Which Rate Plans should I create?

In the Rate Plans section of Vik Booking, you are asked to create your Types of Prices in order to be able to set up the rooms rates. How to know what are the correct Rate Plans to configure?

First of all, it’s important to say that Rate Plans should reflect your conditions of stay or your cancellation policies, as well as some services included in the rate plan (like breakfast or other meals/services).

Once you have correctly configured your Rate Plans, you can move onto the next step of setting up the base rooms rates for the longest period of the year and for each rate plan created, so that this configuration will no longer need any modifications in the future. This is because you will be able to change the costs for each rate plan and rooms for any dates, seasons or periods of the current and future years ahead.

Valid examples of Type of Prices (Rate Plans) are:

- "Standard Rate" plus, eventually, another rate plan called "Non Refundable Rate" to offer lower rates with more strict cancellation fees.

- alternatively, those properties who offer different types of stay, could opt for a configuration of 2/3 rate plans like "Breakfast Only", "Half-Board", "Full Board".

For example you can offer a free cancellation booking of the rooms as well as a no cancellation/non-refundable price. Alternatively, those properties who offer different types of stay, could opt for a configuration of 2/3 rate plans like "Breakfast Only", "Half-Board", "Full Board".

This way, each of your rate plans will offer a different pricing for the stay and customers will be able to pick their preferred type of price and the relative cost of the room.

You should not create type of prices to reflect your seasonal rates or short periods like “Summer”, “Winter”, “Christmas”, "High Season", "Low Season" and so on ... because you can already set a different cost for your rate plans on special festivities, dates or seasons.

If you need to set a different pricing on some seasons of the year, weekends or festivities, you can quickly adjust the prices of your existing rate plans by using the Special Prices or the Pricing Calendar on the page Rates Overview.

There exists also the Derived rate plan feature that allows to automatically inherit any pricing modification from one parent rate plan. By enabling this parameter, you will find more settings to configure the "rule" between parent and derived rate plans. Useful, for example, to set up a Non-Refundable Rate that is always 10% cheaper than the Standard Rate. If enabled the "Follow restrictions" parameter, also the restrictions will be automatically inherited from the parent rate plan.

NOTE FOR VIK CHANNEL MANAGER USERS:  when sending the bulk action Rates Upload, the system will transmit to the channel only the type of price you have chosen from the drop-down menu without considering the derived rate plans.

In conclusion, please always keep in mind that:

1. Every Rate Plan will support different rates on any days, weekends, seasons, festivities or periods of the year.

2. It is only necessary to set up one rate plan, you do not need to create more than one rate plan.

3. Rate plans can be closed on certain dates of the year, for example you could choose to turn off the "Standard Rate" in a high season period to only offer the "Non Refundable Rate" which has more strict cancellation policies.

4. Your guests will see the name of the rate plans, and reading something like "high season" or "low season" is not what you want for the booking process.

5. Closing/opening a rate plan on some dates is time consuming and wrong, unless you have specific needs to do it, and so a (wrong) rate plan called "High Season" would also be visible in the "low season period" to your guests - not what you want or need.

6. It is completely useless to have a rate plan dedicated to a season, since the cost for each rate plan can be modified on every date of the year by using the Special Prices or the Calendar Pricing in the page Rates Overview.

7. Only use the Derived Rate Plans function if you need to create linked types of price.