Your ResRequest system may exist or be installed in multiple environments both on and off the internet. The different installations of ResRequest are known as ‘Environments’. For a comprehensive tutorial of how to work with different ResRequest servers and multiple environments, how Master status works and how environments synchronise with each other, see the Environment setup tutorials.

As the reservationist, you need to understand how this setup works as you may have a team of reservationists working from different locations and a Property environment at the lodge being used by lodge staffers.

In a situation where a team of reservationists are working from different locations, they may set the web environment to master and all work off the internet concurrently. If there are any Reservation offline environments, these would be set to slave. All parties would have to communicate before changing the status to avoid data conflict issues as synchronisation between the offlines and the web occur periodically.

In a situation where a reservationist normally works off the reservation offline environment at the office but decides to work remotely for a few weeks, the offline environment may be changed to slave status and the web environment set to master so the reservationist may work off the internet from anywhere with full editing rights. The ability to force an environment into Master status is also possible – to give the user full editing rights – but this needs to be carefully managed as it may lead to data conflicts. If properly managed, the ability to operate in different environments is extremely useful.

A property environment is separate from the reservations environment in that it has exclusive ownership of its data (data created on the environment). Users working in property environments may not edit data created in reservations environments – only add to it e.g. add payments, add extras. Any additions that add to the booking’s financials will be added in a new, property-specific folio which may not be edited by users in the reservations environments (be it from the web or offline reservations environment).

In summary, reservationists working from different locations can all work concurrently with full access rights on the web environment. However, if an offline Reservations environment requires full update capability for any period of time, the update rights on any other Reservations environment will be limited during that time.