Product Release - 13.8.2019

This feature release includes a number of new and updated reports, new email templates, and enhancements to transactions on reservations and reservation items. Please share this with all relevant staff at your property.

We’d love to hear your feedback on our new features and have set up a quick survey – if you could take two minutes and provide some feedback that would be much appreciated.

Contents

• Updated Transactions view
• Amend additional information on a transaction
• Link card to reservation and room reservation
• Default room occupancy
• Multiple accommodation articles
• Charge articles per adult or child
• Complaints on room profiles
• Combined Housekeeping Report
• Room Revenue and Room Nights booked
• Availability Report
• Reservations Report
• Pickup report
• Weekly Event Report
• Event text boxes are collapsible
• Event accommodation rooms 
• Invoicing Layout
• Change number of items per screen
• Change email template used to send invoices
• Ready for Check In notification

Updated Transactions view

To clarify the process for adding a payment or charge to a reservation, we have updated the View Transactions screen. It will now be presented to you as a split screen, which can be toggled on or off using the “List” icon button in the top right, meaning that you can see both the reservation and reservation item at the same time. Once selected, the preference will be stored in a browser cookie specific to that page so that your choice will be remembered for next time. This view will now also show you the booker name, guest name and room number. If there is more than one reservation item on the reservation, there is a drop-down menu which will allow you to change which room you are looking at:

If you wish to move a transaction, HOP will now offer to transfer the transaction you have selected to the reservation/reservation item currently onscreen next to the one you are looking at:

Linked in with this, there is now also a setting on the Property Administration page which will allow you to tell the system to send charges to the reservation item (room) by default:

Amend additional information on a transaction

You now have the ability to update the Additional Information on a transaction if you wish to add notes to it. (This is the text that appears in the “i” icon next to a payment or charge.) To do this, all you need to do is click on the drop-down menu next to the payment method/charge type as shown below:

Link card to reservation and room reservation

When adding a credit card transaction in HOP, you are now able to select whether you want to link it to the reservation and the reservation item as well. This is particularly useful if one person is making the booking and will also be staying in one of the rooms, but not paying for the entire reservation – this will enable you to take payment for their deposit to secure the reservation and then when the stay date arrives, take payment from the same card against their room as well:

Default room occupancy

You are now able to set default occupancy numbers for Adults, Children and Infants by going to Administration > Booking Engine in HOP. This will be shown in the search criteria when a guest is making an online reservation, improving the customer journey on the booking engine and helping you to ensure that bookings are being made for the appropriate number of people.

Multiple accommodation articles

You can now select a separate accommodation article to be used for billing of individual room types. This can be changed by going to Rooms > Room Types and editing each room type in turn, but if you do not select a room-specific article then HOP will use the default accommodation article that has been set as per your Administration menu. This will be useful, for example, if you wish to separate your accommodation revenue between your main hotel rooms and self catering lodges.

The following reports have been changed to include revenue from both the default accommodation article and Room Type accommodation articles:

• Market Revenue Report
• Occupancy Report
• Snapshot Report
• Account Revenue
• Dashboard average room rates

Charge articles per adult or child

You now have the option to tick a box to exclude children from an article. This will be useful if you, for example, only charge adults for breakfast on your B&B rates:

Complaints on room profiles

A new section has been added to the Rooms menu in HOP called ‘Room Reviews’ where you can log any complaints that you receive about a reservation. This includes feedback you have received directly and also from third party review sites. Each review can be linked to a maintenance issue that you have already logged in HOP and you can also choose to link it to a reservation (RES number) or reservation item (RESX number) if you wish. These sections are not mandatory, however you must type something into the ‘Details’ box in order to save the review.

The ‘Room Review Source’ and ‘Room Review Status’ are fully customisable and you can update both of these lists by going to Administration > Option Sets.

Linked to this, you now also have access to a report so that you can see an overview of all om Reviews in one go. This can be found by going to Reports > Housekeeping > Room Review Report.

Combined Housekeeping Report

At the request of a member of the HOP community, we have introduced this new report which will show your arrivals, stayovers and departures on the date of your choice. To locate this, please go to Reports > Front Desk > Combined Housekeeping where you can view the report onscreen or download to either PDF or CSV format.

Room Revenue and Room Nights booked

This new report will allow you to gather information on where your business is coming from, whether that be manually created reservations, third party sites like booking.com or via your Booking Engine. You can choose whether to show the revenue figures with or without VAT, and decide whether or not to include non-accommodation revenue (e.g. breakfasts). The report can be found by going to Reports > CRM and is called ‘Channel Manager Revenue Report’.

Availability Report

At the request of a member of the HOP community, a new Front Desk Report has been created to show room occupancy by day, split by your room types. The report is downloadable in PDF or CSV format or can be viewed onscreen as well.

Reservations Report

Go to Reports > Front Desk > Reservations and you can now filter the Reservations Report by selecting one or more rate plans. You can also sort the data by choosing which column headers to include.

Pickup report

A new filter has been added to the Pickup Report so that you can view the report by room type, as well as by rate plan, to help you take a more detailed look at the data.

Weekly Event Report

If you go to Reports > Front Desk > Events you can now see a customisable report that will allow you to see all events between two dates of your choice, as well as such criteria as:

• Created date
• Creator by
• Event Status
• Number of attendees

You can also sort the data by choosing which column headers to include and this report is available to export in PDF or CSV format.

Event text boxes are collapsible

Following feedback from a member of the HOP community, we have made an adjustment to the text boxes on your events. The ‘Description’, ‘Additional Info for Guests’ and ‘Menu’ fields are now all collapsible so that you can hide them away if you are not using them. This will help to speed up your navigation around the events module.

Event accommodation rooms 

When you confirm an event that has an accommodation booking linked to it, HOP will now ask if you want to confirm the room reservation(s) as well.

Invoicing Layout

For those HOP users that regularly receive large group reservations, a new feature has been introduced called ‘Print Summarised Invoice’ which will enable you to issue a shortened version of your invoice. This will make it easier for both parties to understand the bill and for you to hopefully reduce invoice queries and thus receive payment quicker.

Change number of items per screen

If you are on any screen in HOP that has a large amount of data (such as one of the reports) you can now choose how many items to show onscreen. Users now have the option to choose a page size from 15 to 200 rows per page. Once selected, the preference will be stored in a browser cookie specific to that page so that your choice will be remembered for next time.

Change email template used to send invoices

Following feedback from a member of the HOP community, we have now added the ability for you to create your own email template(s) that will be used when sending invoices to customers from within the system. This is available for both reservations and House Accounts. To set this up, go to Administration > Email Templates, click the “+Add” button and choose to create a template for Group Reservation Invoice, Group Reservation Proforma Invoice, House Account Invoice or Reservation Invoice. As with other email templates in HOP, you can use Custom Fields to populate the template with relevant details from the reservation.

For a reservation, the invoice email will be sent to either the booker or the company depending on which one is set when the reservation is first created, or if you edit it at a later date:

The process is similar for House Accounts in that you can now select which invoice email template to use when creating the House Account or later when editing:

Ready for Check In notification

This new feature will send an email to your guests to let them know that their room is ready for check in, if you mark it as "Vacant Clean Inspected" earlier than your standard check-in time. You will need to set up a new email template for this in Administration > Email Templates and enable the feature by going to Administration > Property and looking in the ‘Property Settings’ section:

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