Meeting Room Booking Software

As the owner of a small business, did you know that you can harness the power of Wordpress to provide you with an instant, free, online Meeting Room Booking Software solution?

Many small and medium businesses have a need for meeting room booking software, to enable their clients to book meeting rooms, hotel rooms, B&B rooms, or even other resources. It could be ideal as a boardroom booking calender even. Wordpress can instantly enable you to do this - and online - using the instant power of a Wordpress plugin you can have meeting room booking software almost instantly.

You probably spend a lot of time using manual systems, when a computerised system would work faster and better for you. In considering software to automate a process in your small business, it can take a lot of time, and money, to specify what you need doing and to find a competent programmer to undertake the work for you. Once operational, software that's been written for you can tend to become out of date - and you can't ever track down the original programmer to get changes made.

That's why I love Wordpress. Put simply, Wordpress is known as a blogging platform. This can make most people shut down at this point because they don't want a blog in their company, they don't know how they'd use it, it sounds hard .... but, look deeper than this and you'll quickly find that these days Wordpress can quite simply be used by you, in your business, to automate systems and procedures - often for free, mostly very cheaply - and in most cases it only takes a hour or so to set them up, or half day from start to finish if you're new to doing this.

Below are a couple of Wordpress-based solutions that I think you'll find invaluable in taking your business to the next level!

If your room bookings are for whole days, then why not investigate the Wordpress Hotel Reservations Plugin, which will enable you to create your own, instant, online booking system.

While it works perfectly for hostels, B&Bs and hotels, the concept of booking something for a whole day means that anything can be booked.

Features:

• Your clients can make their own reservations from your website
• You can book multiple rooms in one order
• You will build yourself a mailing list as your customers have to register to be able to make a booking - other Wordpress plugins (free of course) then give you the ability to make out special offers or other information to all your registered users ... or even export the data to use with any of your existing marketing lists.
  
• Your users get sent an automatic notification email
• Your customers and clients can see their bookings
• Your users can cancel their bookings by being able to contact you directly through the system.
• The Administration system enables you to create bookings manually
• The Admin system enables you to change, delete and confirm bookings
• Administrators can add, delete and edit the resources available
  
• You can offer discounts, based on criteria you set up.

Website: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-reservation

One solution you could investigate would be the WebReserv Embedded Booking Calendar, which enables you to add online booking and reservation handling (as well as management) to your website.This is a hosted solution, with a Wordpress plugin. All you need is to install Wordpress, then get this Wordpress plugin - so this could easily be installed alongside/on your existing website, or, you can create a separate website just for your new online bookings service.... it's really up to you. This is something you could do for yourself, or simply put into the hands of your in-house IT bod, or hand over to your web design company to implement.

Plugins give you instant functionality, ease of use and a solution out of the box.... no waiting, zero or low cost, job done! In fact, most plugins will give you more features than you'd have thought of yourself if you'd sat and tried to get the solution written specially for you.

There are several "views" to choose from. This reservations booking plugin will enable your website visitors to check availability, and book/reserve your, rooms, classes, vehicles, or any other resource you're making available or hiring out for profit. It can be set to take bookings by the minute, the hour, daily, monthly or even yearly bookings.

Appointment Bookings

The Web Reserve Booking Calendar system can even handle bookings for events or appointments. For classes, spa bookings, point-to-point bookings, equipment hire or anything else. What does your company hire out or allocate to people that needs controlling?

You can even use this on a private area for staff only and use it for staff to book rooms or resources.

WebReserv Booking System Features

• Can be used by nearly every industry
• The administrator receives an automatic emails every time a new booking is made
• You can set up automatic emails to your customers, advising them that their booking's been made, confirming their booking, or perhaps that it is provisional (if you like to phone them individually)
  
• Once booked, your rooms/equipment are automatically marked as unavailable, so there's no double booking.
• There is a back-office facility, enabling you to handle any bookings you take over the phone, or any walk-in business.
  
• There are reports you can run
  
• It handles multiple seasonal rates
• You can give discount codes, ideal for marketing or tracking
  
• You can embed just the booking component directly onto a webpage on your main website
  
• Many payment methods are supported, including cash, cheque, bank transfer, credit cards, processing gateways and Paypal.

Website: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/webreserv-embedded-booking-calendar/

As you can see, you can have your own online meeting room booking software almost instantly - and certainly affordably.  The power of Wordpress grows daily - and you can quickly add fabulous usability to your website and your business, literally at the press of a few buttons!

Once you've set yourself up with an online booking system, you'll see how easy it was to do. This means that if you're looking for an additional income stream for your business, then you could offer the service to other companies who could use the service.

Using Wordpress plugins, to create functionality for small and medium-sized businesses is a great way to add additional income, work the hours you want and work from home.

If you aren't already in business, then why not have a play around with Wordpress and plugins - they're easy to set up and use and you really can create a business from providing the services directly to small, local, national, or even international businesses.

Small and medium sized businesses can now harness the power of the Internet affordably and with confidence.

These are just two of many solutions. I hope this article's helped you to see the possibilities and has enabled you to confidently embark on a research mission to track down the best solution for YOUR needs.

Good luck!