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 improve the "accommodation" configuration within itinerary based tours (Go to Descriptions and Images > Key information > Tour Type)
Configure prices with a single year view by clicking on a year within Dates and Prices
Edit by individual date - or by date band
Configure which board bases are applicable to the rate and the room/rate occupancy (Dates and prices > Set up)
The booking process (for staff) shows multiple hotel availability on a single screen
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 set up 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 set up (for an individual property), you can select up to 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:
If you have a really complex room pricing setup, trying using the Total price rule. It will require you to do the maths (rather than perhaps load in just like the hotel contract you have in front of you) but at least it will work.
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 on sale) but you don't want it to 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 in 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 to a room. When there are no rooms remaining, the rate is off sale. 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)