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This feature release launches our brand new booking engine, which is live as of now for all HOP customers. It also includes a number of enhancements to the online booking process, rate plan promotions, two key reports and a new accounting software integration. 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
NEW Booking Engine
We are extremely pleased to bring you our new and improved booking engine. This new, fresh, design not only updates the look and feel of the booking engine, but also offers:
The colour palette used on the new booking engine is the HOP default branding. Please contact [email protected] if you would like to discuss any changes to make this more sympathetic to your own aesthetic.
Please see the below screenshots from the booking process, or click through to the booking engine from your website using your Book Now button to experience the new customer journey!
Room Dimensions
You are now able to add room dimensions to HOP, which will display on the booking engine and help your customers in deciding which room they would like to book. To configure this, all you need to do is go to Rooms > Room Types in the PMS and add this into the newly-created field shown here:
These will then be displayed on the room details section of the booking engine like this:
Star ratings
We have now introduced the ability to display star ratings on the booking engine. To set this up, simply go to Administration > Booking Engine and scroll down to the 'Hotel Rating' section where you can select your Rating Provider (Self Assessed, AA, VisitBritain, VisitWales, Visit Scotland, Tourism Ireland or HotelStars.eu) and the corresponding number of stars. This will instantly be updated on the booking engine
If there is an awarding body not on this list, please email [email protected] so that we can look at adding this to the list in a future release.
Option to say Bed not Room
To increase flexibility on the booking engine, we are now able to offer HOP users the option to amend the naming of the accommodation units that they sell. For example, a self catering business may not sell "Rooms" but instead offer "Flats", "Cottages" or "Units". For all customers, the default setting is "Rooms" but can be amended by going to Administration > Booking Engine and updating the field shown below:
Google Analytics & Facebook Pixel
We have expanded the capabilities of the Google Analytics integration, a feature that was already available in HOP, to allow you to use Coupon Keys (e.g. to track Promo Codes). In addition to this, if you use Facebook Pixel for your website analytics, you can now add your Pixel ID to HOP as well. Please navigate to Administration > Booking Engine in order to set up one or both of these:
Add time sensitive promotions to Rate Plans
With this release comes the ability to create discounted promotions on your rate plans. This builds upon - and will work alongside - the existing Promo Code functionality that we already offer but you can now set up multiple promotions on your rate plans based upon:
To set this up, go to Rates > Rate Plans and click on the name of your chosen rate plan to edit it. You will then see a new tab down the left-hand side called 'Promotions'. On here, you can set up one or more promotions, such as in the examples below:
Hide option to search for children/infants
If your accommodation has age limits on the guests that are able to stay with you, the ability to include children and/or infants in an availability search on the booking engine can now be controlled from within HOP. If you head to Administration > Booking Engine and scroll down to the section called 'Occupancy Controls' you will see that there are two new check boxes. By default these are ticked but if you un-tick one or both then this will remove them from the search box on the booking engine.
Housekeeping Daily Report
Following a request from a member of the HOP community, if you navigate to Reports > Housekeeping > Housekeeping Daily you will see that this report now includes a date range filter. This means that you can forecast your workload and staffing for, say, the coming week or month, instead of looking at these figures on a day by day basis.
Historical Company Night Stay Revenue report
This report now includes a 'Show Company Totals' button underneath the filters for Market, Source etc. If you click this, the total number of room nights booked will be displayed alongside the number of rooms booked, to give you further information on your business customers.
Global Daily Charges
To cater for overseas territories, we have added a menu item in the Accounting Manager section called 'Global Daily Charges'. This will enable HOP users to configure local tax rates and select an article that it gets posted against. The charges can then be attached to your rate plans as needed:
Xero integration
We are now able to offer a direct integration with the accounting package Xero. A full step-by-step guide for this has been added to the Support portal. Please click here to view this.
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