P3 Hotel Software now lets guests book interconnected hotel rooms online, making it easier for them to guarantee their booking of interconnected rooms without the need to contact the hotel.
The P3 booking engine is able to identify and secure interconnected rooms in the hotel’s property-management system at the time of booking, reducing the risk of human error and of groups arriving to find that their rooms were not actually reserved in the desired configuration. This also removes the need for guests to either phone or email a hotel with a request for connecting rooms, which also reduces the work of hotel staff, who otherwise would have to manually complete the task for their guests.
“Booking a family or group stay in a hotel has always been difficult to do online," P3 CEO Phelim Pekaar said in a statement. "It has traditionally involved either a phone call or email to the hotel to request interconnecting or adjoining rooms. We wanted to remove that barrier, in order to make it simple for guests to search and book interconnected rooms at a time that is convenient for them. That’s what our new booking engine functionality does—it secures the interconnecting rooms at the time of booking, and it does it on the hotel property-management system, so the rooms are guaranteed.”
The service can be integrated into Oracle Hospitality’s Opera PMS.
Hotels typically offer a discount to families who book interconnecting rooms. The first room is charged on an adult/child occupancy rate, while the second room is charged on a child-only occupancy rate. Traditional booking engines and PMS systems cannot handle this, so a reservation agent would need to make a manual price override on the reservation to give a family discount. “What we’ve done is build a discounting function into the booking engine that can mimic the same group family discount that reservations agents offer over the phone,” Pekaar said.
Beyond the booking upgrade, P3 also recently released a housekeeping tool that allows staff to update and view live information on the status of each room. This tool is a mobile web page that pulls out the changes made in Opera to display a live report of whether a room is vacant, occupied, clean or out of order. This tool is designed to help housekeeping staff better organize room cleanings, but can also be used by the maintenance team to get a report of rooms that need to be checked. Users can filter their view by floor, room status or housekeeping status according to their role.