cpanel displayJomres has always been about giving as much control as possible to you, the booking site owner, while relying on as few outside services as possible.

You get to run your booking site, your way, on your hosting. You can choose from over 160 Jomres core plugins to adapt the functionality to your needs, providing an unparalleled range of options. If we do not have a plugin that does precisely what you want (unlikely), any PHP coder can follow our excellent documentation to adapt an existing plugin or create a custom plugin from scratch. No other booking system comes close to the power and flexibility of Jomres.

When establishing your own Jomres booking site, the most vital task is building relevance with the search engines so that potential guests can find your site. That is not easy and takes time.

It can be tempting to simply list your properties on sites such as Booking.com and Airbnb. They have poured billions of dollars of investor cash into Google ads in order to soak up as much traffic as possible but, make no mistake, their investors want that money back. Airbnb is now valued at around 40 billion dollars. What they are buying is you.

These corporations’ openly stated business plan is to keep increasing their fees as they become more dominant. They do not pay your mortgage, wash the bedsheets, or deal with drunken guests at 3 AM and, yet, they expect a fifth or, even, a quarter of the entire booking amount.

One way to expose your property to more potential guests is to connect with a “Channel Manager” which, in return for a fee, will place it on hundreds of booking sites and OTAs (Online Travel Agencies). Jomres has long included a plugin that makes it easy to connect with a channel manager but this approach is not ideal. First, there are the channel manager’s monthly fees, which are significant. Then, if you get a booking, the site in question will get a percentage of the full booking amount and again, you make yourself dependent upon someone else’s platform.

Generating your own traffic for your own booking site is harder but, in the long run, far healthier for your business.

Enter the Jomres Syndication Network

Jomres already gives you the control to display your properties as you wish, and the ability to set the context. You decide which properties to feature and, unlike an OTA’s website where your property is just one of over 30 million, all presented in the same way, you get to express what makes your business special.

The advantage of channel management was that it got your properties onto many more sites, but at a steep cost and with no real control. Now, with the JSN (Jomres Syndication Network), you can extend that control beyond the confines of your own site. For free.

Built upon the powerful Jomres REST API, you can now “syndicate” your properties, meaning you get to publish them on other Jomres sites, just as you publish them on your own site. This sudden jump beyond the confines of your own site means that you expose your properties to massively more potential guests than would ever discover your site on their own. The results our early users have been seeing are impressive.

In return, you allow the properties from those sites to appear on your site, in order of distance. Your own properties are, of course, always displayed first, regardless of location. Bookings for your properties are never taken on the other sites. A guest who wants to book is always directed to your site to see the full suite of available conveniences and extras. The transaction is handled in exactly the same way you always handle them, and you do not owe a penny to anyone.

This network improves your website's relevance to google because, with more local properties, you become a more valuable resource for users. Delivering the most useful possible results is the priority of all the major search engines.

An additional benefit is that some sites could list your properties without any requirement for you to list properties from them. For example, a Russian or Chinese designer could create a site in his own language, and containing content to cater to his own countrymen. He could pull in your property listings purely as additional useful content and, again, any of his visitors who want to book would be directed to your site for that.

Another example could be a designer creating a directory site that lists all wheelchair accessible properties, or all properties with their own swimming pool, or pet-friendly properties worldwide. The JSN could allow such a designer to become aware of any properties on your Jomres sites that have the feature in question, and he could then use the API to publish your relevant property listings on his site. For him, it is helpful content for his users. For you, it is free, zero-effort exposure with no reciprocal requirement.

The JSN feature is completely and utterly free to all Jomres users because I want to break the stranglehold of the big boys and enable independent business owners to rediscover the original promise of the Internet: a world in which cooperation is the best strategy and middlemen are irrelevant. That was my vision for Jomres back in 2005 and, back then, it seemed entirely possible that the little guys could make a difference. Over the past 15 years, however, we see that giant corporations have ruthlessly executed a plan to place more and more power in fewer hands.

Let us all, together, headbutt Booking.com, bitchslap Airbnb and take the Internet back!

  • Created on .

ABOUT US

vince picDeveloped and maintained by Vince Wooll, Jomres was initially conceived in early 2005 as a Mambo based solution to a client’s hotel management needs. While it wasn't originally expected to be an online booking system it quickly morphed into one as users requested more and more features.

As the number of feature requests grew Vince knew that he would need to dedicate more time to the project and in July 2005 Jomres was released as a commercial project. Since then Jomres has become the world's oldest online booking plugin for any PHP CMS. It has been used in Joomla 1.0, 1.5, 2.5, 3 & 4 and WordPress 4, 5 & 6.

Aladar joined the project in 2010 after using Jomres for his own projects. He was active on the forum, helping other members of the community and eventually Vince invited him to join the team. Between 2010 and 2018 he was an integral part of the project and made many significant contributions.

Whilst not formally part of the Jomres project, Rodrigo Rocco and Vince have become firm friends. Rod is a freelancer who specialises in doing custom work for Jomres users and developing custom plugins for the system that take advantage of it's modular design. He has built many useful extensions including his fabulous Valentina Template Override Package.

Jomres and the Jomres Logo is trademarked and can't be used without written consent from the owner.

www.jomres.net is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla! Project, Open Source Matters or the WordPress project. The Joomla! & WordPress names and logos are used under a limited license granted by Open Source Matters and the WordPress Projects.

© Copyright 2005 - 2022 Vince Wooll