Room Service (Self Service Portal)
The newest module to the Self Service Portal – Room Service gives your guests the unique chance to place Room Service orders to the restaurant or other catering establishments of yours and they can do it straight from their rooms using their mobile devices.
Guests view and select from the respective restaurant's or bar's eMenu, where meals and beverages are displayed through high quality photographs, descriptions and the current prices. If you have happy hours or other promotions, they will be reflected automatically.
No extra charge is required for the Room Service module. In order to use it, it is only necessary to have the Self Service Portal enabled, as well as an eMenu for the respective catering establishments.
How Does It Work?
- With each booking confirmation, your guests receive a link to the Self Service Portal. On it, apart from all other interesting features, there is a Room Service Section.
- As soon as guests check in, in this section, they can find the restaurants selected by you to handle Room Service orders.
- With the guest's selection of a restaurant or bar, the eMenu of the respective catering establishment opens. On the eMenu, the menu groups selected by you are displayed, as each menu item can be presented through high quality photographs, an additional commercial description and the item's ingredients and price.
- Clients can view the eMenu and add menu items of their choosing to their basket.
- Upon finishing with their selection, clients can place their orders.
- The placed order appears instantly on the kitchen monitors related to these menu items, as a sound signal reminds the kitchen personnel of the new order received.
- Note: Due to the fact that a guest's mobile device can be on another LAN, their order is not printed on the kitchen printers, but appears straight on the kitchen monitor.
- The order received is visualized on the map of tables on the POS like any other order and in order to be recognised as a Room Service order, the name of the table contains the room number and the booking number in the following way: "Room: 101 / #5678". The bill is also automatically connected to the room (a blue label appears above it with the booking data), thus the bill is ready for transfer to the client's account with just one click.
- When the order is ready, a room service waiter delivers it to the guest's room, bringing along a tablet with Clock POS.
- The guest receives the order, as the bill can be closed in all possible ways:
- It can be transferred to the hotel account of the guest – only the guest's signature on the tablet is required and the bill is transferred with a click. Later on, using the Check your bill feature, the guest can check one's hotel account, where all the details of a Room Service bill are present.
- It can be paid by credit card through a portable POS terminal.
- It can be paid cash, etc.
How Is It Set Up?
- The Room Service module requires the setup of the eMenus of the catering establishments from which guests will order.
- The hotel has to have the Self Service Portal add-on enabled.
- Access the respective hotel for which you would like to enable the Room Service feature.
- Select 'Other' - 'Settings' - 'Self service settings'
- In the section of 'Welcome to our hotel' - 'Room Service ( eMenu )', select the establishments to handle the Room Service orders of your hotel.
- On the Self Service Portal of each guest, a new Room Service (eMenu) section will appear to be used by the guest to place one's orders.
Rates
- New restrictions have been added to the 'Advanced rates management' add-on concerning early-bird, last-minute and limited-time-offer cases. The new restrictions are:
- Min days before arrival / Max days before arrival. These two restrictions determine a future period in which bookings can be accepted. The days being outside this period are stopped for sale. For example, if it is set that the min days before arrival are 60, and the max days before arrival are 90, only the bookings with nights falling in this period will be accepted. All the other nights (before the minimum of 60 days and after the maximum 90 days) will be stopped for sale. Please note that the restriction only concerns the nights, but not the arrival itself.
- Active from date / Active to date. These restrictions concern the current date. If the current date complies with the conditions set for a rate, sales at this rate are made. If the current date does not comply with these conditions, the sales at this rate are stopped. Thus you can determine the date of the automatic activation of a certain rate and on which date this rate is to be stopped.
- The restrictions are also valid for the channel manager, thus rates are automatically stopped or activated in it.
- Deletion of Rates. Now it is possible to delete old rates, which are no longer in use, even when there are related bookings. With their deletion, the rates are removed from the related bookings, without affecting the charges.
- The problem, not allowing rates to have only weekend prices, has been fixed.
Authorize.net
- A new payment interface to Authorize.net. The new credit card payment interface allows credit card details to be collected on a screen of the booking engine itself. This way a client does not need to leave the website of a hotel and the payment process is much easier and faster.
- The payment interface can also be used on the Self Service Portal – for the features of 'Self Checkout' and 'Check your bill'
- Settings:
- The settings of the interface can be done from 'Other' - 'Settings' - 'Authorize.net (AIM)'.
