Online Booking Requests

The Angelfish room calendar embedded in your website is very helpful to visitors in that it gives them a good idea of your room availability without them needing to call or e-mail you. As a guest house owner, you may prefer prospective guests to contact you directly once they have established your availability to make the booking arrangements. On the other hand, you might consider a more automated booking system, whereby a guest can make a provisional reservation or online booking request based on your current availability. This option can be switched on by ticking the Allow Online Booking box in the Guest House section of your Angelfish Members Area.

Making a Booking Request

With the online booking option enabled, visitors to your website are able to click on a Make Booking Request button next to your room calendar. This shows a detailed view, including descriptions, images and full pricing information, of all the available rooms between the selected dates. The list of rooms adjusts automatically as the visitor changes their arrival and departure dates. They can then tick all the available rooms they wish to reserve and proceed to the final page, where they enter details about themselves (name, address, telephone number, e-mail, etc.) before submitting their request. At this point, the booking is created as a provisional booking, and an e-mail is sent to you, the guest house owner, informing you of the new request. An e-mail is also sent to the visitor explaining that a provisional booking has been made, but that the booking is not finalised until they receive confirmation from you.

Fetching Online Bookings through B&B Manager

B&B Manager has a facility for fetching your online booking requests. To check for these requests, select Website > Fetch Online Bookings from the top menu, enter your login details and press the Fetch button. If you have any booking requests outstanding, these are shown on the next screen, from which you may either confirm, refuse or delete each booking. Confirming a booking request will automatically add the booking to the B&B Manager diary and calendar and send the visitor an e-mail with the confirmation details, at which point it becomes a solid booking and is displayed in your website room calendar. Refusing a booking request will send the visitor a refusal e-mail, and the booking will be removed from your room calendar. Removing a booking request will also remove that booking from your room calendar, but will not generate a refusal e-mail to the visitor. This option can be used to clear the booking request from the system without contacting the visitor.

Confirming Bookings Manually

Rather than using the automated system in B&B Manager, you may wish to process the booking request manually, either by telephoning or e-mailing the guest directly. This at least allows for a more personal approach to dealing with booking requests. If you choose to work this way, you can still use the Fetch Online Bookings facility in B&B Manager to automatically add confirmed bookings to your diary and calendar, but you should ensure that the Send Refuse/Confirm E-Mail box in the Guest House section of your Angelfish Members Area is not ticked, so that the visitor does not receive automated confirmation/refusal e-mails as well as your personal ones.

Automatic Booking Request Checking

B&B Manager can be set up to automatically check for online booking requests on start-up, and every 30 minutes thereafter. To do this, click on the Hotel button in the toolbar and go to the Other tab. Then tick the box marked Check for online bookings. This is a useful backup to your e-mail system, as online bookings will always be detected in this way, whereas e-mails can occasionally be missed or, worse than this, spam-filtered by your mail client.