Company

Discoveroom Joins Forces with Webhotelier/Primalres: What This Means for Our Clients

We are excited to announce that Discoveroom has officially been acquired by Webhotelier/Primalres, a long time trusted partner, a move that opens new possibilities for our valued clients. This acquisition ensures continued innovation and access to top-tier technology solutions within the hospitality sector. We understand that this transition brings changes, and we are committed to making it as smooth as possible for everyone involved.

A Migration Path for All Clients

As part of this transition, all Discoveroom clients will be offered a migration path to the products and services provided by Webhotelier/Primalres. Our aim is to ensure that you can continue to manage your bookings, channels, and operations efficiently while benefiting from the enhanced functionality of the acquirer’s products.

Here’s what you need to know about the migration:

Replacement Products for Current Services

  • For clients using the Octorate Channel Manager: The replacement product will be Primalres.
  • For clients using our Booking Engine (Webookings): The replacement product will be Webhotelier.
  • For clients using a Property Management System (PMS): The replacement product will be Hotelizer.

If You Are Already Connected to Primalres or Webhotelier

For clients who are already connected to Primalres and Webhotelier, as well as for those who do not require those services, only Hotelizer will be needed to manage your property efficiently.

Subscription and Billing Details

We recognize the importance of honoring your current subscription agreements. As such:

  • Annual subscriptions will be honored until their expiration dates. Once they expire, they will not be renewed under Discoveroom’s terms.
  • Monthly subscriptions will continue to be renewed until May 2025. After this date, the migration process will be complete, and all subscriptions will be managed by the acquirer.

Reservation and Client Base Migration

To ensure a seamless transition, we will be migrating your existing reservations and client base to the new systems. This means you will not lose any crucial data, and you can continue to serve your guests without disruption.

New Offers and Subscription Models

As Webhotelier/Primalres operates with a different billing and subscription model, all clients will receive updated offers tailored to their needs. These offers will reflect the enhanced capabilities of the new products and ensure that you get the best value for your business. Your acceptance of the offers will signify the beginning of the transition to the new products and environment.

Next Steps

Over the coming weeks, you will receive guidance on how the migration process will work and what actions, if any, you need to take. We will be available to assist you every step of the way to ensure a smooth transition.

We are confident that this new chapter will bring enhanced tools and opportunities for your business. Thank you for trusting Discoveroom. We look forward to continuing this journey together under the Webhotelier/Primalres umbrella.

Stay tuned for updates, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or concerns.

Channel Managers, featured

New Channel Manager: Syncbnb

We are happy to announce that we have concluded a connection with Syncbnb, a channel manager that specializes in Vacation Rentals.

Syncbnb supports two-way, near real-time connectivity with more than 200+ vacation rental channels and is the only channel manager in the world to offer Zero Double Booking Guarantee.

 

SyncBnb

 

Supported functions

Vacation Rentals have different and, sometimes, simpler needs, than bnb’s and hotels. And Syncbnb is well positioned to cater exactly these needs.

Syncbnb rentals are mapped to Discoveroom rooms.

Because of the nature of rentals, moving clients from one rental to other is not a requirement, so for reservations originating in Syncbnb, the “Change room” functionality in Discoveroom, is disabled. However, for reservations entered in Discoveroom originally, it is still working.

Onboarding Syncbnb rentals, for the time being, requires an one-off effort on our side to import all existing reservations. This will be automated in the near future.

Reservations entered in Discoveroom are sent instantly to Syncbnb. 

Reservations originating from Syncbnb or connected channels, are transfered to Discoveroom within 5 minutes. 

 

Requirements

To connect with Syncbnb, an active “Plus” subscription plan on the Discoveroom side is required, plus an active subscription on the Syncbnb side.

 

Promo

From now till the end of the year, we are running a promo for the existing Syncbnb clients: By using one of the following coupons

SyncBnb2020Μ

SyncBnb2020Υ

you can purchase a Plus subscription  (monthly, or yearly, respectively) at 50% discount for the first year, provided you are not an existing client in Discoveroom, or that you have never used a Plus, Pro or Premium plan before.

