a lot of columns and rows. To use the math buttons, you have to learn how to use a computer and get good at it. If you use the conversation method and figure out each number, I think this job will take you a long time and make you bored.
Lack of real-time updates and synchronization
Excel spreadsheets can cause problems like overbooking or double booking if they don’t change and sync in real time. This mistake can happen if a lot of people look at the same worksheet at the same time but don’t always see each other’s changes directly.
Also, users who are not in the office, like remote workers or people who use mobile devices, might not be able to easily access Excel files. To avoid these problems, businesses could add real-time collaborative tools like cloud-based project management software that lets users talk to each other in real time and offers automatic updates and syncing.
Excel Spreadsheet is easy to make mistakes
Spreadsheets always have some kind of mistake because so many people use them at once and make changes and numbers on them. If you want charts to be accurate, don’t count on it. Because of this, it makes sense to pay for database software that can either alert you to mistakes or fix them quickly and correctly on its own.
The worst thing about spreadsheets, especially big ones, is that it’s easy to miss mistakes if you don’t check them row by row all the time. Because of this, it’s annoying and hard to book and manage rooms when a lot of people are planning at the same time. Your travel agent will have to put in work, time, and maybe even money to fix mistakes that happen often at work.
Advantages of Online Booking Systems
Know the information of the hotel in advance
Online hotel booking will help you learn more about the hotel you want to book, such as its location, amenities, and infrastructure. You can also see what the hotel rooms are like and how good the service is by reading the reviews and looking at the pictures.
Cut back on your staff duty
How long does it take you and your team to take phone or in-person reservations? It often takes a person half of their day to do. If you have an automatic online booking system, a customer can do all the work for you. The buyer sees a list of available times and dates, picks the one that works best for them, and then fills in all the necessary information.
Your system will record an appointment immediately, so you don’t have to do anything. A study found that 57% of all trips were booked online in 2019. In contrast, 68% of all travel and tourism sales will be made online in 2022. Many people use the booking system to book rooms because it is easy and gives them useful information. And the tour business will pay its workers as little as possible.
Real-time updates and synchronization of bookings and availability
Online sites for making reservations can give you information about availability and bookings in real time. After a customer makes an appointment, the system updates the availability calendar right away. This keeps other customers from booking the same time slot or service. This reduces the chance of overbooking or double booking, which can irritate customers and hurt a business’s reputation.
Online booking systems also make it easy for customers to make reservations whenever they want, since they can be viewed from anywhere. Online booking systems are a reliable and effective way to handle reservations and availability. They can help companies save time and make customers happier.
Automated billing and payments
Online hotel booking will help you to choose from many different hotels when staying in the same place. You will comfortably compare, analyze and rate each hotel with just a computer or mobile device without having to consult many people. You can research carefully on many travel websites and then aim to book an advance to keep your room first. It takes for a second to conduct the bill and check your bill or confirmation through emails to have the detailed and clear information that you need.
Real-World Example: Booking.com
Statistics show that Booking.com had 564 million visits in May 2022, making it the most popular travel and tourist site in the world. Booking.com is one of the most popular online travel agencies. It lets you book hotels, trips, and rent cars, among other things.
Booking.com stays up-to-date and uses innovative tools and features. They try new features on their website often to make sure they get enough bookings from good customers without making the user’s job harder. They always pay attention to what you say and keep improving their goods to make your experience with them better.
Booking.com has internet marketing experts on staff. Booking.com advertises the properties of its partners on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, making sure that they can be seen by as many potential buyers as possible in 43 different languages.
We also let people who are planning a trip know about your homes through our more than 17,500 affiliate partners. Booking.com also promotes businesses’ properties directly to Booking.com users, customizing their search to help them find the perfect property. This helps you attract good and potential clients, which helps your business’s revenue grow over time.
P/s: Travelerwp is a WordPress theme that comes with a powerful booking engine designed to provide an experience similar to that of Booking.com. This feature-rich theme allows users to easily book tours, hotels, flights, and more. It provides a simple and intuitive booking process, making it easy for visitors to make reservations and plan their travel itinerary. The theme is customizable, making it perfect for any travel agency or tour operator looking to enhance their online presence and streamline their booking process.
Conclusion
Excel is a good tool for organizing numbers, but it can’t handle business data that is too complicated to fit on a single worksheet. Using a lot of different papers makes it more likely that someone will make a mistake, since it’s hard to keep track of all of them and update them all at once. Also, teaching new workers complicated formulas and complicated ways to enter data takes a lot of time, which hurts productivity and slows down the onboarding process. In these situations, companies can benefit greatly from modern data management solutions that make it easier and faster to handle complex data, reduce errors, and help new team members get up to speed faster.
