Auto top up availability of rooms

[praguecityrooms]

Hi,

Lets say we have 10 double rooms in our inventory. We don't want to give the OTA's an availability of 10 rooms as it will not create any urgency to book. Its better to send an availability of say 5 rooms, and if one of those rooms gets sold, then the channel manager will automatically top up the availability to 5 rooms again. So this would mean configuring a CAP figure for each room type and if the inventory is greater than the cap, then the cap figure is sent as as the availability for that room. If the inventory is less than the cap, then the actual inventory is sent to the OTA's.

Yes I know you can manage the inventory manually on the calendar but this is prone to human error. I prefer an automated solution.

Thanks,
Brian

[markkinchin]

You could create a virtual room with availability dependent on your master room type. Give the virtual room a restricted quantity and have it assign it's bookings into the master room.
This way the virtual room will have a max availability of the quantity you give it and never more than the amount available in the master room.

[praguecityrooms]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the suggestion, I would like to try and implement it. We have individual apartments which we have linked to a master virtual room. Lets say we have 6 identical apartments, linked to a virtual room called say VR1. To implement your suggestion, we would create a new virtual room (VR2) with inventory of 3 dependent on the first VR1 with inventory of 6 ?

Thanks,
Brian

[markkinchin]

VR2 will never have more than 3 available so it will work as follows, is this what you are looking to do?

VR1 has 6 available = VR2 has 3
VR1 has 5 available = VR2 has 3
VR1 has 4 available = VR2 has 3
VR1 has 3 available = VR2 has 3
VR1 has 2 available = VR2 has 2
VR1 has 1 available = VR2 has 1
VR1 has 0 available = VR2 has 0

[praguecityrooms]

hi, yes this is exactly what we want to do.

so under the "Dependency Level" setting of VR2, we would use "include" as defined below ?

"Ignore=logic uses dependent room only
Include=logic uses dependent rooms of dependent rooms etc. "

[markkinchin]

The dependency setting should not be relevant in this setup.

It applies when there are dependent rooms dependent on other dependent rooms.

[praguecityrooms]

To anyone who wants to setup the same feature as described in this post:

The Combination Logic setting on your dependency rooms must be set to Any Room Must Be Available and not Sum of All Bookings. And the VR2 must be set to the individual final dependent rooms. Then you can control the number of rooms sent to any channel at once, and any bookings will auto-allocate to the dependent rooms and auto top-up the inventory again. Hope this helps.

[markkinchin]

To anyone who wants to setup the same feature as described in this post:

It is also important to understand that bookings are allocated based on the rules of the original room.

When allocating a booking to a different room, the different room's allocation settings do not further allocate the booking to a third room.