Also, for the Discoveroom clients that would like to use Syncbnb, by using the coupon

DISCOVEROOM50

you can buy a subscription with 50% discount for the first three months.

Products

New functionality: eRegistrations

As a response to the COVID-19 crisis but also because we see it  as the way to the future, we we have added eRegistration functionality, for your guests.

With eRegistration, physical contact is minimized and, therefore, safety increases. Also, a part of the work that was performed from the hotel staff, now is performed (and, presumably, checked) by the guests themselves.

How it works

To put eRegistrations in place you need to take the following steps:

1. Create an Email Template with the new tag #LinkToRegistration#. This tag, will create a unique url for the guest, to enter his registration details. Plus, in the same form, he can give his/her consent to a newsletter subscription and/or various emailed offers.

 

2. From the reservation, we send an email to the client using the template created in step 1.

 

3. The client sees and updates his details. He can do it as many times as he wants till the day of Checkin and provided, his eRegistrations has not been approved yet (see below).

Make sure you have uploaded a logo image  to discoveroom, otherwise the client will see the Discoveroom logo in the registration form.

 

4. The hotel staff sees the registration details, and, if they are ok, approves the registration.

By clicking of the client name, one can see the details entered.

If they are ok, he can approve the registration by checking the relevant checkbox

This is not equivalent to performing a checkin, as the registration is only the updating of the client information. Also, the actual checkin can be performed at a later date.

If he wants to change something, or checkin the client, he can use the shortcut to the reservation provided.

 

5. Once the eRegistration is approved, the unique url provided to the client, stops to work.

Also, if the client does not perform an eRegistration, and checks-in the normal way, the eRegistration link is invalided the day after the checkin.

Last, but not least, the calendar has now a visual indicator for all the eRegistrations pending approval. If the eRegistration has not been activated (by sending a guest an email with an eRegistration link), or if there is no pending eRegistration,  the indicator  will show no number. Otherwise, it will show the number of all the outstanding eRegistrations.

 

 

Developing eRegistrations has been a hasty undertaking. We plan to enhance the functionality, based on various ideas we have, as well as your feedback. But we, nevertheless, feel that you will find eRegistrations a valuable function.

Products

New Reservation Field: Paid amount

Amidst the coronavirus crisis, we dare to not stop our efforts to impove our offering. With this mindset, we released today a new version of our apps (web and mobile) with a small but important change: we have added an extra field in the reservation form, to track the client payments.

This is a pretext of a much bigger change which is underway: a full client payments management module, that will be released in due time.

For now, with the new field, you can track payments separately from the advances. The field for the advances it was kind of confusing one. It was meant to track both the advance agreed and the advance (or any other amount) paid.

From now on, this will be a lot clearer: the advance field will be used only for the Advance agreed. All payments should go to the Paid field, as per the image below.

 

Mobile apps for both iOs and Android have been updated to reflect this change.

On top, for the iOs app, there is one more cosmetic change: we have moved the green button that used to be in the bottom right of the Home screen, up to the top bar of the same screen, on the left of the magnifying glass icon.  In its place, we  brought the chat button, which, from now on, will also be present in all screens. The change is meant to facilitate the users that have questions, to send them to us, without having to leave the screen they are currently working.

The change will be applied to the Android apps too, at a later time.

Stay tuned for the bigger changes but, most importantly, stay safe.

 

Products

No Show, Split Reservations, Export Bills in Excel and other enhancements

Happy new year everyone! We want to kick off  this year releasing a number of enhancements and changes that were in our backlog for a long time.

No Show

We have added a way to mark a reservation as a No Show. This applies to both reservations received from external sources (channels, booking engine) and to those entered manually.

The purpose of the action is not just to free the calendar and change the availability, but also to mark and store the relevant reservation in a way that will be helpful for reporting and billing purposes. You can find the action at the reservation menu:

 

No Show in Reservation Menu

Constraints:

  • The date of the action must not be prior to the checkin date and the state of the reservation must be Active (green color).
  • The action has to be performed on the Channel Managers separately, as their Api does not support it.

