New Features
BookDirect
Two new options added:
Sale of extra services on specific dates
Up until now, you had the option to offer the extra services in two ways - either as one-time services (on the day of check-in) or as services that were charged for the entire booking period. Now you can offer your customers a much more flexible approach to choosing additional services. With the new functionality, guests can choose exactly on which dates they wish to use a particular extra service. For example, the guest can select the exact date on which they wish to use an additional spa package or several dates on which they wish to add a rent-a-bike.
The new date selection functionality takes into account the Counters. Through the Counters you can manage the sale of extra services that have a limited availability. When suggesting possible dates for each service, the Counter associated with the service is taken into account so that the guest can buy the service on a date in which there is still availability
Example: if you have 5 rental bikes that are already booked for a given date, that date will be stopped from selling, but the guest will be able to book a bike for a previous or subsequent date.
To enable a given service to be offered for dates selected by the customer:
- Open the new charge template setup screen: Settings->All Settings->Charges & Taxes-> Charge template.
- Select the "WRS extra services" tab
- Tick the "Allow date selection" checkbox for the services for which you would like to allow guests to select the dates.
- Save the changes.
Note: The services with a ticked "Allow date selection" checkbox will no longer be affected by the existing "Per Day" checkbox .
Adults and children at the first step
We've added a new setting through which you can show fields for children and adults at the first step. The aim is to let you reduce room types and rates at the next steps. If your hotel has many room types and products making it difficult for guests to make their choice, you can take advantage of the new setting. This way, the guest will only see the rooms and rates whose restrictions match the number of adults and children entered. The downside of this approach is that the guest will not be familiar with all your products as well as it makes the process less clear when booking more than one room. Choose the option that best matches your product mix.
To activate the new setting:
- Open the settings of BookDirect (Web - BookDirect Settings).
- Select "Ask for guests at the first step" and save.
Here is how the behaviour of BookDirect will change when using new setting:
- At the first step, the entry of number of adults and children will be required;
- In the text, showing the selected dates (the second and the third step), the selected number of adults and children will also be visible.
- The room types will be filtered to match the number of adults and children entered at the first step;
- The rates will also be filtered.
- The fields for adults and children next to each rate will be forbidden for editing.
- The fields for the children's age will remain active for selection and when these ages are entered, the price will be recalculated as before.
- To change the number of adults and children, the guest has to return to the first step by using the steps at the top of the screen or clicking the text with the selected dates and adults and children beneath it.
The field for children can be hidden through the existing 'Hide inputs for children' setting.
Channel Managers
Channel's Max Rooms as a percentage
The functionality refers to the following channel managers: RoomCloud, D-Edge and the channels using the OTA interface. The Max Rooms aims at controlling the possibility for overbooking when you sell simultaneously through multiple agents. The shortcoming of the existing max rooms functionality is that if you set a small number, you may hinder sales, and if it is too great, you risk overbooking. Through the new functionality you can set a percentage of the free rooms of a type instead of a fixed number of rooms for the value of the max rooms of the channel. The percentage is calculated for each day and room type, as the percentage of free rooms.
Example: If you have 30 free rooms for a given date and you have set the value of the max rooms of the channel to be 50%, 15 free rooms will be sent to the channels. In case of decrease in the free double rooms, the max rooms value will also decrease, i.e. if there are 4 free rooms left, the max rooms will reduce the number of the sent free rooms to 2.
Please note that when the free rooms are calculated, the number is rounded to the bigger value, i.e. if you have 2 free rooms and the max rooms value of the channel is 10%, mathematically speaking that is equal to 0.2 rooms which will be rounded to the greater value of 1 room.
The new setting can be found on each of the channel manager setup screens and is called "Max rooms %". Click "Yes", if you wish the new approach to be applied. The percentage itself for each room type is also visible in the same place as the old Max rooms data.
RoomCloud - Hotel level occupancy effect
For RoomCloud, we added a new setting regarding the number of sent free rooms for each product. Previously, the number of sent free rooms was determined by the free rooms of the room type and max rooms setting. If you enable the new setting, the number of sent free rooms will depend on three factors: free rooms of the room type, free rooms of the hotel and max rooms. In other words, with the new setting, the total number of available rooms can be taken into account and the smaller of the two numbers can be determined.
Example:
- For a given date, you have overbooking for double room with 5 rooms (5 rooms overbooking)
- For the same date, you have 7 triple rooms available.
- With the old behaviour, sales of the double rooms will be stopped, but you will submit 7 triple rooms for sale, which will not solve the issue with the overbooking for double rooms.
- If you enable the new setting, you will have the behaviour. The double rooms will be stopped again, but only 2 will be submitted as available for the triple ones, because you only have 2 rooms at the hotel level. This way, you can possibly solve the overbooking problem by moving it to the triple rooms.
