Bewley's Hotels show dramatic business increase with Bookassist

The Bewley's Hotels Group (bewleyshotels.com) has recorded a sharp increase in direct online booking revenue in the final quarter of 2009, the group announced today. The change has coincided with the group's adoption of Bookassist booking technology and online marketing strategy in October 2009.

Commenting on the results to date, Tracey Moran, Communications Director with Bewley's Hotel Group said: "We began working with Bookassist in October and in this short space of time have seen immediate growth in online revenue and particularly in average booking value. Furthermore, introducing Bookassist's eCommerce integration with Google Analytics has helped us to reduce our online marketing costs and to achieve a significantly better return on investment. Although it is still early days we are delighted with the progress and the speed at which it was achieved."

"Switching Bewley's to Bookassist's suite of technology and services has shown immediate dividends", according to Paul Dooley, Director of Client Services at Bookassist's Ireland office. "Our booking technology in particular has one of the highest conversion rates in the industry. We expect further performance growth through 2010 and we are confident that some of our exciting new technology releases in the first quarter of 2010 will accelerate this."


Bookassist products and services in use with the group include Booking Engine, with visual search and interactive booking map technology; Traffic Builder online marketing with Google Analytics eCommerce connectivity; Site Builder content management system website; Corporate booking and loyalty system; online electronic voucher purchase system.

Installation of a direct connection between Bookassist's booking engine system and the hotel group's property management system (PMS) was also facilitated. Bookassist's standard OTA/XML interface allows connections to PMS systems with ease, saving hotels the time and effort of transferring reservations between systems.

Bewley's Hotel Group have four hotels in Dublin - at Ballsbridge, Leopardstown, Newland's Cross and Dublin Airport - together with UK hotels at Manchester Airport and in Leeds. The Group, headquartered at the Red Cow Complex in Dublin, is a sister group of Moran Hotels.

Bookassist® creates and manages online strategies for hotels and groups and is the industry-leading hotel booking engine and online marketing provider in Ireland. A Deloitte Fast 50 Technology Company in Ireland and in the Top 100 Deloitte Technology Companies in Europe, Bookassist has received numerous awards in Online Trade, Online Marketing, and Technological Innovation including the Irish Internet Association’s NetVisionary Award for online trade.

Bookassist fuses powerful Google Analytics and Booking Engine reporting

Bookassist has announced today a major innovation in its Traffic Builder search engine optimisation and marketing services. Clients of its award winning Booking Engine software can now use Google Analytics not just to track usage throughout their websites but specifically to trace clicks on individual adverts right through to a specific booking by a specific person in the Bookassist system via a direct integration between both systems. This allows for website statistics as well as advertising tracking in unprecedented detail.


Client hotels can now "drill down" into any pay per click (PPC) advert campaign and determine instantly the return on investment, in booking revenue terms, for each accommodation package they offer online. This allows for immediate feedback on the perceived value by online customers of special offers, discounts and other offerings the hotel has online, giving the hotel valuable instant intelligence on what is working online and what is not, rather than having to wait to analyse returns at a later date.

"What we now have is a complete integration between our Booking Engine system and our Traffic Builder [online marketing service] system, all rolled together in Google's Analytics. So in one place you can view user patterns throughout your site and track every single cent spent on PPC to see if a particular advert is generating real booking revenue, what part of the world your booker is coming from, what kind of package was booked and whether any add-ons or additional services were bought", said Mary Collins, responsible for Traffic Builder strategy at Bookassist.

Bookassist's integration of Traffic Builder with Google Analytics leaves no room for doubt and is the most powerful analysis of online marketing available to hotels today. Hotel clients using Traffic Builder can respond instantly to the marketplace based on real data, not on supposition. It is another in a string of tie-ins with Google technology for Bookassist.

Early in 2008, Bookassist was first in the industry to adopt the then-new Google Charts technology for the generation of innovative real-time graphics in its Booking Engine reporting. As far back as 2005, Bookassist integrated its entire database of hotel information with Google Maps. Bookassist is a Google Adwords Qualified Company and works closely with Google and has had access to early technology releases. In 2007 the company was a beta tester of the Google Local service on Google Maps where it now features prominently.

Traffic Builder with Google Analytics is available now, exclusively to hotels using the Bookassist Booking Engine on their websites.