All the reservations that you capture in ResRequest have a status. This status communicates whether the reservation is stock holding or non-stock holding – see the Stock holding / non stock holding tutorial for more information. The reservation status may also be used to manage certain work processes.
The reservation status is defined during reservation creation – if not manually selected the status will default to Provisional status meaning the stock is being held for the specified dates. If the guest/agent confirms the reservation at a later stage the status may be changed. Reservation status is displayed on the Details tab of a reservation. The date when the status was defined is also indicated.
Change the status of a booking by selecting the ‘Change Status’ button. Be aware that you must be in edit mode and the ability to change status is also dependant on user access.
ResRequest has 5 statuses available: Confirmed, Provisional, Waitlist, Cancelled and Quotation.
Best practices
It’s recommended that you use Quotation to release Provisional Bookings, and Cancelled to cancel Confirmed Bookings. It is important that all your users apply the same rules for cancelling/releasing bookings otherwise your reporting will not be accurate.
Accounts can include Cancelled and Confirmed bookings in revenue and payments due reports because all cancelled bookings where fees don’t apply will have a 0 balance and only those where fees are due will show as values on the reports. If Provisional Bookings are cancelled instead of changed to Quotation – these too will show up on revenue reports which is why it’s important to follow these rules.
Simultaneous status change
Since ResRequest enables you to have multiple users, there may be a situation where two users logged into the system at the same time change the status of two different bookings for the same accommodation type at the same time. If the bookings are both changed from non-stock holding to stock holding statuses – but there is only one available room – there would be a conflict. The person that selected the status change first will be successful and the other will be notified via a popup that the booking may not be changed to a stock holding status.
To release stock that is being held by a provisional or confirmed reservation, click on the ‘Change Status’ button on the details tab of the reservation and change the status to ‘Quotation’ or ‘Cancelled’, whichever applies. This stock is then available to be booked again.
You may use the Reservation status to manage your cancelled bookings where the guest/agent owes a cancellation fee. We recommend you apply the ‘Quotation’ status to Provisional bookings that are cancelled and apply the ‘Cancelled’ status to Confirmed bookings that are consequently cancelled and incur a cancellation charge. This means you may easily report on Cancelled bookings and identify your debtors owing a cancellation fee.
For more on working with cancellations, take a look at the Working with cancellations tutorial in the Financial module.
Provisional bookings have a set expiry date (the provisional time period is set up in defaults) and at midnight on the date of expiry the stock is released and is available to be booked again. The reservation is still in the system but the status will be highlighted in red and the date on which it expired is also indicated. This is particularly important as the Reservation goes from being a stock holding booking to a non-stock holding booking automatically. It is essential to keep track of your Provisional bookings on a weekly basis or set periodic checks that are determined in your SOP. This may be done by running Provisional Expiry reports so you can:
If you don’t keep track of your Provisional bookings and manually extend the expiry date, the stock may be released automatically and rebooked. Another issue is that if expired Provisionals are cancelled and are left with the expired Provisional status, you will need to remember to specifically exclude ‘Expired Provisionals’ on certain reports otherwise your revenue statistics will be incorrect.
To release a Provisional booking:
A great way to manage waitlists is using the Reservation booking Status; Waitlist. With this method you can use reports to track the Waitlist status plus when a user cancels bookings, they’ll automatically be notified that space is now available for Waitlisted bookings stored in ResRequest.
Here’s how this works:
2. When a stock-holding booking is Cancelled or set to Quotation it may mean that availability can now be allocated to a Waitlist booking. When a booking’s status is changed to a non-stock-holding status, the user editing the booking is automatically notified that there is now space for the Waitlisted booking.
3. To make this work easily for your team it’s good practise to define your rules for Waitlist prioritisation so your team know which booking they can bump from Waitlist to a stock-holding status, for example your policy may be first-come-first-served or you may prioritise the value of the booking or the importance of the booking agent. By defining these norms your team can quickly prioritise Waitlist and close a new sale!
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ResRequest has many reports to show Waitlisted reservations by create date, consultant, agent etc. Another great, quick and easy trick many of our users love is to use the Requests Received report to manage Waitlisted bookings. How? Simply change your Waitlist booking consultant to ‘No Consultant’. Once you save this change, the Waitlist booking is automatically flagged in the Requests Received report. Then remember to click your Requests Received report occasionally to check if any of your Waitlists are now available.
A purple handle shows on days where Waitlisted bookings are included in availability.
If you are working with bookings where only one itinerary item will be Waitlisted, split that line item into a separate booking and follow the steps above. To easily reconcile bookings, remember to cross-reference the Waitlist and parent booking in the Voucher fields. A good naming convention is to use the reservation number followed by the status e.g. WB937-Waitlisted is added to the Voucher field of the parent booking and WB936-Confirmed is added to the Voucher field of the Waitlisted booking.
Reservation status application and management should be determined in your standard operating procedure (SOP). This will ensure that all your system users apply the same rules for cancelling/releasing bookings otherwise your reporting will not be accurate.
