Today we published a number of much requested features:
- Opening and closing rooms at will
- Setting the minimum stay per room and per day
- Rate plan rules for discounts based on number of days booked
Along with the above came a few look and feel tweaks for the calendar.
The availability and minimum stay functionality affects all clients utilising our booking engine and web sites.
The discount rule is available to all paid subscriptions but it is more useful with the booking engine.
Opening and closing rooms at will
So far, in order to block a room from appearing as available in certain dates, a reservation was required. Now, with a dialog invoked from within the calendar, you can open or close a room at will.
The dialog is invoked by clicking on the room button, to the left of the calendar,
and looks like this:
The default choice is for availability setting. You can choose a date range and open or close the availability of a specific room. You can also apply the availability setting to all the rooms of the same room type.
Since we changed the function of the room button from invoking the room calendar to invoking the Availability/Minimum stay dialog, we added an extra icon-button on the left to open the room calendar.
We also made a couple of aesthetic changes to to the appearance of the calendar:
- weekends are now marked with darker colours for quick identification.
- the shape of the reservations changed to rectangle with slightly rounded corners.
Setting the minimum stay per day
The alternate function is the setting of minimum stay. So far your could enter a global setting for the minimum stay for each room type. Now you can differentiate between individual room and days.
Again, you need to select a range and apply the setting to either room or room type level.
Both settings are meaningful for the booking engine only. Manual reservation entering is not obstructed by any of the two settings.
The dates a room is closed are subtly marked on the calendar with a diagonal grey pattern.
The minimum stay settings appear as numbers in the middle of the day squares but since this make the calendar screen look “busy”, they are turned on only by a user action. To display the minimum stay settings, you have to click the new calendar icon on the top right of your calendar.
Rate plan rules for discounts based on number of days booked
Rate plans have now a “number of days” criterion. This is meant to be used for discounting when a client books for a stay over a certain number of days.
This is now the default field showing with the rules “Absolute price” and “Percentage”. Once you pick the third rule “Per Extra Person Price”, the field changes to “Number of persons”, and works as it used. This change is protective: The “Per Extra Person Price” works only with the “Number of persons” field, so confusion is avoided.
The new criterion works with absolute numbers and percentages.
An important thing to have in mind is that whatever you set, applies to all days up to this day limit. An example will make this clear:
Say, you have a normal rate of 100. For over 5 days stay, you set the absolute price to 90. This means the client, for 6 days, will pay 6X90=540. For 7 days, he will pay 7X90=630. And so on.
Likewise, if you choose a 10% off discount on the above rate, for 6 days the price will be 6X100*90% = 540. For 7 days, 7x100x90%=630. And so on.
If you do not want to utilise this feature, then just leave the field empty.
We hope you will find the new features useful and to your liking. For us, apart of being a new piece of functionality, they also lay the foundations for more complex services for the future. Stay tuned.
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