Reservation tab

[Reservations dialog box > Reservation dialog]

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All of the relevant information about a reservation converge in the reservation tab. Any changes you make here, correspond to the entire reservation, including the allotted rooms and guests.

Basic information about Rooms will be displayed in the overview to the left. When more than one room has been booked, all of the rooms will be listed here sequentially.

You can find information about occupancy in the middle.  

The actual guests can be allotted at a later time in the Room or Guest tabs.

You can find the basis information about the invoice in the summary located to the right. All of the invoices which have been allotted to this reservation will be displayed here. The expected total sales (forecast) will be displayed here for the invoices which have not yet been completed.

Double-click on a single invoice to open it.

The close date and invoice number is shown for closed invoices.

 


You can find further information about the reservation dialog here:
Cash Register > Invoice summary


Add additional information

[Reservation dialog > Reservation > Reservation tab > Drop down lists in the lower part of the window (status, travel reason, distribution channel etc..)]

Document the various aspects of a reservation here (reservation codes).  The reservation codes can help with the typification of your bookings (where do your guests come from and what was their motive to make a booking?) For example: Booking per website - business trip. Or: Mailing event Winter - Private trip. For each booking, you can gather valuable information. These can then be evaluated and detected in reporting, e.g., such as the success of a marketing event and campaigns. The detected facts can help you compare your costs and usage and, if need be, optimize your marketing strategies.

A commission is a flat fee or a percentage typically paid to travel product distributors for selling the property booking to the customer. Commissions are calculated after the guest checks out from the property and are usually based on accommodation charges incurred during the stay (plus possibly the value of other charges for F&B or extras). As need arises, you can select a commission code to attach it to the reservation.

Definite

The reservation is guaranteed by advanced payment or a deposit.

Guaranteed with credit card

The reservation is guaranteed by providing a valid credit card number.

Until 6 pm

A deposit has not been paid for the reservation which can be deleted without being charged.

Option

This reservation sets up an optional period for the guest, thereby attaining a privilege for the booked room. The reservation will be able to be cancelled without charge should it not have been guaranteed or confirmed by this time.

Non-binding offer

Marks a reservation as a non-binding inquiry without reducing availability.
Reservations with the status “Non-binding offer” do not appear in the room plan and will not be deducted from the availability! You can learn more about the topic of "optional reservations" in the section entitled: Hot topics > Everything you need to know about reservations > Optional reservations!

Temporary

Each new reservation which you create, is first occupied with the "temporary" status.  The temporary reservation blocks further users from posting queries for the respective room types or rooms for the same time period. Only after the reservation has been confirmed in the system (by clicking on [OK] or [Apply]), will the status be changed to the preset standard status.

As need arises, you can enter the reason for why you have booked the reservation here ("Come reason").

Enter where your guest heard about your hotel. Where did the guest learn about the hotel?  ("hear reason").

Enter the distribution channel used for a reservation.

Answers the question about which customer type the reservation is to be allocated to, e.g., independent travelers, business travelers, senior citizens, families with children, singles, groups.

Settings for which default booking codes are to be preset for a newly created reservation, are made in the system data:
System Data > Reservation > Reservation codes > Default settings

Upon request, you can make it mandatory for your employees to fill out (individual) selection fields. Without providing this information, a reservation will not able to be completed (go to System Data >Reservation > Reservation codes > Default settings)

The status of a reservation determines the color used for the reservation in the room plan!

 


Additional information about the reservation codes can be found here:
System data > Reservation codes


Optional date

[Reservations dialog box > Reservation tab > Optional date]

A date can be entered here until the reservation will be held as an option. Even though the optional date has expired, the reservation will not be automatically cancelled. The optional date can be entered as additional information for definite or guaranteed reservations. Completely optional reservations must always receive the "Optional" or "Non-binding Offer" status (see here).

HINT: For monitoring purposes, you can print a list of all of the optional reservations at the end of day. Learn more about how to set your end of day reports here.

Payment / Payment Organization

When intending to use Payment Organization, special settings in the payment method's system data are required! Click here to learn how to configure your system accordingly!

[Reservation dialog box > Reservation tab > Payment & "Payment Organization" button]

The Payment Organisation function enables you to define several payment types per reservation. This speeds up the check-in and check-out process. A Payment can already be defined in the reservation dialog box. In the respective drop-down menu, we can choose from various payment types:

Adding a payment in the Reservation tab

  1. Open a reservation and go to the Reservation tab.

  2. In the payment dropdown list, select the required payment.

  1. Important: When altering any reservation, it is important to click Apply to save any changes.

The selected payment is used as the default payment method for the reservation.

