What is a connected room?
We present a new improvement of our platform: the connected rooms. It is about creating a virtual room formed by two or more regular rooms. In this post we tell you how this new feature of our PMS works.
A connected room is a virtual room consisting of two or more regular rooms. To set it up, it is necessary to create room types first.
- Regular room types
- Virtual connected room types
Once the connected room type is created, we can start configuring the rooms, which can be of 3 types:
- Regular rooms
- Regular connected rooms (forming connected rooms)
- Virtual connected rooms (made up of regular rooms)
Virtual connected room types have the same availability and rates as regular room types. In a hotel with connected rooms, the availability is linked to the availability of regular rooms and conversely, the availability of regular rooms is linked to the availability of connected rooms.
How does the inventory work?
When there is a reservation or block of a regular room, the system will check if it affects the availability of connected rooms and update the availability accordingly.
Similarly, when there is a reservation of a connected room, the system will automatically adjust the availability of affected regular rooms.
Identically to a regular room type, it is possible to force overbooking / underbooking in connected rooms, as availability is increased or decreased only by the units relative to each booking or block, and is not reset. In other words, existing overbookings are respected when availability changes occur.
How are reservations handled?
Bookings are handled as they would be for a single larger room. Guests are registered and billed as a regular room. Rooms that form a connected room do not appear on the reservation and cannot be managed independently, however, they do appear on the housekeeping and maintenance listings.
How does this affect listings and reporting?
When a connected room booking is saved in the system, it is split into regular rooms and these "dummy" rooms are saved in the booking along with the original connected room. This generates duplicate information, as in some listings and reports we will work with the connected rooms and in others with the regular rooms.
In this way, in operations related to the reservation and the client we will work with the virtual connected rooms, while in building operations we will work with the regular rooms as well as in the statistical reports, since the financial projections are made based on these physical rooms and not on the virtual connected rooms.
- Operations with virtual rooms: Reservation management, invoicing, listings and meal forecasts.
- Operations with regular rooms: Housekeeping, maintenance, performance reports (income, occupancy, sales, production, revenue...), forecast reports.
- Mixed operations: Planning and rack.
