A Room Type is a marketing package; it has a description, picture, maximum guest capacity and 'default' rate. A Room Type may be a common description for a number of Rooms, or it may represent a single room. Each Room Type will have an inventory of Rooms available to book.
Example – ABC Motor Inn - 18 rooms:
- 6 - Standard Rooms with Queen Bed,
- 10 - Standard Rooms with a Queen and Single Bed
- 2 - Honeymoon Suites with a King Bed.
Loading every Room into the system could make the day to day management of availability complicated. Often, we recommend you load just enough rooms to meet demand. * Guests commonly book several rooms at a time; you may risk loosing larger group bookings with too few rooms.
Room Types (Example ABC Luxury Inn):
Room Type ID | Room Type Description | Default Rate ID | Num Rooms | Max Guests | |
STD | Double Room | STD | 4 | 2 | |
TWIN | Twin Room | STD | 4 | 3 | |
HM | Honeymoon Suite | SUITE | 1 | 2 | |
3 Room Types |
In the past, the ABC always called their rooms Standard Rooms. When guests booked by phone the staff would always ask the guest how many beds were required. Now, guests are booking without talking to the staff. That changes the way you communicate. Guests need a clear way to indicate how many beds they require. Therefore, it makes sense to create 2 Room Types where in the past there was only one Room Type.
For this example, instead of labelling all 16 rooms as Standard Rooms; we've create 2 Room Types (Double and Twin). Now every booking is clearly indicating how many beds are required. In fact, when a guest books a Double you can always put them in a Twin. Clear labelling will avoid the uncomfortable mistake of putting 2 co-workers in one bed.
Default Rates
(Example ABC Luxury Inn):
In this example, the Double and Twin Rooms both use is the same rate - STD. The Honeymoon has a unique rate - SUITE. Create as many Rates as needed. Only 1 Rate will apply to each Room Type. Later we describe how special rates can apply to Agent Bookings.
Flat Rate or Person Rate
There are 2 types of Rates:
- Flat Rate - is a single price for all occupants up to the capacity of the room, i.e. $92 per night no matter how many guests.
- Per-Person - has a base rate for the first X guests plus an additional guest rate, i.e. the first 2 guests pay $80 plus $12 for each additional guest up to the capacity of the room. There is an option to set a different rate for extra adults and extra children.
Each Rate has 3 Price rules – Weekday, Weekend and Weekly or Extended Stay. This allows you to set different rates depending on the day of week and length of stay.
Weekends - To define a Weekend, go to General Settings – tick the box to include Fri, Sat and/or Sun as weekends. You must include a value in the Weekend price column. If you have the same rates for weekdays as weekends, then enter the same value in both columns.
Weekly or Extended Stay – this rate applies to stays equal to or greater than 7 nights. Enter the nightly value in this column. For example if you charge $1,400 per week – the Extended Stay Rate is $200.
*You have the option to turn off Extended Stay rates. Go to General Settings and tick "Use weekend prices even during weekly ("extended") stays". This will cause the system to add up each night's rate to make a total booking cost.