Make room availability dependant of another

Hello,

Thanks for the detailed message. What you’re looking for is the “shared calendar” function, which is available by default in the edit page of each room-type created through VikBooking.

This is a widely used feature among our clients that connect their properties through our Channel Manager with OTAs like Airbnb or Vrbo. For example, their often have the need to advertise a listing called “Entire property” as well as to offer the possibility of booking individual apartments/rooms, for example “Room A” and “Room B”.

In the above example, the room-type “Entire Property” should share their calendars respectively with “Room A” and “Room B”, while the latter rooms should not share their calendars. With this configuration by booking the “Room A”, the system will make unavailable on the booked nights both “Room A” and “Entire Property”, but “Room B” would still be available. Instead, by booking the “Entire Property”, all 3 room-types would be unavailable on the requested dates.

This is something you can also test with the free version of VikBooking without needing to purchase the commercial version. Our only suggestion is to consider giving your packages/formulas some names that can let the guests (and the admins) identify the rooms booked (i.e. “Entire Chalet”, “Half Chalet” etc..).

Our example of rooms and shared calendar settings could be adjusted to your scenario as follows:

• Create the 3 individual room-types in VikBooking respectively for Room 1, Room 2 and Room 3 with their specific capacity of min/max adults, children and total guests.
• Create one room-type for each combination of multiple rooms (packages/formulas) that you would like to offer and select the individual rooms with which the calendars should be shared.
• Define the nightly rates for each room-type (individual rooms as well as package-rooms).

Please notice that with the above configuration you should not allow guests to book multiple room-types with the same reservation, because you are already offering solutions (packages/formulas) that include multiple rooms. You will find an apposite setting in the Configuration page (section “Search Parameters”) to define the number of rooms that can be booked on any booking/search form of VikBooking. That value should be set to 1 in order to disallow bookings for multiple rooms.

Also, just for your information, in case you are interested into using our full solution (VikBooking + Vik Channel Manager + E4jConnect) to sync your website with various OTAs through real-time API connections, the system would be ready to support the same shared calendars configuration with any OTAs. The only channel with which we do not recommend advertising “packages” of rooms is Booking.com, for the sole reason that they allow bookings for multiple rooms. In this case you would risk to get bookings for two rooms, like “Entire Property” and “Room A” without the Channel Manager being able to tell Booking.com that those room types are sharing their calendars. In this case, on Booking.com you should only have the individual rooms (Room 1, Room 2 and Room 3) in order to have the Channel Manager do its job correctly.

We hope this is helpful.

The VikWP Team

Hello,

Thanks a lot, couldn’t ask for a better answer !

Just to clarify, I created the 3 individual room types by adding them to the Rooms list, but how can I create the formulas ? I can’t find the option that allows to select the rooms I created.

Thanks a lot again

Hello,

The formulas like the “Entire property” in our example must be room-types as well with their own guests capacity and pricing information.

For this reason, beside the 3 individual room records, you should create another room-type for each formula you would like to offer so that you can actually use the shared calendar settings.

For example, you are going to need a room-type for the formula “Package L+” and this room should share its calendars with “Room 1” and “Room 3”. Then you need another room record for the formula “Package XL” to share the calendars with “Room 1” and “Room 3”, lastly you need another room-type for the formula “Package XL+” that should share the calendar with each individual room-type according to your initial example.

You should see your formulas/packages as if they were listings indicating the “full building” or the “entire property” so that you can offer larger booking options. Since the system will require a dedicated room-type for each “formula”, you will have to specify the guests capacity as well as the pricing setting for each room-type that shares the calendars with other rooms.

Please notice that the “shared calendar” settings are not retroactive. This means that when you set this up, all future reservations will affect the availability of all calendars shared across the rooms booked, but in case you have some older reservations saved in your system, these will not affect any other room calendar’s availability. Therefore, we suggest setting this up correctly prior to putting the system live/online. By using the page “Calendar” in Vik Booking you can easily test the result by making a manual reservation for a formula or for an individual room to make sure the correct rooms will reflect the proper availability.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

The VikWP Team