 

Split Reservations

Having to accommodate a guest in different rooms, during his stay, is a common problem that can arise either from availability issues, or customer wishes/complaints. So far, we did not provide a mechanism to allow splitting a reservation in multiple part. This enchancement comes to remedy the situation.

Now, you can split a reservation in as many parts as the number of dates of the reservation. You can handle each part separately (i.e. perform a room change) and you can bill the client either for each part separately or for the whole stay in one shot.

Splitting reservations is a tricky thing, especially when they originate from a channel. Why? Because if the channel sends an update, then the system is unable to determine a new split automatically. It will cancel all the old reservation parts instead, and attempt to create a single new reservation in one room.

To avoid such an unpleasant situation, refrain from splitting reservations many days before the guest’s arrival.

Reservations you enter manually carry no such risks.

To perform a split, you must first change the calendar to Split mode. There is a new scissors icon on the top right that toggles the Split mode.

Calendar tools

Once in Split mode, the cursor changes to a scissor icon whenever over a reservation day that is suitable for a split. Checkin and checkout dates are not suitable for split.

Calendar Split Mode

After the first split, two new reservations appear: one with the old Reference number and a new one with the same reference number suffixed with “-1”. If  we keep splitting a reservation, the suffix increments accordingly: “-2”, “-3” etc.

Reservation part

The amount of each part is calculated proportionally to the ratio of the number of nights of the part to the total number of nights of the original reservation. Same goes for the advance. This will change in the future and, instead, the proper daily rates for the calculation of the amount of the part will be used. Of course, you can change manually the amounts of the part to whatever you like.

If there are extras, all remain under the original reservation.  But you can add new extras to the parts.

Upon billing, you are promted to choose between billing for the whole or just the part. If you chose the whole, all parts are shown in one bill. If you chose the part, then you have to repeat the process for each part and issue separate bills for each one.

Bill single or all parts?

You cannot undo a Split action. If it is a manual reservation, you can cancel everything and start afresh. If it is a channel reservation, you’ll have to force an update from the channel manager, to force the cancellation of the created parts.

This change goes deep to the core of our system and affects various modules. We expect that there will be more iterations on its implementation, based on your suggestions.

Calendar Enchancements

We have enchanced the tooltip of the reservations so that it is more readable and visually pleasant, and we have added localised tooltips to the icons on the top right of the calendar.

New Reservation Tooltip

Also, when you use the room type filter and then press refresh, that calendar remains in filtered mode. The refresh does not reset it. You have to do it manually now.

 

Bill States

We have now given you the option to revert from an issued/paid bill back to draft. While this is controvesial, we have observed mistakes occur rather frequently where the editing of issued/paid bills is required.

Reverting to draft

Reverting back to draft will retain the bill number. However, if you delete the draft,  if the number is not the last one for the concerned  bill type, it will be lost. Re-issuing will give you a new number which will be the same as the old one, only in the case where the deleted number was the last one generated. Otherwise, a gap in the numbering will arise.

 

Exporting Bill to Excel

We have replaced the old printer icon that printed the page from the bills list. In its place, there is a button now, with the Excel sign, labeled “Export”. You can now export the same lists as before but in excel, instead of pdf for printing.

Export to Excel

Excel is more convenient to communicate data lists, as it allows one to modify them, if they want: change column sorting, arrangement, deleting or adding rows etc.

 

Mobile Apps

The mobile apps have been updated to support the No Show action but not the Split Reservations. The latter is too complicated and until we have gathered feedback and user suggestions, it was deemed not worthwhile implementing.

Products

Enhancements for reservations

2 Comments

We have added four new fields to the reservations:

  • Breakfast: To mark a reservation as including breakfast.
  • Non Refundable: To mark a reservation as non-refundable.
  • Pegged: To prohibit a reservation to be moved from the selected room.
  • ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival): to add manually the expected time a client has stated he will arrive.

The first three fields are in the form of mini on-off switches, while the fourth is a drop down with all half hours of the day. This does not constrain you from entering something more specific, like 11:10. The system will accept your input.