If you change the default payment in the Reservation tab and there are other invoice windows in the Payment Organization window, all of the other payments are changed accordingly - provided you have not fixed the payment types (see below: Fixing Payment Types).

  1. If you need to add an additional payment to a reservation, open the Payment Organisation and click the New Invoice button.

The new invoice is created with the default payment method.

  1. If you need to change the payment method, e.g., because a businessman wants to pay his consumed extras with his private credit card, open the Payment dropdown list and select the corresponding payment for the respective Invoice window no. - see the following figure.

Credit and Debit Card Payment

If you select the Credit card payment, protel Tokenizer automatically opens to capture and encrypt the guest's credit card information. Only the last four digits of the credit card number are shown in the payment dialog box. The rest of the number's digits are replaced by an "X" (e.g.,XXXXXXXXXXXXX6166)

Note!

Reservations for which a credit card has already been deposited are automatically updated - the credit card is automatically set as the default payment.

If a credit/debit card is stored as a payment, protel Air automatically marks the reservation with the appropriate credit card logo, such as, for example, the following:

     

Detokenizing credit card information in Payment Organisation

You can detokenize a captured credit card by clicking on the respective credit card icon:

The "De-Tokenizer" then opens. Click on the Detokenize button located at the lower right corner of the box - see following figure.

 

One default payment per payment type

If you use several payments per payment type, the default payment type is automatically preselected when checking out / posting the payment (for example, "Direct Bill" for "Debitor" to transfer charges to an Accounts Receivable account).

NOTE!  The default payment for your payment types is defined in the payment's system data.  Learn more...

The "Payment Organisation" Screen

The Payment Organization screen is opened by clicking the identically named button in the reservation dialog.

Note: The button is only active when you assign a payment to the reservation and the click the Apply button! This is done in the reservation tab of the reservation dialog box - see the following figure.

 

As soon as you have selected a payment, you have access to the Payment Organisation button which opens a screen with the same name:

In the Payment Organisation screen, you can do the following:

If you change the original payment to another one, the new payment will be automatically fixed. Fixed payments can only be changed manually. This ensures that the payment is not overwritten when the default payment is changed in the Reservation tab.

In the Payment Organisation window, you will notice the invoice number in the first column. This column also tells you if the payment is fixed or not.

In the Payment column you can see the current payments which have been selected for the respective invoice. As with all active lists, we can edit this column inline and switch payments by selecting them from the drop-down menu.

For card payments, the encrypted credit card information will also be located here. In the Payment icon column, we see the icon of the respective credit card being used (VISA, MasterCard, etc.), while the other payments are represented by a respective icon.

In the Details column, the encrypted credit card numbers are displayed again.

The following buttons are located at the bottom part of the screen:

Opens a new invoice window for this reservation containing the payment which has been set as default.

Sets the selected payment as default. The default payment is the one which is set in the reservation dialog box.

"Fixes" the selected payment; now if the default payment is changed, this one remains unchanged.

Select two different payments to switch between them. Only fixed payments can be switched.

Payment as mandatory field

Hotel Management can enforce the entry of the payment as a possible guarantee for all reservations. This can be done with the help of the following XSetup:PaymentMethodMandatory If you define the payment as mandatory, the following conditions apply:

If you do not make the entry of the payment mandatory, the payment does not have to be stored as information and the entry is optional.

Working with invoices

If an invoice is created for a reservation for which a payment has been specified in the reservation, the respective payment is noted in the invoice. The icon for the payment appears in the upper part of the invoice. In the Check-out dialog box, the selected payment is already specified in the "Payment" field. For credit cards, the respective credit card type is shown here. The "Cash", "Noncash" or "Direct bill" payments are actually groups of payments - if we select one of these groups, the payment with the lowest number is displayed in the invoice's check-out dialog box. The remaining payments are selectable by means of the drop-down menu which is also sorted respectively. You can also configure them individually. [System data > POS > Payment method (Flash)]

Of course, the payment can always be changed directly in the invoice.

Active lists

The assigned default payment is also displayed in a separate column in the active lists. Like always, we can decide to hide or show the column. It can be found in the following lists: Arrivals List, Departures List, In-House List, and Reservations List

Attention: to include the column in our lists, we need to insert it manually.

Examples | How to use the Payment Organisation feature

Company reservation

A company reserves a room for one of their employees. The company bears the cost of accommodation and breakfast while the employee pays for the rest (e.g., minibar and other services).