- Max rooms. The max rooms setting has the same role as before, but this time having impact on the new quantity of free rooms. In other words, the max rooms for the triple rooms will be calculated on the basis of 2 free rooms instead of 7.
To enable the new behaviour, open the RoomCloud settings and select ”Yes” for the "Hotel level occupancy effect" settings. Save
City Tax - Price Ranges
We have added new options to the City Tax calculation to solve even more cases.
Example: In Hanover and Hamburg, the the City Tax amount is determined based on a tiered approach based on the price per bed or room:
- if the price per bed is up to EUR 10, there is no City Tax
- if it is between EUR 10 and 25, the price is 0.50 per person;
- if it is between EUR 25 and 50, the price is 1.00 per person, etc.
So if the City Tax amount is also determined based on a tiered approach in your region, you may be interested in this new option.
Here are more details:
- Up till now, for each of the seasons, there was a price for an adult and a price for a child. These two fields continue working as before.
- To the season, we have added "Price Ranges". Through them, you can add multiple prices. For each level, there are "Price from" and "Price up to" fields. Based on these fields, it is determined which ranges will be activated.
- For each range, there are also Price per adult and Price per child fields. The range to be activated determines the prices for adults and children (applied even with an empty price).
- If the price does not fall in any of the defined ranges, the prices for adults and children set in the season itself will be used.
- When defining the ranges, specify which price exactly to be taken into account. In other words, the range (the price from - to) may refer to the price for the room or the price per guest. The latter is determined as the price for the room is divided by the number of adults in it (adults + children).
Improvements
- Documents - required attributes. We have added a new setting to let you specify the required Billing to attributes when closing folios. The settings apply to each type of document. You can specify for each type which Company or Guest fields are required. You can access this setting on the new setup screen for documents: Settings->All Settings (new)->Documents->Document Type(s).
- A new booking always from the Rate and Availability screen. We have made a small change, so that the new booking link opens the Rate and Availability screen instead of an empty new booking screen. If you prefer this mode of work, you can set it for all employees at the hotel using the new setting ”New Booking - go through Rate and Availability screen”. You can access it from Settings->All Settings (new)->Hotel->User Interface. After saving it, do not forget to save the screen again.
- Payment Autopilot - the value determined based on the number of nights up till now depended on the average price per night. Now it can also be determined based on the actual prices for selected X nights. It depends on the new "Average Price" setting. Such a mode of work and setup is similar to one for determining the deposit amount.
- Inventory Items Report- it now filters the results by the revenue date of the charge. Up till now, it worked based on the closing date of the folio containing the charges.
- Folios (new version) - for your convenience, we have added the 'OTA' label and the expiry dates of the credit cards used for payments/pre-authorisations to the new folio screens.
- The change of the master user is now also accessible through the new user settings screen.
- RoomCloud - we have added an option to map extra services by 'supplement ID'. In case, there is no match between the received from the partner and any of the IDs entered in the mapping, a search by text is performed as before.
- Extra services screen in the booking has been redesigned.
Fixes
- The preview of the transferred POS bills through the PMS folio no longer requires access to the POS account, from which the transfer is made
- POS - Hourly Sales Report - includes the charges arising from Split or Remove/Subtract taxes from prices
- Events - BEO - in the Other section, the advance charges were visualised
- Adyen - part of the terminal transactions remained with a pending status and an 'Initialised: IDLE' message.
- SixPayments - a fixed bug that didn't allow refunds of payments made through iDeal
- Folios (new) - if field for the the CSV code of the credit card was hidden, the transaction (payment) was not possible
- RoomCloud - extra services with a long description generated errors during booking import
Integrations
- [API] - The POST request to block_rooms endpoints are more flexible now allowing multiple "date" elements in the payload.
- [API] - You can now archive companies via the API. For more details, please check the API documentation.
- [API] - Endpoint booking_find_in_hotel now supports bookings without an assigned room type or room.
- A new user right for accessing the AppConnector has been added. The users with access to AppConnector may enable / disable integrations which is authorising 3rd parties to access your data as well as may affect your monthly fee. To have a better control over that you can decide which users should do it.
- The bookings information now contains RateName instead of RatePlanName as IDeaS finds RateName as more useful..
- The data collect mechanism from Gastronovi was optimised and now data for longer periods may be collected without problems which is very helpful in case of new activations when you want to have some historical data or when you reactivate the connection.
Localisations
- The virtual rooms are excluded from the AJPES monthly report as they were not properly accepted.
- Swedish Central Bureau of Statistics Report - When a rate tag is selected for the report, the information is filtered in all columns where the filtering is applicable.