Direct booking controls let you restrict when and how a rate plan appears on your booking engine. They apply to your booking engine only. Set up Direct booking controls when you create or edit a rate plan in Rooms and rates > Rate plans.

You can set up the following Direct booking controls:

For channel (OTA) promotions and additional controls, set these up directly in each channel's extranet directly.

Use Applicable dates (also called stay dates) to make a rate plan bookable only when the guest's check-in, stay nights, and check-out fall within the dates you select. You can set multiple date ranges, select specific days of the week, or exclude a date range. Note: specific times/hours of the day are not supported.

➕ For example, for a Valentine's Day deal, use Applicable dates to only allow guests to check in on Valentine's Day, or check in on Valentine's Day and stay the rest of the week.

Use Advertised dates (also called sell dates) to control the booking window when guests can book the rate. You can set multiple date ranges, select specific days of the week, or exclude a date range.

➕ For example, if you want to create a Valentine’s Day deal, you could configure Advertised dates so that the direct booking rate plan can only be booked from 1 January to 14 February.

Maximum advance booking dates sets the earliest a guest can book a direct rate before their check-in date. Use it to stop guests booking too far ahead. For example, if you set it to 180 days, a guest can book when check-in is 180 days away or sooner, but not earlier than that.

Maximum advance booking dates is set separately for each direct rate. It applies to one direct rate on your booking engine, not to all rates or all channels at once.

You can also use it for last-minute deals. For example, a rate that can only be booked one to two days before check-in.

➕ For example:

💡 Maximum advance booking dates is the opposite of the Release period setting, which is the minimum number of days guests can book in advance of the check-in date.

These two settings do different things:

If you want to stop sending rates and availability beyond a set number of days on all rates and channels including your direct booking engine, for example you do not want any of your rates or channels bookable more than year ahead, use the update period.

Encourage more direct bookings by setting up Dynamic discounts (length of stay discounts, package deals and stay pay deals) for your booking engine.

The Highlight rate plan on direct booking engine feature lets you display your best rate plans and their inclusions and discounts at the top of your booking engine, helping to attract more direct bookings.

Set up mobile only rate plans for your booking engine by enabling the Restrict rate to mobile device toggle. This is an easy way to make a direct booking promotion available exclusively through mobile devices.

If you only want to show a rate when a customer enters an assigned promotion code, enable the Restrict rate toggle when editing a Direct booking rate. You can use this setting to create offers for select groups. If the toggle is switched off, the room rate will be visible to all customers on your booking engine.

⚠️ Before you turn on the Restrict rate toggle, create a promotion code and assign it to this rate plan.

To restrict a rate to a promotion code: