Hotel Banquet & Conference Hall Booking Software.

Begin with commission, because it is the largest number. Third-party guides in 2026 put the large Indian OTAs at roughly 15% to 25%, with the exact rate set by contract and by any visibility programmes you join. Take a 40-room hotel at 65% occupancy and an average rate of ₹4,200. That is 780 room nights a month. If 60% come through OTAs, 468 nights bring in ₹19,65,600, and an 18% commission takes ₹3,53,808 every month, plus 18% GST on the commission itself of about ₹63,685. Whether you can claim that GST back depends on your room tariff slab, so ask your CA. The point is the size of the bill. Even one percentage point of commission is about ₹19,656 a month at these numbers.

Now price the alternative honestly. Direct bookings are cheap, not free. A booking engine on your own website, a payment gateway at roughly 2%, and some promotion all cost money. Suppose the engine and site cost ₹3,000 a month and promotion ₹5,000. Move 10% of your OTA nights, 46.8 nights a month, to direct and you save ₹35,381 of commission, pay about ₹3,931 in gateway fees and ₹8,000 in running costs, and keep ₹23,450 a month, roughly ₹2.81 lakh a year. You break even at about 12 nights a month, or 2.5% of your OTA volume. The workbook on this page runs these numbers with yours. One 2026 guide also lists Google's free booking links as a zero-commission channel, worth checking for your property.

Overbooking is the second leak, and it usually comes from two calendars, not from carelessness. On a busy Saturday the last room is sold to a walk-in at 4:00 pm and to an OTA guest at 4:10 pm, because the sync takes minutes and a person updated the front-desk sheet by hand. Now you have a guest at the desk with a confirmed booking and nothing to give them. Walking a guest means a room at another hotel, transport and an angry review, and it can cost a few thousand rupees each time in direct outlay alone. A channel manager with two-way sync removes most of it. Before you buy one, count the problem. The overbooking audit sheet in the workbook lets you log nights over capacity for 30 days.

Rate and availability controls matter most in wedding season. Suppose 28 rooms are set aside for a wedding family from 4 to 7 December. If they stay open on OTAs at ₹4,200, strangers will book some of them, and you will scramble to move them. Block the rooms in the system, set a release date 30 days out for any the family has not named, and put a minimum stay on the nights around the event. Check that the block reaches every channel. Many OTA contracts also ask for rate parity between channels, so read yours before you offer a direct-booking discount.

A hall is not a room. Rooms are sold by the night, and a hall by the session, with a per-plate quote, a tentative hold, an advance in three instalments and a menu that drives the kitchen. That calendar logic differs from anything an OTA supplies, which is why hotels with weddings often run a room system and a banquet system side by side. Kaliquid is the banquet system: it books halls and lawns by morning and evening session, holds dates, issues per-plate quotes and advance vouchers, and can attach a block of rooms to the event contract. It is not a channel manager or an OTA connector, and it does not sell individual rooms. Pair it with a room booking engine.

Decide by pain, not by feature list. If more than 70% of your nights come from OTAs, start with a direct booking engine. If you have oversold twice in a month, buy a channel manager. If wedding dates are your biggest revenue line, fix the hall calendar first, because one double-booked Saturday can exceed a year of software. A sensible small-hotel stack is a booking engine at about ₹3,000 a month plus Kaliquid Pro at ₹999 per hall per month, or ₹750 on yearly billing. That is under ₹4,000 a month for direct bookings and a hall calendar that cannot be sold twice.