Functional capabilities
The Room calendar has been revamped with a focus on customisation and convenience in daily operations. New features give more control over the view, information and management of bookings, making navigation easier, operations faster and guest service better.
To load the new version of the calendar, from the navigation menu select Availability ->Room Calendar->NEW.
Colour customisation
You now have the option to change the booking colours to suit your preferences. We have classified bookings into new groups, and you can specify a colour for each group. By default the colours are similar to the old calendar, but the new calendar offers more categories:
Expected / Guaranteed
Expected / Non-Guaranteed
Expected / Awaiting Guarantee
Expected / Expired Guarantee
Checked-In / Individual
Checked-In / Companies or Agents
Departures / Paid
Departures / Not paid
Checked-Out / Paid
Checked-Out / Not paid
For each category you can choose a colour. Save your changes to apply. Note that changing colours affects all users in the account - the colours are the same for the entire account.
View Customisation
You can change any of the 14 calendar parameters (filters, grouping, sorting, sections) and save the view as the default view. The view will only be saved for your device. This makes it much easier to customise the calendar to suit your specific needs - for example, to see only a specific floor, location or cleaning sector, to see or hide bookings without room allocations, to see or hide the events section, the occupancy section and more.
To customise the view, select the filter icon and change the parameters. The calendar instantly displays the new view. When you're done, save the parameters as defaults with the button below.
Many new filters
We've added new filters that let you filter rooms by different parameters:
Quickly filter by room number in the top left corner of the calendar;
Room types - one or several;
Room features - one or several;
Floor;
Housekeeping sector;
Location - one or several;
Dirty/Clean Rooms;
Calendar filtering happens instantly after you select the filter. To open the filters screen, select the button from the navigation bar.
We've also added a button to quickly remove filters. If you don't have a saved view, the filters will be reset. If you have saved the view, this button will return the filters to the original, saved state.
Grouping and sorting
The old calendar had three options - no grouping, grouping by room type, and grouping by location. The new view can group by these parameters and more: by cleaning sector and by floor. Additionally, we have added the ability to select the sorting of the rooms on the list. You can choose whether it should be in ascending or descending order (1) and sort by the set room sort order, room name, room type, floor or housekeeping sector. By combining the two settings, grouping and sorting, you can get the most convenient view for your needs. When grouping, we have also added the possibility of group collapsing/expanding (2). This way you can quickly focus on one group or another. There are also changes in grouping by room type. When a view is grouped by room type, for each room type unallocated bookings for that type are displayed. Also, the section with the amount of availability and the occupancy percentage is visible for the room type itself in addition to the hotel.
Showing bookings WITHOUT room
Larger hotels very often do not assign room numbers to bookings in advance. In the old calendar we showed the number of unallocated rooms for each day. In the new one, in addition to this amount, we have added a section with the bookings themselves. You can say that all unallocated bookings are visible in one "unallocated" room. This gives you a much better visual orientation that covers all bookings. It's also much easier to allocate bookings without a room, and also to edit them - that is, everything you can do with bookings with a room, you can now do with bookings without a room from the calendar itself. On the other hand, if you don't care about bookings without room, you can take advantage of the view customisation options and hide them.
Room feature icons and quick visualisation of room information
When you hover over the room name, you'll get a detailed description of the room itself, and we've added icons next to the name for a quick preview of room features. Additionally, if you fill in a filter for a given feature, in addition to filtering the rooms with that feature, the icon will be coloured.
To set up the icons, open the room feature settings. There is a new "Icon" field in the feature editor (Settings > Rooms > Room Features). There you can fill in the name of the icon from Google Fonts - "Material Icons":
- Click the button with the link (3) to open the icon list.
- Find the icon you want, click on it and copy "Icon name".
- Paste the name into the box and save. Here are some examples of icon names: "balcony", "bathtub", "shower", "desk", "smoke_free", "smoking_rooms", "single_bed", "king_bed", "crib", "kitchen", "countertops", "water", "park", "location_city", "stairs", "elevator", "chair".
The whole list of icons can be found here: https://fonts.google.com/icons?icon.set=Material+Icons&icon.style=Filled. Use the search to find ideas for icons. The "Places", "Search", "Home" and "Maps" groups have the most icons, but if you don't find an icon there, search the other groups.
