Bookings

There are a few ways to get new bookings on the system. The easiest is directly from the application via "Create Booking" or "Create Enquiry". Bookings can also be acquired from an external website using the Guestbook 24/7 enquiry widget. This widget can easily be integrated with your existing marketing website to capture enquiries from potential guests. Lastly bookings can also be imported via a text file, see Importing Data

Create Enquiry v Create Booking

An enquiry is more a note of a potential booking. An enquiry can be created directly via the "Create Enquiry" option. An enquiry can be easily changed to a full booking if required. The difference between an enquiry and full booking is the level of information and the fact that enquiry does not appear on availability and schedules. The external enquiry widget will capture basic details from a guest and create a booking enquiry. Enquiries are displayed in their own list on the homepage and you'll also receive an email when an enquiry is made via the widget on your own website.

Click on images to zoom in

The following form shows the details for an enquiry.

As you can see above it's pretty simple to capture an enquiry. To create a new booking we select the menu option Bookings | Create Booking. This is a two step process, first we enter the basic booking details as shown below

As well as capturing the basics like name, dates, contact details we need to say whether the booking is unconfirmed or confirmed. How you determine a booking is confirmed is your decision, it has only a small impact on how the booking is handled by the system as in the colour used to display the booking on the availability calendar. We can also allocate the appropriate rooms, clicking "Check Availability" pops up the availability view from which rooms can be selected. Finally the Base Rate can be entered, in step 2 (just below) we can enter the payment details.

The above shows the pop up availability dialog. From here we can see the booking period with yellow borders and based on this select the appropriate rooms for this booking.

On submitting the basic booking details page we are next shown the main booking details page...

As you can see from above we can now add more details to the booking such as details on the guests, payment information and any notes we need to add. The warnings section shows system generated messages about possible inconsistencies with the booking.

It's optional whether you record each individual guests name, address, ID , dob, etc. If this information is required it can be entered from this page or the main guest can be requested to complete this information online via the Guest Confirmation feature. Simply by clicking the "Send Confirmation Email" the main guest will receive an email containing a link to a special web page where they can review the booking, your terms and conditions and provide additional guest details, thus saving you some tedious data entry.

Booking Status

A booking can go through several phases during it's lifetime. It may start off as a booking enquiry, from where it can be converted to a full booking. A full booking starts life as unconfirmed or confirmed, unconfirmed is meant for bookings that are agreed but await final confirmation, maybe a deposit.Confirmed bookings are the real deal, it's really up to you how you decide which bookings are unconfirmed or confirmed. Both types will appear on the availability and schedules. Whenever you edit a booking you must select the new status. So for example if you open a booking that is unconfirmed, make some changes, you need to select a new status to save the changes. It can stay as unconfirmed or become confirmed or cancelled.

The image above shows the current status in Red In edit mode the New status is always set to "Please Select". To save any changes you must select a status, you can in this example leave as is, set to confirmed or cancelled.

Enquiry to Booking

You have an enquiry from a customer on the system but now the customer has firmed up their intention to stay, so you need to take some more information and create a full booking.To change an enquiry to a full booking is easy. First we need to find the enquiry, for this we can either select menu option "Recent Enquiries" or use the "Booking Search" or look at the list recent enquiry list on the homepage. If using the search function you can select a status of "Request" and enter in a part of the surname. On selecting the enquiry it is displayed in the Edit Enquiry page, see below.

From the above Edit Enquiry page we can select an action such as "Confirmed Booking", make any other edits and click "Save" - this enquiry is now a booking.