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Hotel

TourCMS works for hotels just was well as for tours and activities.

The "hotel" functionality can be used as a hotel PMS (property management system), a multi-hotel travel agency system or for other products. Examples of other products could be diving boats, yacht charter etc. Alternatively the hotel product types can be used to better "accommodation" configuration within itinerary based tours.



The difference between a room and a rate
A room has fixed availability. Once it is booked, it is booked (TourCMS won't allow overbooking).
A rate is a mechanism to control pricing without having to be concerned with availability control.
Generally travel agents will load rates - and suppliers will load rooms.

The difference between setting up to count days or nights
Between "today" and "tomorrow" there are 2 days - but just 1 night. Generally for overnight accommodation you would setup a hotel to count nights.

What is "same as"?
If you have 5 double rooms you may not want to show each room on your availability screen. (If you do, don't set same as!). The same as switch enables you to say which rooms are interchangeable. Only one room will show on the availability screen - and once that is booked, the next one in turn will be booked (until none remain). Note that with same as you still need to configure prices and occupancy on a room by room basis (although you can copy existing rooms)
You can configure "same as" for rates - but it is less useful.

Allocating individuals to rooms
Within the booking edit screen you can allocate individual customers to take individual rooms. This enables complex rooming lists to be created.

Multi-hotel bookings
Staff can make complex multi-hotel (or multi-room, single hotel) bookings within the staff booking system. The online booking process only supports making a sole hotel room at a time (at the moment).

Multi-room bookings
There is a switch to permit multi-room bookings in the online booking engine. Go to Channel Manager and the step 1 configuration page.

Infants
On the tour/hotel setup (for an individual property) you can select upto 3 free infants in a single room (or on a rate). An infant dropdown will show on the online booking engine. Infants count as children (for room occupancy setup) but are removed from the children count for pricing purposes. You can set text to describe the infant (and child) age per property. This text appears next to the children / infants number selection in the online booking engine.

Whole chalet rooms
The hotel functionality can also be used where, for example, a ski chalet has 5 rooms. Sometimes it can be booked out entirely (at a certain price) and at other times individual room bookings are accepted. On tour setup configure which room is the full chalet toom. Also set max size of booking (maximum 50 adults, 30 children). Normal room occupancy setup does not apply to these rooms.

Price rules
There are three main price rules. Depending upon the price rule configured (on tour/hotel setup) you would load as follows:

   Per Room OR 1st Adult, 2nd Adult ...etc (Default)

     1st Adult  100 GBP
     2nd Adult   50 GBP
     -----------------
     2   Adults = 100 + 50 = 150 GBP

   Total price (1 adult, 2 adults ...etc)

     1   Adult   100 GBP
     2   Adults  150 GBP
     -----------------
     2   Adults = 150 GBP

   Per person pricing

     1   Adult   100 GBP
     2   Adults   75 GBP
     -----------------
     2   Adults = 2 x 75 = 150 GBP

   Mixed: 1-2 adults per person then 3rd adult, 4th adult as supplements

     1   Adult   100 GBP
     2   Adults   75 GBP
     3rd Adult    50 GBP
     -----------------
     2   Adults = 2 x 75 = 150 GBP
     3   Adults = 2 x 75 plus 50 = 200 GBP

Single occupancy
You can configure a price for when a rate/room has single occupancy. This means either just 1 adult or just 1 child. Useful where you want to load a different 1 adult price (by themselves) vs the 1 adult price within a 1 adult / 1 child occupancy combination.

If not set the price will be taken from the 1 adult or 1 child price (i.e. if you leave the single occupancy price set to zero but 1 adult has a price, the 1 adult price will be used not the zero price).

No arrivals
This will leave a date as being bookable but you can't arrive on this date. Ideal if you are selling products that have a fixed season (e.g. a ski season) and the last day of the season people need to be able to leave (so you have to have the date onsale) but you don't want it to be look like it might be bookable (it won't be bookable, just it might look like it from a glance).

Show multiple durations
On step 1 of the online booking engine you can show multiple durations. e.g. if the user selects 2 nights you can show 2 nights, 3 nights, 4 nights etc. This is useful if you are using TourCMS for fixed date type products (e.g. campsite pitches with restricted start and end days of the week) and the user is unaware that by adjusting by one or two nights different products may show.

Managing individual rooms or managing a group of rooms using a rate
IF you are using rooms to control availability by default you will manage each room individually. i.e. the prices, availability, no arrivals etc will be controlled on each room. This can be exactly what you want. There are situations (e.g. if you are a campsite with 20 equal pitches) where managing individual rooms requires too much work - for example to do a price change will require editing the price on 20 rooms. Instead you can use rates to control pricing and the rooms to control availability. The switch for this is on tour/hotel setup - hotel tab. When configured in this way the rooms will no longer show on your online booking engine - only rates. To change the price for the 20 rooms you just need to edit 1 rate. When a booking is made, the customer is automatically assigned into a room. When there are no rooms remaining, the rate is offsale. This capability is also useful for where you have multiple rates all using the same accommodation capacity.

Using the hotel functionality for other travel products
Within Configuration & Setup you can change the word "hotel" to something else. Then, within TourCMS, there will be fewer mentions of the word "hotel". The hotel functionality is ideal when you want advanced per person pricing control and replaces the need for complex price tables using options.

Use the tour pricing rule to price a product based on the first night (day) for the entire "stay" (ideal for occupancy based tours). (i.e. not duration based pricing)

You can also remove the Children dropdown from the online booking engine (so that only adult rates are bookable)



See also

• Villa, cottage and chalet setup guide
• Hotel example: Pre-pitched tent sites / glamping
• Hotel example: Overnight / multi-day cruises