Housekeeping status is updated in real time and can provide notifications
The housekeeping status, which is visible in front of the room name, is now updated automatically and in real time. This means that if a housekeeper or anyone else marks the room for cleaning in the Housekeeper app or from elsewhere, then the status in the screen will change instantly. Even more interesting is the new option to receive notifications. For example, if guests are in the lobby waiting for the room to be cleaned, then you can mark that you would like to receive a notification when the room is cleaned.
Click the second icon from left to right for notifications (4).
A notification icon will appear next to the name of the dirty rooms.
Click the room name (5). Done. When the room is cleaned, you will see a notification in the bottom right corner of the calendar. This feature will serve your guests even better.
New method of room allocation and change
In the old calendar, moving a room was done through drag and drop. However, this method is inconvenient if you have a lot of rooms, and implies more errors. The new method is as follows:
Enter the Assign room mode via the rightmost button in the navigation (6). The button indicates that the mode is on.
Click a booking without a room (7) or one in a room you wish to assign/change.
Alternatively to the above two, you can select the booking first and select " assign Room" from the drop-down menu.
Grey boxes will appear on the calendar for each room, which are "projections" of the selected booking.
Select the room/projection where you wish to move the booking to.
Proceed with allocating/moving other bookings if you wish.
When finished, turn off the "Assign room mode" using the rightmost button (6) in the navigation.
What are the advantages of this method?
Moving is much more precise and fewer mistakes are made. A prompt shows the name of the room you will move the booking to.
You can work with a much larger list of rooms because you can scroll through the calendar until you find the room.
The grey box, which is a "projection" of the booking, allows you to see much more clearly whether the room is occupied, as well as how many days before and after it remains available.
You can use the filters on the calendar to see only the rooms you are interested in.
Use the dedicated "Focus" button (8) to the left of the "Assign room mode" button. It will quickly apply filters for the room type as well as for the room features, if any in the booking. This will make the room assignment process much easier.
Already when you select the booking, you will receive a message (9) if it has selected features, so as to remind you what you need to comply with.
If the booking has been moved, you can change the room for these movings too.
Room sharing. The old calendar didn't allow a room change if the new room wasn't available. To do the sharing, you had to open the booking itself. We changed that. Now, if the new room is occupied, you will get a warning. You can cancel the operation or confirm it, at which point the bookings will go into sharing mode.
Another convenience. Shared bookings and bookings without a room overlap each other by default to save space. To make it easier to select them, we've added a new button (third from the left) that can be used to toggle Compact View mode. When the mode is off, bookings are not overlapped and are easier to select.
What are the disadvantages?
Compared to the old calendar, you can no longer change the period by dragging. Instead, we have added a quick edit to the booking period to compensate for this change.
Quick booking change
We've added the ability to quickly change the time period, early arrival, late departure, and lock or unlock the room change in the booking. When the Assign room mode is not enabled, select the booking and select "Fast booking update" from the drop-down menu.
Room moving management
From the new calendar you can efficiently perform all the operations related to the change of the room of the booking.
To add a room change. Select the booking and from the drop-down menu select "add Room change". Select the date and the booking will be split.
Select the part with the moving and move it to the desired room as described above.
You can delete the moving. Select the part with the moving and from the drop-down menu select "delete Room change".
Early arrivals and late departures
To better manage early arrivals and late departures, we have made two important changes:
Bookings clearly show early arrivals and late departures, taking up the whole day of arrival and/or departure. This makes it easy to see that the room is not available for these dates.
When assigning or moving, if the new room is occupied by an early arrival or late departure, you will receive a message that the room is occupied. You can choose whether to look for a new room or do the operation despite the message.
More improvements
We improved the performance of the calendar almost twofold.
For each room, you can see all the related information, including descriptions - just hover over it.
Booking also has quick information that is much more complete and better organised than the old calendar.
7, 14 and 31-day view. Depending on the view, the width of the columns changes and you can see more information.
Double-clicking on a booking will open it directly, and single-clicking will open a drop-down menu of features.
Colouring the days is now extremely easy. Simply click on the date and choose a colour and, if you wish, a short text. And if you already have a colour set - you can just as easily remove it.
As before, there is a separate section for events. In the new calendar, however, they are displayed so that they take up much less vertical space. There's also quick information about them when you hover over an event.
We have improved the mobile view of the calendar. It will now be more convenient to use on a tablet or mobile phone.
Managing cleaning tasks, blocked rooms and creating a new booking is similar to the old calendar.