Product Release - 16.12.2019

This feature release includes updates to rates and reservations, the Booking Engine, the Events and Arrivals reports, payment methods and payment types. Please share this with all relevant staff at your property.

We’d love to hear your feedback on our new features; please feel free to use the Comments section below.

Contents

• Hotel Group Name
• Sales View default number of occupants
• Remove attached invoice from Follow Up emails
• Check-in and check-out end times
• Arrivals report – new column
• Events report – new columns and filter
• Transaction Refund Reason
• Share Credit Card Details By Default
• Store credit card as Primary
• Automatic payments
• Excluding Payment Types
• Additional charges on pro forma invoice
• User activity – Void Transactions

Hotel Group Name

For those hotels using HOP that form part of a group, it is now possible to include your group/company name on your invoices. To set this up, please go to Administration > Property and scroll down to the 'Property Settings' area until you see the ‘Hotel Group’ line.

Fill in your name and then save the changes by clicking on the 'Update Settings' button. This will then appear as the first line of your address on any invoices that you generate from within HOP, as shown here:

Sales View default number of occupants

Following feedback from several members of the HOP community, we have now introduced a function which will allow you to set the default number of adults and children that appear on the Sales View before you start a search. This means that you can have this number pre-populated in the Sales View to save you some time when checking availability and providing a quote if most of your enquiries are for a certain number of people (e.g. two adults).

To set this up, simply head to Administration > Property and fill in the boxes shown below, which can be found in the 'Property Settings' section:

Fill in your desired number(s) and then save the changes by clicking on the 'Update Settings' button. This will immediately be reflected in the Sales View the next time that you use it.

Remove attached invoice from Follow Up emails

If you have configured HOP to send follow-up emails to your guests after they check out, you can now choose whether or not to attach their invoice to this email. By default, the attachment is included so to remove it please go to Administration > Email Templates and then click on the name of the relevant template name to edit it. At the bottom of the screen, you will now see a checkbox called 'Attach Invoice'. By default this is ticked, so if you do not wish to include a copy invoice in your follow-up emails simply un-tick the box and press Save to update the email accordingly:

Check-in and check-out end times

We have now given you the ability to display your check-in and check-out end times alongside the times that they begin on the booking engine. This information will appear in the Booking Summary box on the Room Summary, Guest Info, Payment screen and Confirmation page as follows:

We have also added several new Custom Fields to enable you to include this information in your email templates as well, should you wish to update these as well.

Arrivals report – new column

We have now added a new column to the Arrivals report called ‘Price of Stay’ to help give you access to more information when getting an overview of your incoming guests. You can add or remove this (and any other) column heading on the report by clicking on the ‘Choose Columns’ button and then selecting or deselecting according to your preference.

Events report – new columns and filter

We have made some improvements to the Events report and added the following columns:

• Article
• Main Group
• Forecasted Revenue
• Actual Revenue

You can add or remove these (and any other) column headings by clicking on the ‘Choose Columns’ button and then selecting or deselecting according to your preference.

Additionally, you can now filter the report itself based on articles, using the new search box in the top right corner of the screen.

Transaction Refund Reason

We have now introduced a “Refund reason” on the refund window in HOP to help you track and report on the circumstances in which you may be giving out refunds. When you select to refund a transaction on a reservation or house account, you will now see a ‘Refund Reason’ box appear underneath the amount:

This can be configured to meet your needs (i.e. the wording altered to suit your business) by going to Administration > Option Sets and looking for the Transaction Refund Reason section.

Share Credit Card Details by Default

For increased flexibility, credit cards added to a reservation from online bookings (OTA or Booking Engine on your website) will now be available for you to charge at both the reservation and reservation item level. This mirrors the functionality that already exists for you to choose to share card details between the reservation and reservation item when adding a card manually.

Store credit card as Primary

We have now introduced the ability to mark a credit card as the primary card to be used or charged for a reservation or house account in the case where more than one has been used (e.g. the accommodation has been pre-paid on a corporate credit card but the guest is required to pay for any extras during their stay on their personal card). When you are adding a transaction (payment or pre-authorisation) you will now see that there is an additional checkbox for you to tick, located just underneath the CVC number field if you wish to designate the card as such:

Automatic payments

When creating a manual reservation, by default HOP will tick the 'Take payment automatically (if applicable)' box on the Summary page, to help you collect payments in line with your policies:

If you do not wish to have this feature enabled, please raise a ticket with HOP Support to opt out.

Excluding Payment Types

To configure this, please go to Accounting Manager > Payment Method and click on the name of the payment method you wish to edit. You will now see a checkbox that you can tick if you wish to stop this payment method from being used for manual transactions entered by your staff:

Once you have saved your changes, the onscreen overview will now display which ones are excluded, as shown in the example below:

Additional charges on pro forma invoice

The pro forma invoice will now include all charges that have been added to the reservation, rather than only any services or extras that were ‘booked’ at the time the reservation was created. To access this information, you do not need to take any additional steps; when you export a pro forma these will now automatically be included.

User activity – Void Transactions

To help give you greater control over financial transactions in your PMS, we have now added a new user activity called "Void Transactions" so that you can ensure that only the appropriate members of staff have the ability to carry out voids. To configure this for your staff, please go to Users > Manage Users and click on a username and then scroll down to 'Activities' to make the necessary amendments.

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