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July 1, 2013

Dashbell – Better Bookings for Hotels & Resorts

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If independent hotels want to compete with international chains, they need the right tools. Dashbell is one such tool, providing small hotels and resorts with all the features necessary to accept online bookings, payments, and out-of-the ordinary guest requests. Dashbell also serves as a reporting and analytics tool, letting business owners know where they can reduce costs to improve the bottom line.

Enter the name of your hotel to get started using Dashbell, then upload your room availability information and rates. Dashbell will provide you with a widget to add to your website to start accepting online bookings right away. Travelers who visit your website from anywhere in the world can make reservations in real-time, without going through travel agents or waiting for manual confirmations via phone, and they can pay with their credit cards directly through the online platform. Dashbell syncs these paid reservations with your web-based calendar, making it easy to see how many reservations are pending, confirmed, or cancelled on any given night.

Dashbell collects reservation data and uses it to help inform a hotel’s pricing and marketing programs. Hotel owners can use Dashbell to identify popular date ranges, and then adjust their prices to capitalize on those peak periods. Hotel owners can also use the platform to quickly create promotions or discounts, as a way to boost occupancy during slower times of the year.

Practical Uses:

  • Avoid over-booking your hotel during peak travel season
  • Increase or decrease room pricing based on demand
  • Accept bookings from travelers in other countries
  • Create promotions to maximize revenue during slower travel periods

Insider Tips:

  • Create guest profiles for each person staying at your hotel
  • Paid reservations are automatically synced to the Dashbell system
  • Dashbell offers WordPress integration
  • Hotels with the Enterprise plan can get a personalized URL

What we liked:

  • Managers can see how many reservations are pending on any given night
  • Hotels can validate credit cards and online payments
  • Dashbell works on any device that’s connected to the Internet

What we didn’t like:

  • Dashbell’s reporting system still hasn’t been released

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: December 2012 (Beta)
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
  • Founded by: Paige Brown, Alex Torrenegra, and Gisella Borja
  • Web site: http://dashbell.com

Costs:

  • Start plan is free
  • Grow plan is $49 per month
  • Enterprise plan is $349 per month
  • 5% service fee for online bookings (for Start and Grow plans)
  • 1% service fee for offline bookings (for Start plan)

Comments

  1. Thank you for the article. We are working hard to release new features every week. In fact our first version of reports and analytics was released this past week and more to come in the following weeks.

    Also there has been an update to our pricing model based on customer feedback. It can be found here: http://dashbell.com/pages/pricing
    We have removed the offline booking fee and have moved to a model that works better for the hotels.

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