A number of requests have been made to add 'lunch' as part of Caterbook's management and reporting of meals, particularly for cases where users have longer durations of stay.
We've now added a new Board type of 'Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner' when creating a new Rate Plan.
Additionally, there is a new dedicated Extra Item type for Lunch.
These will be reported out in the same way as Breakfast and Dinner were previously:
Where lunch is booked as part of a rate or an extra (set with the new Lunch Item type), the Resident guests report will show an "L" for lunch, in addition to the existing B and D for breakfast and dinner.
And (only if you create a Rate Plan with the new Board type):
- The Dashboard Meals panel will now show the count of all rate-based and 'extra' lunches for a given date.
There are some caveats:
- For a rate that includes lunch, there is an assumption that lunch will NOT be taken on either the day of arrival or day of departure. For this reason, we recommend that any rates including lunch have at least a 2-night minimum length of stay.
- A rate that includes lunch also includes dinner, so the functionality around dinner allowances is also applicable to these rates, BUT, there is no separate "lunch allowance" feature as such. If you intend to use allowances on a rate that includes lunch (and post lunch items to the guest's room), then we suggest adding these together for the dinner allowance configured on the rate plan (e.g., £20 for lunch + £40 for dinner = a £60 allowance in total), however it is redeemed across the two meals.
If you're using the ResDiary integration, again, with Dinner being a part of the rate, the same surfacing of whether a booking has a table time booked or not will be shown on the Dashboard Arrivals panel and in the booking record.
To provide flexibility, the lunch extra has a charge type of "each", allowing you to select the date on which the lunch extra is to be taken.