Knowledgebase
Promo codes for Discounts, Packages or Promotions on my website
Posted by Jesse Chieppa on 12 Dec 2012 07:50 PM

MyPMS and Management Tool customers can offer Promo Codes to guests on a website booking engine. These Promo Codes can be used to deliver specific or discounted rate plans or packages by using a local Agent and then mapping that 'promo code' to the Agents Allocations. Follow these steps to set up a Promo Code and corresponding Rate Plan.

  1. First you need to enable the use of Promo Codes. Go to SETUP | SETTINGS | BOOKING ENGINE SETTINGS and set 'Use Promo Code' to 'Yes'. This will enable the promo code box on the inquiry page of the Booking Engine (all our Booking Engine templates use this setting).
  2. Next,  modify or setup the proper local agent. Go to SETUP | RELATIONSHIPS | MY AGENTS. Use an existing local agent or create a new one, however it is important to notes that the Agent ID becomes the Promo Code. To enable the Promo Code in the Agent. Go to the Agent details and set the Agent Class to Promo Code
  3. Once this is completed, then simply allocate the Rate Plans or Packages to the proper Room types and to the Agent/Promo Code in Agent Relationships. SETUP | RELATIONSHIPS | AGENT RELATIONSHIPS. See Agent Allocations. This is where you can use 'Rate Loading' to quickly create a % or flat fee increase/decrease for use in the rates allocated without having to modify the rate values.
  4. if you wish for the Promotion to only be for specific date9s) then use the 'Close' values on teh rates being allocated to onlymake them available for the time period desired.

Here are two examples of how to use promo code agents to either provide a flat discount, or to sell as a Package. These are just two examples of how using Agent Allocation features in BookingCenter can help your online marketing. For step-by-step instructions, see Promo Codes

Flat Discount: Our hypothetical property wishes to offer a 15% discount to all employees of a local company 'Ted's Widgets' when staying in our Queen or King rooms. We first create our local agent at SETUP | RELATIONSHIPS | MY AGENTS and name it TEDWIDG, we also set the agent class to 'promo code'. Next we go to SETUP | RELATIONSHIPS | AGENT RELATIONSHIPS and allocate our Rack Rate Plan(s) for the Queen and King types to the agent. Once that's done, while still on the Agent Relationships screen we once again find agent TEDWIDG and set Rate Load to -15. When employees of Ted's Widgets go to make a booking on the booking engine they would enter TEDWIDG in the promo code box and the Room Types and Rates displayed to them would be adjusted by the rate loading, in this case 15%.

Selling a Package: Our hypothetical property has a dynamic or fixed package in which we offer a two night stay in a queen room and one full day of guided fly fishing. We want people to be able to book this off our website with the code 'FLYGUIDE' so we create a local agent named FLYGUIDE and set the agent class to promo code. Then we allocate only the desired package to the queen type for agent FLYGUIDE. Because we're not trying to discount the package via the promo code there's no need to adjust rate loading.

Specific Dates to Make the Rate or Package Available: If you use the BookingCenter Booking Engine, and wish to make a Discount or package available only on certain dates, then the control must be made on the Package (packages have dates available options) or on the Rate used for the Discount.  So, for the example above, if the rack rate plans were allocated, and this Discount was only to be available for April 1-10, then the dates for all other days would need to be CLOSED for the Discount to only be bookable between April 1-10. For this reason, it is usually best to create a new rate for purposes of allocating to a Discount Agent that will be CLOSED most of the time, so that it doesn't affect your use of 'rack rates'.

 

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