Numbering and Distinctive Features

If your Room Type has more than one unit available as full inventory, then you can specify certain features for each unit. By editing one room from the back-end, you can display the Distinctive Features for each unit of that room type.

The Distinctive Features are composed of an unlimited number of Key-Value Pairs to define the name of the Feature (Key) and the Value of the feature (Value) for each unit. The default feature for each unit is the 'Room Number' which is the feature that is mostly needed by any type of accommodation.

Using this function will guarantee a better management result for the back-end so that you will know, for example, in which room number each customer is staying.

The screen shot below shows a room type called 'Triple Deluxe' with 5 units available as full inventory. There are two Distinctive Features specified for each unit: Room Number and Room Code.

There is a setting in the VikBooking Configuration page to enable the assignment of the rooms units to each booking. This setting is called 'Auto-Assign Room Units' and it should be enabled if you are going to number each unit of your rooms or to set some Distinctive Features in general.

The result of using this function is the one displayed in the screen shot below for one booking for this room type 'Triple Deluxe':

The same assignment is displayed in the Dashboard page, under the section 'Today's Occupancy'. Any receptionist will easily see in which rooms certain customers are staying:

Using the Distinctive Features is useful also for the page Availability Overview

Allocating certain customers to certain indexes of your rooms will make all the management functions easier. Rather than using many different room types, thanks to this function it is intuitive to manage the exact rooms booked even when working with less room types, but with more units available. This is the result of the page Availability Overview that shows the current availability of each sub-unit:

The last thing you should know about the Distinctive Features is that the confirmation email message sent to the Customers, could contain this information. This means that the customer could be informed through the confirmation email about the Room Number (or any other feature) that was assigned to his booking.

From the Configuration page, 3rd tab Views and Layout, you can edit the default Customer Email Template with the HTML editor. Search in the file for the special tag {roomfeature VBODEFAULTDISTFEATUREONE} and you will find the explanation for using other distinctive features. Remove that special tag for not including the Room Number in the confirmation email for the customer and for use this function only for management purposes. Please notice that the confirmation email for the customer will include this information only if the Configuration setting 'Auto Assign Room Units' is enabled.