Some might wonder why do we need the breakfast and non-refundable fields while this piece of information is already present in the rate plans of the channels.

The answer is complicated: The information of the rate plan, as it comes from the channel manager, can be in the form of comments that the system has difficulty recognising, or, can be  not present at all.

Whenever this information is present in the channel reservation in a structured way, we will automatically update these two fields in Discoveroom too.

The breakfast field is also used to produce a daily breakfast report for planning or control purposes. Which means that to get an accurate breakfast report, the information on the reservations need  to be specific and accurate.

Breakfast in extras cannot be automatically recognised as it can take any form and description the user likes,  and the system has no means of distinguishing which is which. This means that if you add a breakfast extra to a reservation, you also need to turn the breakfast switch on, to get a proper breakfast report.

The “Pegged” field is for convenience and collaboration. Most hotels have repeaters that know the property and ask for a specific room. This field can be used to make sure that the client will get the room he desires and that no other user of the system can move him elsewhere.

The ETA field is used to produce an arrivals report, along with any notes that you might have entered in the reservation.

All the above information is also available to the reservation tooltip.

Editing Channel Reservations

Also, we have made a change that many have asked for: We will allow you to edit the dates of Channel Reservations, which means you will be able to extend them and truncate them. But this comes with a risk: if, for any reason, the reservation is changed by the channel, all your  edits will be lost. Since, extend or truncate take place at, or after, arrival time the risk is small.

Using Breakfast in Invoices.

We have added a preset product, called breakfast. If you want to automatically split the value of a reservation to Stay and Breakfast, you can set this product to the percentage you like. If the system traces such a setting, it will automatically allocate this percentage of the reservation to breakfast.

 

 

Products

Changes and new functionality for the web app.

We have published a new version of the web app which brings a lot of new things and changes.

  • Interface changes

    • Collapsible main menu: The main menu, with the addition of new features over time, has grown considerably. Making the menu collapsible allows to close the rarely used section and keep open the ones employed daily.

    • Active menu item highlighting: we have simplified the highlighting of the active menu to just one colour to avoid confusion.

  • Usability Enhancements

    • Quick state change for bills: changing bill state is just one click now and the number of states have been reduced. We have removed the Partially Paid and Overdue States. Also, we now allow you to void a Paid bill.
    • Filtering bills by Organisation: Now you can filter by guest and organisation at any combination.
    • Visibility of WebBookings: a new checkbox has been introduced in the room type forms to make a room type visible on booking engine and web site builder.
    • Editable reply-to for emails: You can now change the email address that a client reply to your emails, at the time of editing an email.
    • Editable recipient field for emails: You can also change the recipients email, at the time of editing an email.

  • New Functionality

    • Documents: We have introduced a new functionality for the creation of reservation based documents (like Offers and Proforma-Invoices, Vouchers and Registration Forms). It looks pretty much like the billing functionality, only simpler.
    • Email Tags for linking bills & documents: We have introduced a new tag for inserting links to bills and documents in  emails.
    • Billing Accommodation tax: This is applicable only to those countries that have the obligation to charge guest with an accommodation tax in a separate document, like Greece. To enable it you need to edit the bill type and change the Type field to Tax.

  • Bugs

    • Drag ‘n Drop temporary disabling: Drag ‘n Drop was very buggy and it slowed down the performance of the calendar. We have disabled it until we find a better solution.
    • Time of reservation history: The reservation history was displaying the event time in UTC. It is now shown in local time.
Products

New functionality: emailing guests

First new feature of 2019!

We have improved the guest emailing functionality with a customisable and more sophisticated solution.

Now, you can define email templates that incorporate reservation information with the use of special tags.  You can use different templates for different languages or combine various languages in one.  This way, you can create templates for offers, vouchers or welcome emails with special directions.

 

Email templates list

 

Creating an email template

 

The templates then become available for you to use when you want to send an email to a guest. A new menu item has been added to the reservation menu, that allows you to send an email related to this particular reservation.

Email Guest

 

 

Selecting template

 

You can further edit the email text, if you wish, or you can keep the text generated from the template.

