What are Base rates?
Base rates are the most straightforward rates to create and manage from all the rate types in Clock PMS+. The prices in this type of rate do not depend on prices of any other rate and pricing must be set directly within them. Any subsequent price changes (a new seasonal price or day price) need to be applied individually in every Base rate that you need changing.
Base rate pricing structures
There are plenty of use cases of base rates which mostly depend on your pricing strategy, rate structure and how much you want to automate price changes and lower your manual work.
Using only Base rates
If you operate a smaller property or don't have too many rates on offer, you can have all of your rates to be base rates. However, when changes to pricing are needed, you need to edit each rate and apply the price change to each rate individually. This reiterates the fact that using just base rates in your rate setup is efficient only for properties that do not have too many rates to offer/modify - using only base rates for a very robust and more complicated setup will eventually be inefficient as you will spend a lot of time editing when you need to modify your prices.
Using Base rates in combination with Derived rates
The more common use case of this type of rate, as its name entails is - to be a Base rate for which you set a price while other rates use this price as a base and (possibly) apply a modification to it. Using such an approach will significantly lower the number of edits you need to make to prices, respectively make the process quicker and prevent mistakes or missed edits. Furthermore, this means that whenever you need to determine pricing, you can do that only for the Base rates and set the pricing just for them.
Use Cases
Let's examine several examples of Base rate usage:
1. Determine a Base 'Board' and set prices for it
- We have several rates with different meal options - Room Only (RO); Bed and Breakfast (BB); Breakfast+Dinner (HB).
- The Room Only will be our 'Base' rate and we determine pricing for that board.
- Our BB and HB rates are 'Derived' rates, use the RO as Base and automatically apply an increase to the price received from the RO.
- We only change pricing in the Base (RO).
2. Determine a Base 'Guarantee' and set prices for it
- We have different guarantee/cancellation conditions - e.g. Flexible and Non-Refundable.
- The Flexible will be our 'Base' rate and we determine the prices for that rate.
- Our Non-Refundable are 'Derived' rates, use the Flexible as a Base and automatically apply a % decrease to the price received from the Flexible.
- We only change pricing in the Flexible.
3. Determine a Base 'Room type'
- We have 1 rate per room type.
- We decide that our 'Base' will be our lowest class (cheapest) room type - DBL.
- Each class is 50 GBP higher than the previous class, so we use Derived Amount rates for the other classes.
- We only determine the price for the DBL.