Introduction
Generally speaking, cruise type products should be configured using regular tours with Departure or Freesale season style dates & prices, however sometimes it can be necessary to book small boat/ship cruise customers directly into specific cabins (rooms) much the same as a small hotel, the following guide covers this special case and how TourCMS Hotel functionality can be used.
If you do not need to book customers into a specific cabin, and instead only need to book general spaces or cabin classes; stop reading this article now and instead load like any other tour.
Please note TourCMS Hotel type pricing is no longer developed and is switched off by default. It can, however, be switched back on via "Configuration & Setup".
This example walks through the creation of a single tour on a ship with a selection of cabins that lasts for 15 days.
Loading cabin pricing and availability
Our fictional small boat has 5 double cabins and 5 twins, we will load each of these cabins separately and use the "Same as" attribute so that our customers will just see the choice of "Twin cabin" or "Double cabin" when booking. The quickest to do this is to create one Double and one Twin cabin fully, including loading our prices and then use the "Copy setup from" box to create our additional rooms.
So head into Dates & Prices and create a room, here called "Double cabin". We create it as a Room as we want to control the allocation of cabins on our boat if we were instead selling some cabins "freesale" from a larger cruise run by someone else we would instead create two Rates (one for each cabin type).
Check the Setup page for the room to make sure the number of adults/children plus the board basis choices are correct. It's also a good idea to give the room an Internal note, usually, the actual room/cabin number is a good identifier. Click Update rate setup and you should be back at the main Dates & Prices page that lists our rooms.
Now to load some prices. Click on the year (e.g. 2021) to be presented with a grid showing the (currently empty) availability for the year. In this example we are running this cruise for a fortnight in August, so we click the "Edit rates by date band" link at the top and then enter the date range and price.
Here we have just loaded a price against the first adult, this effectively gives us a per cabin price. Alternatively, we could load a price for each person, or load a price on the first adult and then use a single person supplement Option for single travelers. Create a "Twin cabin" in exactly the same way
The remaining cabins can be created using the Copy setup from box, this cuts down on loading as the only thing that needs to be manually entered then is the Internal note. Creating the rooms in this manner also sets the Same as attribute, this means that the customer will only see a choice of "Double cabin" or "Twin cabin" when booking while staff users can see actual room allocations.