Rate and Availability for a Block
For easier and quicker responding to customers’ enquiries and block bookings, we have added an option for the Rate and Availability screen to work with a selected confirmed block.
To choose a block on the Rate and Availability screen, you will first need to fill in the period and the company. Only the confirmed blocks referring to the selected period and company will be available for selection. Optional blocks are not included in this list, as they have no actual rooms assigned.
The result will show the room type of the block as well as the remaining rooms from the block and the respective price for the selected rate or manual price in the block. Additionally, the system also shows the rate restrictions similarly to the Rate and Availability screen without a block. You can also choose the 'Calendar' option to review the data on a daily basis. It is also possible to make a booking in the well-known way as the related info of the block and the Rate will be transferred to this booking. The block products cannot be used for Booking Enquiries.
To facilitate the communication between clients and the hotel, we have added a new Code field to the Block. It is unique for each block and can be filled in by you for greater clarity (e.g. 'BOSH-01') or automatically generated as a 6-digit code. This code, identifying the block, can be given to the client. We have also added it to the BEO and Example Templates and as a Liquid parameter. If your custom provides this code, you can enter it into a special field on the Rate and Availability screen and save time searching for a company and block from the lists.
Company Contracts
We have added a new functionality to let you better handle issues related to the management of company contracts, and, in particular, the agreed prices and expiry dates. Up till now, you could manage rate tags for each company individually, and the tags from a company were used to establish the connection to the rates for each of your hotels. Still this workflow was not very convenient for companies with many branches. The hotel would sign one agreement with clients being valid for all branches of the respective company, but, in Clock PMS+, you had to manage tags and expiry dates for each branch individually. As a result, all changes to the agreement had to be reflected separately for each branch.
Here is why we have changed the whole workflow and introduced a new feature - Company Contract. The rate tags and the expiry date are now in the Contract (instead of the Company), and the Contract itself can be related to multiple companies. This way a change to tags and an expiry date is done in one place only, but it is now valid for all companies related to this contract.
We have migrated all existing data. A contract has automatically been created for each company reflecting the related already existing rate tags and an expiry date. You can change and reorganise the automatically created contracts to simplify your settings.
Additionally, there is a new report in the Control section - Company contracts. Using it, you can easily find which contracts expire soon or have already expired, so that you can contact the respective clients to extend or renegotiate the contract terms and conditions.
We would like to remind you of what can be accomplished by binding rates to companies:
- In the WRS, by entering a Company Code, a Company can book at rates specified in the respective contract;
- On the Rate and Availability screen, with the selection of a Company, the rates from the related Contract are automatically shown.
The old functionality to directly add a rate to a company without using a Contract and Rate tags is also preserved.
Revenue Date - automatic change at a certain time
Many of you have asked for such a functionality and we have decided to add it to the system. Up till now, the financial date in the POS and the PMS was automatically changed at 0:00 Now you can set at what time after midnight (1 to 6) the financial date is to change. The new setting can be found by going to ‘Tax Settings’ - ‘Revenue Date Mode’ - ‘Auto revenue date offset’. By default, 0 is selected corresponding to the old behaviour. You can select by how many hours after midnight the financial date change to be delayed.
For the use of this setting, we have added a new right, as well as a control event. In other words, this setting can be tracked in the Control Report Event.
If you intend to take advantage of this new setting, please note that it is highly recommended to make changes before 00:00 to avoid the effect of returning to an already past financial date.
Mailing lists
New Mailing list CSV export feature is now available.
- Create as many mail lists as you need ('Other' - 'Mailing List').
- Use the guest Advanced Search (Booking - Guest Profiles - Advanced Search ) to filter the guests you wish to add to a specific mail list through the 'Add to List' option. If you skip the show button, all guests matching the search criteria will be added to the selected list. Alternatively, you can add the selected guests only to the list.
- By going to 'Other' - 'Mailing List', you can change the name of the mailing list as well as to remove guests from it. Also you can export the list to use it in an external mailing system.
Other
- A new option in the Booking Segmentation Report - 'In Hotel (cut-off stay)'. If selected in the 'Period Type' filter, you will get clearer report data that is easier to compare. The old filter (In Hotel) worked the following way: if the period is set to 01.01 - 01.02, the report will include all bookings being in the hotel for this period, but with their full number of nights and revenue, i.e. for the whole length of the booking. With the new 'In Hotel (cut-off stay)' filter, the report will include the same bookings, but it will only reflect the number of nights and revenue referring to the selected period. The nights and revenue related to dates outside the selected period will not be summed up.
- Payment Autopilot. Now it can also process old credit card details containing plain data.
- The data related to a credit card transaction (the receipt usually printed out by the credit card terminal), is now also printed out in the folio with each such payment.
- To the Advanced Search, we have added a new column - City (of the Main Guest).
Interfaces
- Slovenian fiscalization improvements: 'Issued by' label translation; Proper time zone use.
- Hotek interface now supports the QR keys issue. Please consult Hotek that your installation and hardware supports QR keys. If a QR encoder is configured for the Hotek interface, Clock PMS+ will automatically issue a QR copy of each door keycard you create. The QR key is available on the Self Service Portal with the booking issue. If you select the encoder configured as QR encoder for the key issue, only a QR key will be issued.
- BRP interface now supports the activation of SPA entries. If you have Bookings - Identity Tags, you can also use them to access the SPA. Once the identity tags are added for the booking you can click the Update Spa Access button to activate the SPA access for them. Please note that you need to Update Spa Access with each change to the booking period or identity tags.
Fixes:
- A fixed bug on the Booking screen that was related to the showing of the prices per night. Up till now, the amounts used to only include charges of the Rooms and Packages revenue group. Now all charges resulting from the rate and the rate package are included.
- Split by percent for charges didn’t accept values decimal value being less than 1 like 0,5%, for example
- A fixed bug with the Elavon preventing the processing of transactions, if the guest name contained special characters like ‘
- Stripo - the edit button for photos didn’t work.
- Housekeeping Report - for virtual rooms, the number of guests wasn’t correct.
- A fixed bug with the print spooler for the POS that used to result in an error when printing special characters like “&” and other similar ones.
- On the event bulk update screen, the cancelled catering and meeting room bookings are now now marked as cancelled.