What's new in R49?

It's common for your clients to change their plans. The Move Booking button makes light work of the big task of shifting the booking's guestrooms and events to the right dates. Sometimes, when the booking you're moving is a long duration, the unexpected can happen. At times like this, it's always good having the right tools on hand to solve any problem.

With this release, we are introducing a self repair tool that allows you to course correct bookings that you may discover have only partially been moved.

• A new field on the Booking page, "Bypass Move Rules Until," has been added. This field allows your corporate or property administrators to set a time when some of the system's rules will be relaxed so the booking move may be completed. This can be up to two hours into the future. View this topic for more information on how to add this field to your Booking page layout.

• If a previous attempt to move a booking did not go as expected, the user will be taken to a new page when they click the Move Booking button. This page will include the previous attempt to move the booking along with the previous and new arrival dates. The details provided on the page include the number of events, room blocks, and bookings that were successfully moved in this attempt. The user can then decide to resume the move or revert the entire booking back to the original dates.

  

By popular demand, we are very excited to present a brand new guestroom user experience! With a new look and feel, we hope to dazzle you with a host of new features that will bring improvements and efficiencies to every day room block management.

Manage Guestrooms

Here are some of the highlights of the new experience.

• The current day Basic and Advanced tabs on the Room Block Details have been consolidated to a single page, making it easier to complete the fields you need when you are creating a new room block or modifying an existing block.
• On the same page, room types are available for you to select before you create the room block. We have conveniently listed both the room name and room type code in the list. Availability for each room type displays, along with the Minimum Acceptable Rate (MAR) for the dates being booked.
• Once the room block has been created, individual field cells display for each occupancy, making it visually clearer on what details need to be entered and where. Separating single from double occupancy no longer requires you to type a forward-slash (/). Triple and Quad occupancies can be toggled on and off easily depending on the booking requirements. The page will remember how you have personalized this setting.
• The popular keyboard shortcuts available today can be used in the new experience. Navigating between fields is a breeze. Simply use the arrow or TAB keys on your keyboard to move around seamlessly. CTRL+S is the newest shortcut designed to make it more efficient for you to save your work.
• For properties that work with multiple room blocks on a booking, a drop down field allows you to flip conveniently between each block. The room block name displays in full, along with the arrival and departure date of the block.
• Similar to the Fast Update button in the classic manage guestrooms experience, the Bulk Update menu option found in the More... button, allows you to update rooms and rates for specific room types on specific days. This is a convenient way to manage larger volumes of room block changes.
• The Clear All Data menu option, also located in the More... button, allows you to conveniently start fresh by removing all the rooms and rates from the current room night pattern.
• For properties that book large group sizes, one of the biggest benefits to this new experience is what the system is now capable of supporting. When a user is creating or updating a room block, they will be able to enter up to 1,200 roomnight records on the room block without encountering a systems limitation. The scenarios below expand what we mean by this.
  • Your property has 13 different guestroom types. You are creating a room block with single occupancy rooms on every room type. The booking is for 90 days. Your room block will generate 1,170 roomnight records, without error, in the new experience.
  • Your property has 40 different guestroom types. You are creating a room block with single and double occupancy rooms on every room types. The booking is for 30 days. Your room block will generate 1,200 roomnight records, without error, in the new experience. If an additional room type or night is added, you will reach the limitation of what the new experience can support.
• For long stay group blocks, we have conveniently added buttons that allow you to navigate easily between months of the booking. When a booking is over 31 days in length, we section the booking into month-long segments. Using the date range buttons that display, you can navigate quickly between each segment. If you need to make changes to a long stay booking, you are not required to update each segment individually. Bulk Update will perform the changes you enter for the entire room night pattern.

If you want to see a preview of these changes in action, take a moment to watch this video showcasing the new user experience.

New Guestrooms Experience

Inline Room Block overview

To compliment the new guestroom experience, we have updated the room block overview displayed on the bookings page. The look and feel is similar to the new experience, but includes the same features you are familiar with today.

• It displays a summary of total guestrooms blocked, summed together from each of the bookings room blocks.
• The Room Block Name field allows you to toggle between room blocks for a summary of each. The fields displayed above the room night pattern provide you with a visual of the average rate for the block, the number of total rooms picked up, and the status of the room block you've selected.
• The Details button will launch the new Manage Guestrooms experience.

Activating the new guestroom experience

To benefit from all these exciting features, your corporate administrator is required to activate the new experience. Once this feature is turned on in your org, it is applicable for all properties and users. Everyone needs to be familiar with the changes before it is activated. If you are a corporate administrator and you are looking for instructions on how to turn it on, be sure to check out the Feature Enablement page for directions.

Releasing unsold rooms back into inventory is an important part of group management.

While most groups can follow your standard property policy for cutoff dates, you may negotiate different arrangements with others. For those times when the cutoff date isn’t standard, it’s easy to forget where this needs to be updated - booking, room blocks or both. In this release, we’ve changed the product behavior to take the guess work out.

Now when you update the cutoff date on a new booking, any room blocks you add will automatically default to the cut off date of the booking.

Here are a couple of other scenarios worth knowing about:

• If the cutoff date on the booking is changed, any room block with a matching cutoff date will automatically be updated to the new date.

• Let's say you have a VIP room block on your booking. The cutoff date for this block may be different to the other room blocks. When you update the cutoff date on the block itself, it does not update the booking. If the booking cutoff date were to change, this room block will remain unchanged.

Some bonus news about this feature. This behavior update is available with both the current and new versions of the Manage Guestrooms experience.

Changes have been made to the Booking Recap report. Instead of only showing an average rate, we now display the rate for each room type, based on the occupancy of the room. This update ensures that all departments using this report have access to accurate information.

We are pleased to announce a new product integration with Canary Technologies.

Canary's e-signature solution helps you get contracts signed faster by replacing tedious paper practices with an easy electronic process. Create and send contracts with the click of a button, conveniently located on your Delphi Booking. Signed contracts can be viewed from the Canary Contracts related list.

Canary's payment solution allows your clients to make secure online payments toward their booking charges without the fuss of traditional payment processes. This helps your property receive revenue the moment the payment is processed and reduces potential chargebacks. All payments received are recorded on the booking and are visible in the Transactions related list.

For information on integrating with Canary Technologies, please contact your Amadeus sales representative.

We are pleased to announce a new product integration with UpMail. UpMail' s digital sales communication solution saves you time by streamlining the proposal process for your direct leads. By connecting Delphi with UpMail, you allow your user community to easily access UpMail proposal templates directly from within a booking. With just one click of a button, the relevant booking information is applied to a proposal template, allowing you to respond to your client's business requests with speed, precision, and expertise.

For information on integrating with UpMail, please contact your Amadeus sales representative.