Reserve with Google: Streamline Your Online Bookings

Since there are numerous booking apps and platforms businesses should optimize, managing customer reservations has never been more challenging. Fortunately, reserve with Google allows business owners to manage their reservation calendar on Google, regardless of the booking provider.

In this blog, we'll explore how you can maximize your restaurant's availability by setting up Google bookings through a third-party provider. This way, you can streamline an efficient booking system within your company and increase your revenue generation.

What is an online booking system?

An online booking system is a solution that allows potential customers to reserve and pay for their services. Business owners and restaurant managers can get an online booking system through online booking websites, booking apps, website tools, and more. Aside from stays, online booking systems can also help accommodate accommodations, flights, tours, and other services in the hospitality industry.

While numerous restaurants still accept walk-in reservations, online bookings has become imperative in the restaurant industry. Recent surveys suggest that 72% of consumers would rather book their seats before going to a restaurant. This figure alone proves that proper online booking management can bring high conversion rates to your brand.

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How does Reserve with Google work?

There's no denying that Google plays an important role in consumers' customer journey. Recent surveys suggest that 77% of customers would research the restaurant before dining. For this reason, Google continues to optimize its platform to streamline internet searches to direct reservations.

Google Reservations allows you to manage your availability and let customers and partners book time with you directly within Google Calendar through a personal booking page. This will make reservation and scheduling easy, giving you more time to work on more critical areas of your business.

What are the benefits of synching your online bookings with Google?

Here are some of the reasons why you should synch your online bookings with Google:

Increases conversion rate.

As mentioned a while ago, most travelers do a Google search before booking a restaurant or a service. Synching crucial business information such as availability and price list will significantly increase your conversion rates, as guests can seamlessly create a reservation without jumping to multiple websites. Aside from this, an optimized Google listing is automatically synched to Google Maps, enabling you to connect with potential customers within your location.

Enhances customer experience through Google features.

Millions of people have now become dependent on Google's productivity ecosystem. They use their Google account to make online reservations, plan their activities through Google Calendar, and bookmark their locations through Google Maps. Synching your booking calendar with Google Business will allow guests to bookmark their reservations in Google Calendar and Google Maps automatically. Thus, elevating their customer experience.

Avoiding double bookings.

Double bookings have always been a common problem in the food and hospitality industry. While restaurant managers can easily rebook or cancel a reservation, the process can be detrimental to the brand's image. Synching your booking calendars with each other will allow you to avoid reservation problems that may affect your customer service.

Gather customer data for marketing.

Google Bookings is an excellent source of customer data. Since it's acquired through actual reservations, you can be confident that it can help you generate accurate and relevant insights about your current market. You can use your guest data to adjust your price list, configure your offer, make promotions, and more. Most importantly, it's one of the best ways to create an effective marketing plan that resonates with your audience.

How do I access Reserve with Google?

Managing your bookings on Google Reservations is similar with managing your listings on other reservation provider. Here’s how you can access your bookings on Google Reservations:

1. Login to Reserve with Google.
2. Click Menu on the top-right corner of the dashboard.
3. Click Bookings. Click Upcoming.
4. Find the booking you want to check.

How do I set up a booking system through Google?

Setting up a booking system through Google allows businesses to use their guest's Google accounts when creating a booking. This doesn't just create a synchronized reservation ecosystem for restaurant managers, but it also gives clients a choice to synch their reservations to Google apps.

While the process may vary depending on your provider, Google ensures seamless integration of their accounts with third-party booking providers. Here's how you can manage your bookings on Google Business Profile Manager:

1. Log in to your Business Profile Manager. Choose the listing you want to manage.
2. From the menu, click Bookings.
3. Sign up with your provider of choice.

The approval of your external booking provider usually takes one week. Once approved, your scheduling provider will be automatically linked to your Business profile, and you can start managing your bookings through Google. You're automatically eligible to receive bookings if you already use a scheduling provider. In your Business Profile Bookings tab, you can see your booking history with your provider in Reserve with Google.

Consequently, you can also make your listing temporarily unavailable. To do this, you must log in to your Business Profile Manager and select Close this business on Google. You must contact your scheduling provider to permanently remove your online bookings on Google.

To learn more about setting up a Google My Business profile, read Google My Business Guide: How to Optimize Your Profile

How do I set up a booking system directly on Google?

Google also allows businesses to directly set up a booking system within their platform. As of this writing, Google supports 264 booking providers that can accommodate businesses in the niches of dining, beauty, fitness, and event-based services.

To set up a booking system directly on Google, you should fill out Google Reservation's interest form. The approval normally take three business days.

Once a booking provider is synched with your Google Business Profile, you can manage your bookings directly on Google.

1. Log in to your Business Profile.
2. Use Google Search to search for your business profile. Click the listing and select view profile.
3. Click Edit Profile, then choose Booking.
4. Click Manage Bookings. Proceed with making the necessary changes you need.

You can view your bookings performance by clicking View Performance. Consequently, you can also add an alternative booking provider by clicking Add Provider on your dashboard. Google also offers waitlisting for your customers, which you can monitor and manage through the Waitlists tab on your Google Business Profile.

