guestroombooking
frequently asked questions
If something about the guestroombooking system needs explanation, first have a look in the list of howto pages. For most things a quite detailed howto factsheet is available.
If you do not find the answer there, perhaps your question is in the list below.
booking administration
how do I reactivate a deleted booking
If a booking - made by a guest - does not get confirmed within the preset time (either by clicking the e-mail link, either by paying the deposit) it gets deleted by the booking system.
In mean time however you might have been contacted by the client that does want to confirm the booking.
Because the deleted booking does not have rooms attributed to it anymore you will not see it in your 'rooms' overview. To find the booking you will have to make a selection with bookings/overview and select the booking from there.
You will notice there are no rooms shown with the booking. Click on the 'booking' tab and re-enter the desired rooms. If rooms are available they will be attributed again to this booking and the booking will be marked as 'confirmed'.
how do I change the room for a booking
Select the booking-details on screen (either from bookings/overview, either from bookings/rooms).
Click on 'room details'.
On top of the screen you will see your different rooms with their status (occupied, free, too small). You can change the room for the whole length of the booking there.
Lower on the screen you can do the same on a per-day basis.
about rates & invoices
why is guestroombooking cheaper than other booking systems?
Let's reverse the question, and ask ourselves why other booking systems often are that expensive...
Some of the online-booking systems just over-charge for what they do. Others are quite labour-intensive and require a lot of international phonecalls and time.
Guestroombooking involved a lot of labor too, but once the system is up and running it manages to finalize all the bookings in a fully automated way. This does not only cut on costs, it just is the most efficient way of booking, both for you as for your guests.
what subscription type is best for me?
Depending on the number of rooms and the number and type of bookings you can choose out of 2 subscription types.
With the flat fee type you will pay monthly a fixed fee of 5 € for your guesthouse and 5 € per room you have in the booking system.
With the commission type you will pay a commission of 5 % on the value of the bookings made by guests trough the guestroombooking system. (You will NOT pay for bookings you enter yourself)
when is VAT charged on your services?
If you are subject to VAT you should provide us with your VAT details upon activation of your account.
Our invoices will charge (Belgian, 21%) VAT in following cases:
- your business is located in Belgium;
- your business is located in another EU country and you are not subject to VAT.
NO VAT will be charged in following cases:
- your business is located outside Belgium, but within another EU country, AND you are subject to VAT.
- your business is located outside the EU.
technical stuff
on what techniques is guestroombooking build?
The 'core' of the guestroombooking package is made up with loads of perl scripts, specially build for this purpose, a total of around 15000 lines of coding.
Our servers run on linux with apache webserver.
All data are stored in a PostgreSQL database, mail is exchanged with Qmail mailserver. Incoming mails are passed trough a greylist filtering system.
For booking- and maintenance procedures we use SSL encryption technology to secure the connections.
SMS-notifications are sent trough a third party SMS-gateway.
Parts of the pages run with Javascript and Java applets.
can I buy the program and run it on my own PC?
No, you cannot.
First of all the guestroombooking system is not just something you put on a computer and will run. To run guestroombooking quite some infrastructure is needed: a normal and a secure webserver, a mailserver, a database server and more...
Running this would probably exceed the possibilities of a guesthouse (both financial and technical).
Secondly, the software is not for sale. You can however use it, for a moderate fee, running at our servers and with the latest updates. With the owners-interface you will be able to manage most of the settings and functions as if it was running on your own pc.
How long are my data available online?
Bookings will be stored for 2 years online.
After that booking details may still be stored on backup-media for an indefinite time, but they cannot be accessed anymore.
Can guestroombooking really handle a lot of simultanious bookings?
We tried it out. Firing bookings at a high rate from 4 automated scripts simultaniously.
We made over 300 bookings at a speed of 4 bookings a second. CPU-load on the server went up to around 90% and our 'load average' to 3.66 but all worked fine. All bookings got the right rooms attributed, e-mail confirmations were handled and sms-notifications were sent.
Are there any known bugs?
There are some minor ones we will try to fetch as soon as possible.
- overlapping-booking problem
If you have overlapping bookings the situation might occur that you have a free room all the time, but that it is not the same room the whole time.
If someone tries to make a booking overlapping that period he will now get trough the booking schedule (as you have a room available the whole time) but no room can be attributed and the system will freeze once he entered his details.
This is a very rare situation, but we will solve the problem.
In this rare case the client will get an appropriate error message explaining the problem, and the message that you will contact him concerning the possibilities.
In most cases the problem can be solved by moving another booking to another room, so that one room gets available for the whole time of stay. In more complex cases however you would have to descide wheter to make a client change room during his stay, or refusing the booking.
- statistics: week 52 & 53 error
In the statistics per week there is a problem with week 52 and 53.
First of January 2006 was week 52, but year 2006. This makes a weird week '200652' appear in the statistics of early 2006.
This problem is database related and is more complex to solve than it is to understand. It is in no way crucial for the normal functioning of the system and can - until start of 2007 - only occur for guesthouses that were with us in 2005.
Are there upcomming changes?
Apart from the minor bugs above there are some other changes and improvements pending.
deposit payment with money transfer
We will add the possibility to pay deposits with a normal money transfer to a bank account. Due to the time this takes this will only be possible for bookings made quite some time in advance (an international money transfer might take up to two weeks...).
This option will only be available for bookings at guesthouses that want to use it. Payment of money transfers will make a personal follow up necessary, as our booking system will not be able to see what payments have been made, and which have not.
selection of guesthouses with availabilities
As the number of guesthouses in the system increases, we will add a function allowing the clients to select only the guesthouses from a area that have rooms available at the time of their stay. This function will only work for bookings in the next 2 or 3 months.
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