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This feature release includes a number of enhancements to email functionality, as well as updates to rate plans and invoicing, more options for viewing and sorting reservations, and increased flexibility for Aloha tills. 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.
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Pay By Link
We are very pleased to launch this new feature to help you collect outstanding payments – instead of taking payment in person or over the telephone you can now email a link to your guests which will allow them to pay online. This will be especially useful for events, however can also be employed in scenarios when you need to collect additional charges or overdue amounts on a reservation as well.
To facilitate this, a new “custom field” has been added to the Invoice email templates called [[PayByLinkURL]]. If you add this into your invoice emails with a tag line such as "If you have an outstanding balance, please click here if you wish to pay online". Whenever there is an outstanding balance your customers can click on this link and it will take them to a secure payment page which will allow them to make a payment online. The transaction will be immediately posted to the relevant House Account or reservation as soon as it is complete.
Edit and Send booking confirmations
Another major update to email functionality is also being included in this release. If you manually send your reservation confirmation emails from HOP, or need to re-send one, you now have the ability to make amendments to the email “on the fly” before you send it.
Go to Reservations > Manage Reservations and locate a booking that you need to send a confirmation for. If you click on the Preview Confirmation Email button, at the bottom of the window you will now see both an 'Edit' and a 'Send' button. Clicking on the 'Edit' button will open up the same editing and formatting tools as you will see if you are creating a new template in HOP. Any changes that you make here will be
Reservation notes on Room Schedule
At the request of several members of the HOP Community, we have introduced a feature to enable you to see guest notes on the Room Schedule view.
If you go to Reservations > Room Schedule, you can now view notes that have been added to the reservation and/or room reservation by hovering over a guest’s name.
Apply restrictions to articles or services
We are now introducing the ability to apply date restrictions to Services that you offer on your booking engine so that you can inhibit guests from booking things that are not available on particular dates. For example, if you have an optional Dinner package but do not wish to sell it over Christmas and New Year, you can temporarily disable it from, say, 20 December to 5 January.
To configure this setting, please go to Administration > Excluded Services. On this page, you will see that we have now added date fields for you to fill in, as well as being able to tell HOP which Services are not available per room type. The date fields are not mandatory so you can leave them blank (no date restriction), add a "from" date only (the Service is any time before this date), add a "to" date only (the Service is available any time after this date, or a "from" and "to" date (the Service is not available for a given period of time). Please note that the dates you enter here are inclusive so in the below example, the "3 Course Dinner" is only bookable for stays that fall either side of the date range shown:
Add a supplement to rate plans
The process for this is similar to adding articles into your rate plans. To set this up, go to Rates > Rate Plans and you will now see a new tab called 'Services' below the 'Articles' one. Simply use the drop-down menu to select one or more of your pre-existing services and tick the box on the right depending on whether each one is included in the price or will be charged on top:
Sort reservations by status
When viewing your bookings on the Manage Reservations screen, you now have the ability to click on the Status column to give you a clearer view of whether each one is Provisional, Confirmed, Checked-in, Checked-out or a No Show and deal with them in bulk. For example, if you have a group reservation arriving during the day and each room is checking in separately, you can now view the reservation as a whole and sort the room reservations by status so that you can check them in as they arrive.
Sort reservations on Bulk Check Out screen
Similar to the above enhancement, you can now click on any of the column headers on the Bulk Check Out page to sort how they are listed onscreen.
"Jump to Today" button in Room Schedule
If you are on the Room Schedule page and quickly need to get back to today’s date (e.g. you receive a telephone enquiry or a guest walks into Reception) we have introduced a Today button to help you do this. We believe that you will find this is much quicker than using the Day/Week/Month buttons or locating the correct date on the date picker and save you valuable time, especially if the Room Schedule screen is the page you use most frequently.
Emailing invoices from CSL
You can now re-send invoices through the (Customer Sales Ledger) CSL in HOP. Just go into CSL > Accounts Overview and on the right-hand side of each invoice listed you will see an envelope icon. Click on there to send the invoice.
Send Custom Emails
You can now send a custom email from a reservation (RES number) as well as a reservation item (RESX number). Click on Send Custom Email on the drop-down menu in Manage Reservations to be presented with a list of the Manually Triggered emails that you have set up in HOP and choose which one to send.
Ability to change email preference on a Group Reservation
Emails for a 'Tour Group or Corporate' Group Reservation are always sent to the booker, whereas if the Group Reservation type is set as 'Individual' HOP sends emails to the guests in each room. You can now change the email preference on a Group Reservation by editing the Group Reservation type.
Summarise Dinner Allocation Rate plans on Invoice
On a rate plan that includes a food or drink allocation (e.g. a Dinner, Bed and Breakfast rate) that you then post till charges against, your invoices will now summarise how the charges are broken down on an invoice but only if the amount charged to the guest's room is more than the built-in allocation.
For example, if you have a Dinner, Bed and Breakfast (DBB) rate of £150 per night which includes a £50 dinner allocation, if the guest's meal comes to less than or equal to their allocation, the invoice will simply show a rate of £150. If the guest has more than the allocation in the rate plan (e.g. £57.50) then their invoice will show £150 DBB and a separate line item of £7.50 in food charges).
Extension of Sales Types for Micros and Aloha interfaces
For hotels with these tills you will now be able to map extended sales types for different areas. For example, if you have a café and a restaurant you can map Café|Breakfast|Food and Restaurant|Breakfast|Food to give more detailed reporting. This will require an adjustment in the mappings on your till (please contact your EPOS provider if you need assistance with this) and on HOP (go to Accounting Manager > Article Sales Types).
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