New bookings are created and automatically assigned to the next available room of type. Over time, some bookings may get cancelled and your Calendar can end up with a lot of gaps - making it difficult to accommodate longer stays in the same room.
The shuffle row was designed specifically to help you manually move bookings around to open up availability for longer bookings, but we're now in the advanced stages of testing a new optional feature to manage this.
We're really excited to introduce what we believe is a truly unique piece of functionality.... The Optimiser button.
With the feature active, clicking to 'Filter by Room Type' and selecting a Room Type, the optimiser will automatically suggest the best arrangement of those bookings to reduce gaps, and open up space for multi night bookings.
Here we have a before and after screenshot of our 7 'double' rooms. The optimiser first finds a solution, and then allows you to implement it, automatically moving the bookings on the Calendar.
We start with eleven 1 night gaps and three 2 night gaps in our eight night date range.
A couple of clicks later, post optimisation, we have only one 1 night gap remaining, and one gap each of 2, 3 and 4 nights. Wow!
In summary:
- Any bookings starting or ending outside the date range are excluded from optimisation.
- Any rooms set as Unavailable or on Maintenance are excluded.
- Any room that is part of a Virtual Room in a booking is excluded.
- Rooms that have been 1'padlocked' on the calendar are also excluded.
- For any multi-mapped rooms (eg if Rm10 here is mapped as double AND twin), any bookings for room types other than the filtered Room type are excluded. A 'twin' booking in Room 10 would not be optimised if we had selected to optimise 'double'.
- The optimiser assigns bookings around any excluded rooms first.
- It will then try to move bookings based on the order the rooms are assigned, but at the same time keeping an eye on the number of gaps - specifically one night gaps.
- Moving forwards, any newly created, 'split date' bookings after this is released (eg first night in Room 7, second night in Room 5) will be automatically joined into the same room for the full duration of their stay during optimisation if possible. (Remember also that we recently added the ability to manually merge split date bookings, once you had moved them into the same physical room.)
- In case any rooms are mapped as more than one room type, it will then initiate a sync out of availability to OTA's for the optimised date range, to ensure any room counts remain correct.
This is currently undergoing extensive final testing with our development team and we anticipate it will be available for pilot testing by end users some time during early October.