This style of products can have flexible dates (with control over arrival/changeover days). Use for villas, cottages, ski chalets, apartments, yacht charter, hunting lodges, etc...
Overview
Generally, it is good practice to load each villa/chalet as a Hotel, each room as a Room, loading either nightly or set duration based prices (e.g. weekly). The ability to load a rate for the entire property is provided by the special Whole chalet room type.
“Whole chalet” rooms
Each hotel (villa/chalet/etc) can have one of its rooms designated as the Whole chalet room, this special room type will only be offered to customers for dates where no other rooms have been booked and once the whole chalet room has been booked for a particular date, all other rooms will be taken off sale. Additionally, while regular individual rooms are limited to 10 adults/children there is a much higher limit on this special room.
As each room is loaded separately it is possible to take individual rooms or whole chalet rooms on/off sale for particular periods, to help control availability.
Loading
Creating the Hotel (chalet/villa/etc)
- Head to Tours/Hotels and create a new Tour using Hotel. The name should be the unique name for your villa/chalet.
- Click Setup for the newly created chalet
- Under the General tab change status to Public if it should be bookable online
- Under the Hotel tab set the Price rule to [A] Add each day/night (Conventional hotel), check the Minimum notice, Minimum/Maximum/Default duration and if you only allow arrivals/departures on particular days make sure only they are ticked in the Days of the week section.
- Click the Save changes button
Creating the Rooms
It's generally best to start with your largest rooms, you can then use Copy setup from when you load subsequent rooms and just adjust the number of people allowed, all of the prices, etc will be copied over. If you don't allow individual room bookings you can just create a single room called the Whole chalet
To load a room:
- Head into Dates and prices for the newly created chalet
- Create a new room, giving it a name that would be meaningful to a customer (e.g. "Double with WC & Shower"). For the first room on a particular property leave Copy setup from set to [No copy]. For subsequent rooms, you can pick a room to copy from, this copies over settings and prices to speed up the process. Room or Rate should be set to Room (No overbooking)
3. Click Setup for the room and check the Room occupancy, Board basis and optionally Internal note settings. The internal note could be used to store the room number. If you have multiple rooms of the same type (i.e. you have 3x "Double Room with WC") you can use Same as to indicate this, that way the customer will only see one of each type listed. Click Update rate setup.
4. Click on a year (e.g. 2022) to load some dates and prices
If you are loading nightly prices:
- Click Edit rates by date band and enter prices for each different price band you have. If you have a per-room price simply load this price against the 1st Adult, otherwise load against each person.
If you are loading weekly (or other similar) prices:
- Click Edit on / offsale by date band and enter the date range for your full season, click Update sale status
- Click on every start date and load the weekly price there, if you have configured specific start dates you will notice they are highlighted in green. If you have a per-room price simply load this price against the 1st Adult, otherwise load against each person.
Repeat steps 1 to 4 for each of your Rooms.