August Webinar 2023 - Taking the hassle out of hotels (all about accommodation)

Sure - you'll find it in the 'overall principles' chapter in the video above.

At the moment, amenities are only visible to use in the backend for reference, however the ability to show these on interactives sites is something we’re reviewing for inclusion in a future update. You can also go into the Community area in the Support portal and add it to suggestions or upvote it if it’s already been suggested in that forum. 

Application Setup is on the main homepage (where you select which event to work on), but is only visible to users with Admin level rights/access. So if you don’t see it on your setup, just ask the person who’s your administrator.

We'd recommend the group leader register their people first via the Group App or Group Interactive site.  This will create the records for the group members.  Then when they login to the Group Accommodation Portal, the group leader will see all the existing members of their group in that portal, and would be able to allocate the accommodation applied to their group to the individuals.  This will avoid creation of duplicates.  

Not really – sub-blocks are just for you to manage and allocate in the back end.  However, the Group Accommodation Portal is what you’d use to allocate a block of rooms to a Group Leader, (the person within the organization who’s in charge of the group) and then they can log into that portal and allocate those rooms to individuals.

In the Hotel Portal, your hotels can mark bookings as confirmed (or confirmed cancelled) and this data pushes back into the EventsAir records. So you can run reports to see what the status is (e.g. new booking, confirmed, cancelled or confirmed cancelled).  Changes you make to bookings also push back into the Hotel Portal. So if you’ve made a change after a booking was confirmed, it’ll show as an amended booking, so next time your hotel logs in, they can see that. You really want your hotel to be using the portal to go and check bookings. You can see when they’ve logged in too. So you can run a report, see if any bookings or cancellations are yet to be confirmed, check to see when they logged in, and then contact them if needed (rather than spending all day on the phone or emailing them when all they need to do is use the portal).

We’ve double-checked this and it pulls from the “Work” (Office Number) field, not the “mobile” [cell phone, for our USA customers] field.

When you set up the Registration Site, you could add some help text on this field, and/or change the name of the field, if you really want them to enter a mobile number here:

 

But just make sure you also get attendees to add a mobile number into the “Mobile Number” field below that, (even if it’s the same number) because you need that so you can still send SMS messages.

Fixed Rate means it’s the same dollar amount or flat rate across all nights for that room type, whereas dynamic rates can be changed so that, for example, that room type might cost more on a weekend.  

Dynamic rates can be used quite well when you pay for (or offer a lower rate for), the actual conference dates and attendees pay for any extension dates. (In other words, you can make the amount for the conference dates zero, or a small amount) . We have some clients who use it that way. 

The Nightly Room Rate is the going rate – what you charge attendees for the room, or how much they’ll pay. 

The Nightly Room Cost is the wholesale or cost price – the cost to you. 

You can leave cost blank, or make them the same. The Room Cost is really just for your own reference, if you’re getting some kind of commission (i.e. charging attendees more than what it costs you) and you want to record the difference here. 

The Commission Report uses the "Commission rate" field under Advanced in the hotel setup, and the Nightly Room Rate, to calculate commissions. 

The image size for the main hotel image is 371 x 255 pixels.

You’d use hotel inventory when you have a run-of-house contract – you have a set number of rooms across the whole hotel (and all room types come out of a shared inventory). If your contract is more like ‘this many single rooms, this many double rooms’ you’d use the room type inventory.

If payments are made directly (via a payment gateway you’ve configured) when delegates book a room via the interactive (registration) site, this will go to you (or more specifically, to whichever payment gateway account is configured). You’d then reimburse the hotel as arranged. Alternatively, you can collect credit card details from the attendee using the 'credit card vault' which can then be passed to the hotel for them to bill. 

You could add two accommodation components to the site builder, with different settings, then use the logic rules to determine which should show – a bit like how logic was used in the webinar example.

So on the first one you would say 'if package A is selected is TRUE then display this component'  and on the other if package A is selected is NOT TRUE then skip this component'.
 
Then on the component relevant to package A, you could set check-in only from 5th to 5th and check-out only from 7th to 7th.  
 
 Alternatively, you could ask a marketing tag question on the registration site for room type, then use a site submit action to automatically add a package containing default accommodation to that person without them having to book a room directly on the site.

We don’t have a bulk import tool for accommodation, unfortunately. You could create a custom field (under Contact), then add this to the registration site, and use this to collect the information, rather than the ‘Sharing With’ field (because that’s not a Contact field, so you can’t use the Bulk Import feature for it). You can always manually add it to records, of course.

In my experience, the other options (see below) are best at the moment – but we know they’re not perfect. One of the issues with sharing with is you want to link to other records, but there are some privacy issues associated with that and people searching for other people.

We’re looking at more tools for this for the future, but in the meantime:
Option 1 – You can instruct one attendee to book the room, and add in the “sharing with” field to your registration site, so they can put in the name of the person they’re sharing with.  The downside to this is that only the person who’s booked the room will have it in their itinerary.

Option 2 / 3– Set up a pretend room, and you can do one of two things:

 – You call the pretend room something like “I’m Sharing With Someone”. Then you ask one person to book the real room, e.g. Double Room, and the person they’re sharing with books the “I’m Sharing With Someone” room. You’d also add the ‘Sharing with” field and ask both people to fill it in.  You would cross check it and make any adjustments required. That way, they can both get the hotel details in their itinerary.

- The other option is that you set up the pretend room as “Double Shared Room”, for example, and so this looks like a real room to your attendees. Anyone who’s sharing books this ‘room’, and indicates who they want to share with (e.g. via “Sharing With”). However, there’s no inventory allocated in the back end to this pretend room. Then you manually change one of your ‘pretend room' sharing pairs over to a real double room booking.

There’s no one perfect way but those are the current options we’d recommend.