How do you maintain a booking system?

Setting up an online booking system is easy. The true challenges come during the management process. Here are some of the best practices when streamlining an efficient online reservation system:

Choose a main booking channel.

Creating a listing across the leading online review and booking websites is a must to establish strong online credibility. However, you should ensure that all these reservations are streamlined into a main booking channel. Since Google controls search engine visibility and offers integration within its ecosystem, Google Reservations is a good option.

Use data to optimize your listings.

Regardless of how efficient your reservation process is, it's useless when you don't generate actual bookings. For this reason, business owners must optimize their listings based on their consumer data. Fortunately, Google automatically provides periodic reports and insights to Business Profile owners.

Create a standardized operations procedure during system failure.

While Google is a truly powerful website, it's far from perfect. There will still be times when you will encounter errors, bugs, or system failure within your reservation system. That being said, you must create a standardized operations procedure if your online reservation fails. One of the best options for this is maximizing phone reservation, so you should ensure that the contact number on your Google Business profile is active and updated.

Using AI technologies can be really helpful in streamlining an efficient standard operations procedures in your business. To learn more about these AI tools, read Automate Your Restaurant with AI: Essential Tools You Need

Automate tasks.

Lastly, automate as many tasks as you can. Aside from ensuring a fast and efficient business procedure, using technology can also increase the accuracy of your transactions. For instance, one of the most effective strategies to optimize your listing is to respond to Google reviews. Click here to read our complete guide to responding to Google restaurant reviews.

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Respond to diners effortlessly with MARA.

Reserve with Google is a great way to drive reservations and sales to your restaurant. However, it comes with a tricky task—responding to Google Reviews. Responding to online reviews can be a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be with our AI Review Assistant, MARA. This intuitive tool is designed to ease your Online Reputation Management process, making it more efficient, personalized, and time-saving. It offers the best and most personalized AI for responding to and analyzing your guest reviews.

Google-ready Review Inbox

Google is known to be sensitive when it comes to third-party integration as they ensure that all data on their platform remains relevant to their users. This is especially true for Google Reviews and Google Business listings. Fortunately, MARA’s Review Inbox can easily be integrated with a Google Business account and other leading online review platforms.

Your review inbox makes responding to reviews as simple as hitting "Generate reply" and clicking "Send". The Review Inbox connects to multiple review sources, including Google, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor, giving you a panoramic view of all your reviews. And you can even configure review response automation: Why not allow MARA to automatically respond to simple reviews, like 5-star Google reviews with no text, ensuring you never miss a review? Daily notifications about new reviews keep you updated and in control.

Advanced Review Analytics

One of the key changes on Google listing is its sentiment analysis. While it’s definitely a helpful tool for businesses, if you want to stay ahead of your competition, you should run more advanced Review Analytics.

To help you understand and analyze the multitude of reviews, the Review Assistant also incorporates Review Analytics. This provides actionable, easy-to-understand insights that are tailored exclusively to your business. With MARA, you can quickly get the gist of all your reviews without needing to read each one. The analysis is so detailed that you can find out about specific issues like "water in the pool is too cold" or "lack of vegan breakfast option”. These insights help optimize guest experience without requiring you to be a data expert.

Review Automation for Google Reviews

The restaurant industry greatly benefits from automation. Through automating repetitive tasks, your staff can focus on rendering excellent customer service and working on more important activities. After gaining trust in your personal AI Review Assistant, you can even go on autopilot and create automation rules for your review response process. This way, you can specify which reviews should be replied to by the AI directly with no additional approval. With the configuration below, all Google reviews with no text and a star rating of 4 and above are answered automatically.

Personalized Review Responses

Building customer relationships is essential for the restaurant industry. Using templated responses can drive away diners, as it would make it seem like you can’t even be bothered to read the concerns of your diners. MARA's AI isn't just about efficiency; it's about personalization too. The Brand Voice feature allows the AI to adapt to your tone, making sure your responses sound authentically you. Plus, with Smart Snippets, you can "teach" the AI how to respond to recurring praises or complaints. Your AI then incorporates this information into its responses, but always with different words, providing more personalized, relevant replies.

This review response assistant has quickly become a game-changer for over 2000 customers. Its promising capacity to elevate your overall rating, amplify response rates, glean insights from customer feedback, and economize both time and money, is the reason behind its growing popularity.

Final Thought

Your online reservation procedure can truly make or break your business, and Google offers an efficient way to streamline your bookings, from calendar setup to listing optimization. However, the effectiveness of these systems relies on proper utilization by your team. By ensuring that your team knows how to use them effectively, you can maximize their potential to increase revenue generation. Additionally, managing online reviews need not be overwhelming. With the appropriate software like MARA, you can streamline the process, personalize responses, and derive valuable insights from reviews. Don't hesitate to give MARA a try—it's free for testing, requires no credit card, and can be fully operational in less than five minutes.

This article is part of our hero content on "Mastering Google Reviews - A Complete Guide."