- The 'API login' and 'Transaction Key' are the same as the ones which a client has in their Authorize.net account.
- Through the 'Gateway' field, you can select whether transactions to be test (sandbox account) or real ones (production account).
- Through 'CVC required ', 'Email required', 'Address required', a client can choose what data to be collected from guests. It depends on the payment processor used and the electronic checks activated in the Authorize.net account of the client.
ParityRate
- The use of the reference number in bookings has been improved. Rooms being a part of a booking from the channels now have the same reference number and are presented as a small group. Also, the additional segments (digits) have been removed from the reference number and now it exactly corresponds to the booking number from the channel itself.
- The booking import concept has been changed and it no longer leads to doubled bookings due to incorrect messages (New instead Update) received from the channel manager.
Folios and Invoices
- The print screen has been improved, as all the related features are now accessible on it: language change, level of detail, one line print feature, etc.
- An option has been added making it possible to print two copies of one and the same document, positioned next to one another. Thus two copies of an invoice can be printed using the A4 Landscape format.
- The settings selected on the print screen are stored, so that it is not necessary to select them each time.
- The layout of folios and invoices to be printed out is now more compact. The empty space sometimes causing the printing of a blank page has also been removed.
- The quantity of goods having such one set now appears on the printouts of folios.
- Printing on headed paper. Now it is possible to set the blank space above (and beneath) the contents of a folio, so that it can be printed on the headed paper of a hotel.
- Also it is possible to hide sections or lines on a folio (e.g.: "This is not the final invoice"). The settings are done by our development department for each individual account.
Bookings
- Deposits – a new deposit calculation scheme: 'Number of Nights or Percent of Room Charges'. A number of nights and percentage is to be set for this scheme. The deposit amount to be paid is the higher one of these two amounts.
- Registration Cards – custom fields. This new feature enables the specialists of Clock to define additional fields of the registration cards for a certain account. The fields defined can be 'input' ones (to fill in a text) or 'select' ones (to select a value from a predefined list). The new custom fields are included in the register, and on their basis, new custom exports in a text format can be created for the police. The setup of custom fields is charged as per the current support price list.
- Registration Cards – header and footer. Now the registration card printouts can be customised to contain a text in the header and footer. The setting is in: 'Settings' - 'Languages and Texts' - 'Registration Card Header/Footer/Translations'
- Sorting of Booking Lists - the lists of Arrivals, Departures, In Hotel, Search Booking and Advanced Search can now be sorted out by various criteria: guest's name, room, booking number, company/event, arrival date, departure date.
- Arrivals – room housekeeping status icons have been added.
- Booking Confirmations – their subject now contains the booking number and last name of a guest (and in the case of multiple bookings – only the number). This way it is clearer to the guest and the hotel reviewing the copies of confirmations in their email.
- Now there can be special fields for the number of adults and children to be specifically used for the City Tax calculation purposes, as the City Tax and hotel policies can differ in their age criteria in determining guests as adults and children. The new fields are hidden by default and are activated by the development department at the request of a client for each individual account. It is charged as per the support price list.
Other
- Rate and Availability – by rooms. Now the screen has the option to show results by room number. This guarantees not only that there are available rooms, but also that it will not be necessary to move guests to another room during their stay. There is an additional reason for stopping room numbers for sale, if there are no available rooms of a type (there are unassigned bookings).
- Rate and Availability – only available. A new option has been added through which you can hide all the prices (products), which are not available due to restrictions, a lack of price or availability.
- Import of guest profiles from a csv file. You can find this function in 'Settings' - 'Import guest profiles from CSV file'. There you can also find a sample file.
- New Report - Meal Summary Report. It provides summary information on meals for a certain period of time.
- Non-Standard Meals – now it it is easier to define non-standard meals for a booking – when the number of adults and children is not specified, their number from the booking is used.
- To the Arrivals /Departures Summary Report, a new label with the weekday has been added.
- A new button for deleting a logo has been added.
Fixes
- Advanced Search for Bookings – the Created and Cancelled filters already work correctly in relation to the time zone of an account.
- Folio Email – new lines used in custom texts were not kept.
- The manual charges posted to the folios of a booking appeared in a group bearing the name of the hotel instead of the booking
- The WBE numbers of rooms did not arrange themselves by price and the sort order set.