The workflow for preparing the reservation in the system could look something like this:

  1. The reservation is created; first the reservation status is set to "not guaranteed" and the payment selected is "Cash".

  2. Upon receipt of the confirmation, the company declares in writing that it will bear the cost of accommodation & breakfast. The company pays on account (Direct bill, or "Debitor").

  3. The user updates the reservation accordingly:

    1. The reservation status is switched from "Not guaranteed" to "Guaranteed".

    2. A second invoice window with the payment specified by the company (Direct bill, or "Debitor") is stored in Payment Organisation.

    3. A payment instruction is created for invoice window no. 2 (accommodation and breakfast on this invoice).

    4. Finally, the correct recipient must be entered in the invoice windows (no. 1 = employee, no. 2 = company).

Result:

Invoice window 1 with the "Cash" payment is for booking the incidentals (extras, private consumption) of the employee.

Invoice window 2 with the "Direct bill /Debitor" payment is for the settlement of costs for accommodation and breakfast.

IDS reservations with virtual credit cards

A reservation comes in through an IDS interface. The booking is guaranteed using a Virtual Card which can only be processed on the departure date of the Reservation.

The workflow for preparing the reservation in the system could look something like this:

  1. The interface creates the reservation with the "Guaranteed" status and the default payment "Credit card payment".

  2. Upon receipt of the confirmation, the third party provider (the Agency) states that they will pay for the room using a virtual credit card.

  3. The user updates the reservation accordingly:

    1. The user creates a second invoice window in Payment Organisation.

    2. There, he chooses credit card as the payment and deposits the number of the virtual credit card he has received from the agency.

    3. IMPORTANT: Then the user must fix the payment by clicking on the [Fix Payments] button. This prevents the assigned payment from being overwritten.  

    4. Now a new payment instruction which reroutes the booked services to invoice window 2 can be created.

    5. Finally, the Recipient must be changed in invoice window no. 2.

Result:

Invoice window 1 containing the guest's credit card data can be used for the guest's personal consumption. This is the card that was sent when the reservation was created.

Invoice window 2 containing the data of the virtual credit card can be used for billing the third-party provider.

Saving various credit cards for a single reservation

A company reserves a room for an employee and saves the company card for the reservation.

If an additional credit card is to be saved for the reservation, the workflow for preparing the reservation in the system would look like this:

  1. The reservation is created with the "Guaranteed" status . "Credit card" is the payment method selected and the credit card information is recorded in the Tokenizer (or read in via a terminal).

  2. The employee calls the hotel and declares that he or she wants to extend his or her stay over the weekend. The weekend stay should be billed to his or her private credit card.

  3. The user updates the reservation accordingly:

    1. A second invoice window is created in Payment Organisation. The new invoice is created with the default payment method.

    2. The new credit card is saved by selecting Credit Card from the drop-down menu:

    3. The credit card data is recorded by the tokenizer and allotted to the second invoice window.

    4. A payment instruction is created for invoice window no 2 (weekend accommodation and breakfast on invoice 2).

    5. Finally, the employee will need to be entered as the recipient into invoice window 2.

Result:

Invoice window 1 with the company credit card

Invoice window 2 with the private credit card

Notes

[Reservations dialog box > Reservation tab > Notes]

If required, leave a comment about a reservation in the reservation dialog (important information for arrival, etc.).

 HINT: The comment saved here can be exported to your reservation and invoice texts with the aid of the following replacement code: ${res.notes}. Should you have questions about inserting replacement codes into your templates, go here or contact your protel Cloud Support Team or your protel partner.

Assign an allotment

[Reservation dialog box > Reservation tab > "Allotment" drop down menu]

By means of the allotment drop down box, you can subsequently assign a booked reservation to an allotment  Requirement is that the reservation is suitable for the allotment settings. This means that the allotment must be within the reservation time-period and the room type must be contained in the allotment - otherwise the drop-down menu cannot be selected.

Note: If rooms are allotted afterwards, the defined template values in the room allotment will NOT be adopted.


You can find more information about allotments here:
Reservation >
Allotments


Change reservation's display color

[Reservation dialog box > Reservation tab > Color]

The color identification of each reservation in the room plan can be changed (only recommended in individual cases).

In order to choose a different color, click in the color selection field located in the Reservation dialog (Reservation tab):

The status (see above) usually determines the color of the reservation.


You can find additional information about the reservation status here:
System data > Reservation codes > Reservation status