 

Creating email

 

You can opt to just create the email and send it a later time (use the Save Button), or send it immediately.

All emails sent are archived and you can query them, view them or even delete them if you wish.

 

Email list

 

The emails are send from the Discoveroom email server and address. At a later stage we will allow you to send emails from your email servers. The reason we haven’t done it from the beginning is because this requires a rather very technical change on your domain name setup, which, based on our experience, is prohibitive for most common users.

All the above are available in the web app and for all subscription plans. 

 

Uncategorized

Changes in Channel Functionality

In order to improve and streamline the performance of the Channel functionality we have made the following changes:

 

Email Notifications:

In cases where a channel reservation cannot be imported in Discoveroom (for reasons explained in this post), a notification was sent to the property owners. From now on, this email notification will include a link that, when clicked, will allow you to request  the reservation from the channel to be re-imported to Discoveroom. You should click the link once you have determined what was the room cause of the failure and you have taken actions to correct it. If you cannot determine the failure reason, please contact us.

 

Octorate connection:

The way we worked with Octorate so far, was to retrieve from their Channel Manager all reservation from the Channels and send back all reservations that were entered in Discoveroom. This mode of operation relied on Octorate to calculate the correct availability. As of now, we will change this and we will send back the availability as it is in Discoveroom. We will not send reservation anymore, just availability. We are doing this to avoid differences in the availability calculations that might arise from room changes or other kind of updates.

Products

How channels work

This is a long overdue post, explaining how Discoveroom connects to various channels and the things one needs to pay attention to. So let’s better take this from the beginning.

What is a Channel?

Quite simply, a channel is where reservations are coming from. A travel agent is a channel, our telephone is a channel, a site like booking.com is a channel, the hotel’s own website is a channel.  For convenience, we make a distinction between online channels and offline channels.

The online channels are the ones where people make a booking, using the internet and the web. They are third party websites or mobile apps. Their common denominator is that they are web/app based. So, the online channels are mainly the global OTA’s (the likes of Booking.com, Expedia, AirBnb etc) and  regional or local ones.

The offline channels are all the ones that are not based on the web or a mobile app. The telephone and the travel agents are the most common.

 

 

 

What is a Channel Manager?

It is common that a property advertises its rooms and availability on more than one web sites. This fact creates a problem: when a  booking takes place in one site, all the others have to be updated about the decrease of the availability of this particular room. Not being updated timely, makes the risk of a double booking all too real.

Availability updating can be performed manually. But a human has to sleep or take a break. So the time that it takes between a booking and a manual update ranges widely between a few minutes and many hours. The wider this interval, the bigger the risk of a double booking. The problem gets trickier as the availability might be reduced because of bookings that took place offline. So the poor lodge owner has to be constantly vigilant and rush to make the updates upon each new booking. For a big property this is nearly impossible.  Wouldn’t it be nice to automate this updating and minimize the risk of double bookings? Enter the Channel Manager.

The Channel Managers are programs and services that  automatically update channel availability. They interconnect the various channels, plus the applications the lodge owners uses to keep track of the offline bookings (like our PMS). Since there is a constant link between channels and the lodge system, it is very easy to also transfer the actual reservations  from one system to the other.

In short, channel managers interconnect channels and hotel systems, retrieve bookings from the channels and transfer them to the hotel and  update channel availability automatically, whenever a new booking takes place, regardless where it takes place.

How does Discoveroom connect with Channels

Discoveroom, at its core, is a PMS (a= Property Management System). It does not connect to channels directly (this is a choice, not a limitation. It could connect directly, but we have decided not to) therefore it does not play the role of a channel manager. Instead, it connects to other third party channel managers and through them, connects to the various channels.

Why not connect directly? It is a matter of focus and resources. There are dozens of different channels out there and building connections with them requires money, time and expertise. We have decided that this is not the area we want to focus, since there are already many channel managers out there, performing a decent job.

We have, so far, connected with two channel managers: Octorate and WebHotelier/Primal Res. The choice is driven by geographical considerations. The bulk of our clients reside in the areas where these two channel managers are originating and operating.  Geographical expansion will certainly lead us to add more channel partners.

