An Internet Booking Engine (IBE) is a complex software application that enables travel suppliers, hospitality providers, and agencies to sell their services directly to their customers on the Internet. It is an e-commerce component built into a travel website that processes real-time search queries for flights, hotels, car rentals, or tours and handles the secure booking/payment of those.
At its simplest, an Internet Booking Engine (IBE) is the central transaction processor of a travel website, the link between the customer-facing interface and back-end inventory systems. A user’s search query (e.g., dates, destination) sent to the IBE requests real-time availability and pricing from systems such as a Central Reservation System (CRS), Property Management System (PMS), or Global Distribution System (GDS).
It then clearly displays these options to the user. Once the user has made a selection, the IBE securely captures customer information and processes the payment through an integrated payment gateway. Finally, the engine confirms the booking, updates the inventory in the back-end system to avoid overbooking, and issues an automated confirmation or an e-ticket to the customer.
A modern IBE (Internet Booking Engine) is not just a simple checkout form but a comprehensive sales tool. Its most critical components include real-time API integration to all relevant sources of inventory (CRS, GDS, etc.) and a secure, PCI-compliant payment gateway that accepts multiple currencies and alternative methods of payment.
Beyond this, there are two features that are essential:
The fact that it can be “white-labeled” means that the engine can be tailored to create a perfect fit with the supplier’s brand identity.
The IBE is the most significant B2C, i.e., business-to-consumer, sales tool, and this sets it apart from other systems. It is not the inventory source itself; rather, it is pulling data from inventory sources.
For example, a GDS is a massive B2B marketplace, while the Internet Booking Engine (IBE) is the B2C engine to sell inventory from the GDS. A hotel’s CRS is the central database for the hotel’s rates and inventory; the IBE is the “shop window” of the hotel’s website that queries the CRS. A PMS is where the on-property operations are handled; the IBE sends the confirmed bookings to the PMS.
From a supplier perspective, the IBE is the single most important tool to drive direct bookings, increasing the supplier’s independence from high-commission OTAs and enabling the supplier to own the relationship with the customer.
An OTA such as Booking.com or Expedia is a third-party marketplace that markets inventory from a variety of different suppliers. An IBE is the software that a single supplier (such as a hotel or airline) is using on its own website to sell its own inventory directly to the public.
Yes. Modern IBEs are designed to handle complex logic, such as multi-city flight planning, flexible date searches (“+/- 3 days”), and dynamic packaging (i.e., bundled flight and hotel for a single price).
A white-label IBE (Internet Booking Engine) is a booking engine that is delivered by a B2B technology company. It can be fully branded and customized by a travel agency or supplier, which enables them to have a powerful booking engine that looks and feels like an unobtrusive part of their website.
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