Releases in July, September, and December brought Security Enhancements to prevent fraud and ‘phishing’ attempts, as well as Enhancements and Bug Fixes as follows:
New PMS Rate Type Additions
- Long Term rates: Available in MyPMS only (they cannot be booked via OTA/GDS/Booking Engines) allows charging for intervals based on days or calendar months. Days make an entry from the Cost field for each '#of days' the booking lasts; Months make an entry from the Cost field for each 'calendar' date the booking lasts. More details, and examples, here.
- Items Include in a rate: A rate that can be sold that includes an Inventory Item with the rate. You must first create the Item to be sold with the rate, and make are the taxes applied to that Item are accurate. Then add that Item to the Rate, and choose whether to Add the Item Cost to the rate or not, and if the Item should recur each x days.. More details, and examples, here.
Self Check-out and Self Cancellation is now available to all customers who are using Self Check-in. More details here.
‘UpSell’ add-on Items during both the Self Check-in and Self Check-out process, with documentation and pictures of how this works here.
Yield Management now supports yielding rules applying to either a full property or via room types(s) specifically.
MyPMS still fully supports yield management at the property level (ie, trigger a Rule when property occupancy is >50 %), but now properties can choose what method works best for their hotel: property occupancy or room type occupancy.
The latest yield update also streamlines yield rules to support individual yield thresholds (versus stacked or aggregate rules below). See an overview on our website and detailed documentation here.
Reporting and Logging
We added additional logging for the sending of SMS messages to customers and property managers
Detailed Reporting for Cancellations makes it easier to evaluate who and when cancellations occurred, and how much ‘lost revenue’ insured as a result.
Taxes
- Added the ability for the Owners Statement to show specific taxes collected per Owner booking for ease of tax reporting
- We added the ability to make Tax Exempt on multiple taxes when making a booking.
- We now support 'Date Based' Taxes within MyPMS and our Channel Manager to define what tax(s) are 'Date Based' to be in effect for a specified time and thus quoted when they apply. Tax jurisdictions are beginning to alter when they charge some taxes - and not others - and this can now be automated.
Booking Engine
Two Booking Engine Calendar templates, 03 and 04, now support the display of the ‘lowest’ rate on the calendar. This will allow your guests to see the lowest rate over a two-month period directly on the calendar.
We added support for the Flywire payment gateway to allow better utilization of property and guest foreign exchange (FX) processes.
Global Distribution
· Added new support for travel agent ‘Best Available Rate’ (BAR rates) within the GDS
MyGuest
- Updated the iOS and Android apps with security and privacy requirements.
- We have improved the Housekeeping App to enable all ‘needs clean’ events (stay over and full clean) to default to a single Housekeeping User so that requests don’t need to be made manually.
- We have improved the Housekeeping App to enable all ‘needs clean’ events (stay over and full clean) to default to a single Housekeeping User so that requests don’t need to be made manually.
- There has been confusion when a request was made with an email that existed, but did not match the name - did we update their Guest record? Either decision has pros and cons, but we simplified it so that if a Guest makes a request using an email address, we use that Guest record to link to that request even if the name is a bit different. We use the new ‘name’ to display on the Request Ticket, so that the Guest sees all matching. This creates less duplicate records, though is not perfect we’re all aware.
- We now allow managers to define which data collection fields (name, room number, email, etc) are required for their ‘request templates’.
Bug Fixes
· Search Bookings Now Correctly Querying Status
· Fixed Group Booking Status Update from UNCONFIRMED to CONFIRMED
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