In both cases the creation of the property in the Channel Manager’s system is performed by us or the Channel Managers. When this is done, the menu option “Channel Manager” within our web app, allows you to create a new room type mapping between the two systems. The room type  mapping is essential for the correct reservation retrieval and updating. Discoveroom allows one-to-many relations, where one room type from Discoveroom can be mapped to more than one room types on the channel manager side, but not vice versa.

 

 

 

Is there a difference between these two Channel Managers?

Yes, there is. While both perform the same task of retrieving bookings and updating availability, there are differences on how they function, how they are priced, which channels they support, etc. The choice is up to the client. We want to offer what best suits him.

More specifically, the WebHotelier/Primal Res solution has a very deep integration of the booking engine (WebHotelier) and the channel manager (Primal Res) and that’s why they are offered together.

Where is pricing entered?

For both channel managers, the pricing for the channels  is entered on their side, while the pricing for the PMS is entered in Discoveroom. There are plans to integrate these two functions but for the moment they are distinct.

Managing Availability

Discoveroom is built around the concept of always managing the true availability, since it allows the users to enter reservations into the rooms directly, and not in room types. Also, the reservations imported from the channels are automatically assigned to rooms. The reasons for this are multiple: we want to reduce hotel manager’s  load of work, make it easier to understand what is there to sell online, reduce the double booking risks, etc.

For this reason, we have built tools within discoveroom that close the availability to the channels and change the minimum stay. We follow the principle that the PMS should be point of truth about availability. This means the PMS will drive the channel managers and not vice versa. And therefore, availability opening/closing that is not related to specific reservations, should be handled by the PMS.

However, there are cases where experienced hotel managers, for reasons of attracting more bookings,  want to advertise room availability higher than the real one,  knowing that there is an inherent double booking risk. These cases availability should be set directly on the channel managers and not from Discoveroom. But there is a problem here: Discoveroom always reverts to the true availability, so if a room change takes place, it will send back the true availability to the channel managers. This does not pose a problem of double booking. On the contrary. But it creates a workload for the hotel managers that will see the artificially increased availabilities reverted to the real ones and will have to adjust them again.

 

 

Split Availability

Another common problem with availability is when a booking has to be split between different rooms. Let’s examine the root cause of this case.

OTA’s display room types. They know nothing about the specific rooms of a property, just the number of available rooms for each room type on each date .

Consider the following case:

Room Type X comprises of two rooms (A and B), so the total availability when both rooms are free, is 2.

Let’s say that between the 1st and the 3rd of the month, room A is booked, while between  the 4th and the  6th room B is occupied. What availability will a channel display for the dates between 1 and 6?

The answer is, of course, 1.

Now, a new client is searching the OTA’s site and finds out that there is a room of type X in the said property, that is available between the 1st of the month and the 6th. He moves ahead and makes a booking for this room. The channel manager retrieves this booking and sends it to Discoveroom. But Discoveroom cannot record it, because there is no single room available for six days. In this case, a notification is sent to the users, saying that the system could not find an available room for this reservation. What is to do then? There are a few options:

  1. Move the reservation for room B to room A. Then the channel reservation can be retrieved in room B.
  2. Move the reservation for room A to room B. Then the channel reservation can be retrieved in room A.
  3. Enter the channel reservation manually, splitting it between room A and room B.

In practice, all these solutions and more (like upgrading the client to another room type)  will be required. There is nothing wrong here. It is the nature of this business that makes such problems arise.

Regarding Meals

The way meals (breakfast, mainly) are bought with a reservation from an online channel varies. They can be included in the reservation price, they can be bought separately but along with the reservation or they can be bought by the client after the check-in, during his stay.  For reservations coming from channels, this piece of information resides in the reservation notes.

Regarding Payments and Terms

Information about Non Refundable Payments are also added in the reservation notes. Plus, other information, like cancellation terms, whenever they are relayed by the channel managers.

 

 

All the above should be considered as the basics of  channel management. There are many details and many subtle differences between channels and systems. But these are the subject of future posts.