Hotel software solutions provider P3 Hotel Software has opened a new frontier in the direct bookings market with the launch of new cost-efficient booking engine which can be rolled out in just one day.

The P3 Essential booking engine provides hotels of all sizes with a fully integrated booking solution – including reservations and secure payment integration – for an all-inclusive, flat-rate fee starting at just $175 per month.

The Irish company developed the product after identifying a need for an affordable booking engine solution for hotels that are migrating from older, on-premises property management systems to any version of Oracle Hospitality’s OPERA hotel reservations and property management system.

P3 Chief Technology Officer Peter Hinds explained: “Speaking to hoteliers, it became clear to us that there was significant demand for a booking engine that allows hotels and their guests to quickly and easily access the benefits of Oracle Hospitality’s OPERA property management system – and to do so in a cost-efficient manner.”

“That’s what P3 Essential is: a quick, easy, and affordable software solution to a lot of the functionality and features issues that many hotels struggle with when they have an outdated booking engine which is not properly integrated to Oracle OPERA.

“We now hope that the owner of any hotel, no matter its size or budget, will feel they can afford a fully integrated booking engine that will solve those issues, and will also enhance the customer booking experience to help drive direct bookings.”

P3 Essential provides hotels with all the main functionality features of the P3 custom booking engine. These include integrated secure payments with all the main payment gateway providers, integration with P3’s online check-in and checkout, event and corporate rates, and branding around colors and fonts to match the hotel’s existing brand identity.

It does not include P3’s artificial intelligence-driven functionality or its special offers section, and it also is missing the unique web design and branding customization that the P3 custom booking engine offers.

Peter Hinds said: “P3 Essential is an entry-level product but it has all the main features. Crucially, it integrates fully and seamlessly with OPERA through OWS and OPERA Cloud through OHIP. But because it only takes a day to set up and roll out, we can onboard customers and get them up and running quickly.”

P3 Essential costs $175 per month for hotels with up to 49 rooms. That price rises to $225 for hotels with 50-100 rooms, and then to $275 for hotels with more than 100 rooms. There are no commission, transaction, or set-up fees – just an all-inclusive, flat-rate subscription fee each month. The minimum contract length is 12 months.

The launch of P3 Essential comes quickly after the Dublin-based software solutions provider secured an investment of €750,000 to fund expansion into the United States and German markets. The company, a Strategic Oracle Partner which currently works exclusively with Oracle Hospitality, has experienced continuous strong growth in recent years.