Glossary

Homepage

Portal or Homepage : The main landing page that displays the availability calendar and summary of task, recent bookings, payments etc. Click the Guestbook 247 logo to go back to this page from any where

Important Notes : Free text notes can be attached to bookings and guest. You can mark some notes as important which means they are visually highlighted on the Availability Calendar. Making sure you don't miss an salient piece of info about a guest, maybe it's their birthday during the stay.

Bookings

Confirmed Booking : a booking that when allocated rooms will make them unavailable for other bookings. Probably means some payment has been taken too.

Unconfirmed Booking : a proviosonal booking that does not block any rooms allocated to it. So an external booking from an OTA or direct booking can use the unconfirmed booking's rooms.

Enquiry : an expression of interest from potential guest. Can come direct from a guest from the enquiry widget on your website or entered directly into Guestbook. Can later be converted to a confirmed booking

Direct Booking : A confirmed booking taken through Guestbook's Book It web application. Link from your own website to start taking paid for bookings direct from customers

Book It : Is the Guestbook 247 web app that you can share a unique link with guests so they can make direct paid for bookings. See Direct Bookings.

Instant Booking : same as a Direct Booking made through Book It.

Offline Bookings : Bookings taken via offline channels such as telephone, or at the door

Closed Room : A room that you wish to make unavailable for a period of time. Maybe a room is out of action for decoration.

Booking Confirmation : Guestbook allows you to send a guest an email containing a link to a booking confirmation page, unique to that booking. The guest can enter further information and agree to your terms and conditions.

Payments and Invoicing

Deposit Invoice : An invoice that records a deposit payment and shows what the VAT calculations. You should produce an invoice for a deposit or advanced payment.

Advanced Payment : See Deposit Invoice

Stripe : The payment handling partner for taking money for direct bookings. Similar service to Paypal but cheaper fees.

Base Rate : The initial sales cost of a room that can include the items such as room rate, breakfast, tourist tax. Other chargeable items can be added to a booking later on.

Base Rate Template : A template breaks down a base rate amount across several invoice type lines. You can configure your own templates to cover typical invoice needs. For instance the base rate may normally include room rate and breakfast, so the template will specify the breakfast cost and work out the room rate cost.

Channel Management and OTAs

OTA : Online Travel Agent - such as booking.com

Channel : Alternative name for an OTA such as booking.com

Channel Manager : A system that provide simple integration and management of many Channels or OTAs. Guestbook 247 provides seamless integration with leading Channel Manager making it simple to publish availability and receive live booking updates from connected channels.

Availability and Rate Rules : To publish rooms to OTAs and for direct booking through Book It you need to specify the room's availability and rate. To make this easier Guestbook has availability and rate rules that allow detailed control over rate, dates, units, min stay, check in days, single occupancy etc.

Room Type : In order to publish availability and rates to OTAs or to the direct booking app Book It you need to organise your rooms into Room Types - such as Single, Double, Family. This makes it easier to manage.

Other

Alexa: Amazon Alexa AI voice service. Guestbook has the ability to link to Alexa so that you can ask questions like "Who is arriving today?"

Amazon Echo : See Alexa

iCal : A well known format to publish room availability. Can be used to publish room availability to airbnb for free from Guestbook 247

Widget : Describes a web component that can be included in another website. With Guestbook you can include an Availability Calendar or Guest Enquiry Widget in your own website