Important to know:
Rate plans are a way to sell your room types in different ways (based on restrictions and pricing) to help to attract more travellers to your property and increase potential reservations.
Different rate plans attract different travellers to your property. The more variety of rate plans you have, the more chances of attracting different groups of travellers to your property.
What are rate plans?
Rate plans are a way to sell your room types in different ways (based on restrictions and pricing) to help to attract more travellers to your property and increase potential reservations.
You can have multiple rate plans for one room type based on different settings such as length-of-stay restrictions, release period, cancellation policy, and breakfast options.
What are some examples of rate plans?
Some popular rate plans are:
Non-refundable — a non-refundable rate plan that is usually 10-15% cheaper than the standard rate.
Length-of-stay — give your guests a discount if they book a certain number of nights (for example, guests must book a minimum of 2 nights).
Early bird (release period) — give your guests a discount if they book in advance (for example, guests must book at least 30 days in advance).
Breakfast included — include breakfast at a greater rate than the standard rate plan.
What are the benefits of creating multiple rate plans?
Different rate plans attract different travellers to your property. The more variety of rate plans you have, the more chances of attracting different groups of travellers to your property.
You can set up different rate plans with different restrictions, discounts, for different room types, and so on.
What are derived rate plans?
Derived rate plans derive their daily rates from another rate. The price of the derived rate plan will be automatically adjusted by adding or subtracting a percentage or amount (or both) from another rate plan, which is usually the standard or best available rate plan.
What are manual rate plans?
Setting your rate plans with a manual pricing setting means that you will input and adjust rates manually via the Inventory tab. Note that if you want to create many rate plans, adjusting prices manually can lead to more chances of human error.
What are the benefits of having derived rate plans?
Derived rate plans are efficient and reduce the effort of needing to change the prices of multiple rates manually. Using derived rates can save you time and help you to better organise and structure your inventory.
Derived rates will automatically be adjusted if the rate they are derived from changes — meaning less chance of potential pricing errors.
Once I have created a derived rate, can it be changed to manual?
Once a derived rate plan is created, it cannot be changed to manual (or vice versa). You will need to create a new rate plan and delete the one that is no longer needed. You can however add a rate override once in a while to create an exception to the derivation ( Edit room rate > Pricing details > Override rate plan pricing).
You will not be able to delete a rate plan if there are past, present or future reservations without status cancelled or checked-out. If you attempt to delete it, you will see an error message if the rate plan has any open reservations. In the meantime, you can apply stop sells and wait until the last reservation has been checked-out before you delete the rate plan.
Can I sell my rooms at a different price based on the number of guests booking the room?
Yes, to define the final price depending on the number of guests booking the room, you can set up your Occupancies and the Default extra adult/child/infant rate.
Occupancy settings only affect your direct booking engine. If you need to change this for the channels, you will need to change this either in the mapping (if available on the integration for the channel) or directly in each channel’s extranet.
Can I sell my rate plan through a promo code only?
Yes, you can for Direct booking. To do this, create a promotion code, then create/edit a Direct booking rate and enable the Restrict rate toggle if you only want to show the rate on your booking engine when a customer enters an assigned promotion code. If the Restrict rate toggle is switched off, the room rate will be visible to all customers on your booking engine.