Adjusting price for multiple people in one dorm

Hello,

Thanks for your message. We understand the situation, and shared dorms require a particular configuration in Vik Booking, because guests will be booking beds, not the whole room-type. I hope this makes sense.

We have looked at the screen shot you attached regarding the room-type called “Bed in Male Dorm Room”. This is clearly a shared dorm that accommodates up to 9 people. For this reason, you should be treating the room-units as beds, because we said that your guests will be reserving beds.

A proper configuration for shared dorms can be easily achieved by setting the total number of units available to 9, which is the total number of beds in your room-type, hence 9 guests in total can be accommodated. At that point, you need to work on the capacity of the room, which should not be 9 guests, but rather 1 guest (either one adult or a child). Here again it’s because your guests will be booking beds and so one bed can only accommodate one room.

In conclusion, your room-type “Male Dorm Room” should be configured as follows:

• Room units: 9
• Adults: min 0, max 1 (or even min 1 if no children are allowed)
• Children: min 0, max 1 (or even max 0 if no children are allowed)
• Total people (guests): 1 (this will be the maximum capacity of one bed)
• Minimum total people (guests): 1

The above configuration will allow guests to book the room up to 9 times on the same nights, but this room-type will accommodate at most one person, because you are letting guests book beds in a shared dorm.

At this point you probably want to work again on the “Search Parameters” defined in the Configuration page, especially on the setting “Number of rooms”, so that the default label called “Rooms” could be overridden to something like “Beds”, and the drop down menu can be used to choose how many beds guests would like to book. Moreover, from the “Search Parameters” you can also control the drop down menus that allow to select the total number of adults and children for each room, and since this will be actually beds in your case, the setting “Number of Adults” should be set as 1 (“from” 1 “to” 1).

This is the only way to properly configure a shared dorm where guests will be booking beds, and the same settings should be applied on OTAs like Booking.com in case you are willing to set up our E4jConnect Channel Manager in the future.

We hope this helps!

The VikWP Team

https://[url=https://postimg.cc/fthv7smC%5D%5Bimg%5Dhttps://i.postimg.cc/fthv7smC/Bildschirmfoto-2023-07-03-um-15-09-09.png%5B/img%5D%5B/url%5D

This is weird, I have tried to adjust the room units to 9 as you said and tried booking again with multiple adults (let’s say it is a group of friends trying to book 3 beds in this specific dorm room) and it says no rooms available, could you explain what is going wrong?

Thank you so much for your help.

Sorry here are the screenshots, I also did not find the option to change the parameter rooms to beds under search parameters:

https://postimg.cc/gallery/T18mKkG

Hi,

Thanks for the screen shots. If you make a search on the public section of your website to book a room that can accommodate 3 adults, then no rooms will be available, because your room-type “Male Dorm Room” can now accommodate only one person per unit, hence one person per bed. Does this make sense? In this case, the system will suggest to book multiple units (beds) thanks to the “Search Suggestions” feature, but what we were saying is to actually limit the maximum number of adults per room to 1. Instead, in your screen shot we see that the “Search Parameters” are still allowing to select from 1 to 24 adults per room. That value should be changed from 1 to 1.

Since you are now treating the rooms as “beds”, guests should only be able to select up to one adult per room, hence per bed.

Lastly, the default label “Rooms” displayed in the front-end should be modified by using the Gettext functions through any third-party plugin. That is not a setting you can find in Vik Booking, I’m sorry. If you visit the Knowledge Base section on our website under Vik Booking – Customization Tips, you will find one free plugin that we suggest using to quickly override a default translation to another label.

We suggest getting in touch with our team through our website should you have any technical questions related to this topic.

Thank you,
The VikWP Team

Hey! I am happy to contact your team for further technical-related questions, I contacted the vik team at the contact us page on your webpage, but did not get an answer, one week ago already actually. Can you please tell me to whom I should write?

Regarding your answer, technically if a group of friends, let’s say 24 people would want to book, one has to book again and again all over until he has booked separately 24 beds. Did I understand that correctly?

Plus if I have a dorm with 5 beds and one with 9 beds, do I need to enter those 5 and 9 times each as one adult “units”

https://i.postimg.cc/1R7SYPgC/Bildschirmfoto-2023-07-04-um-16-24-23.png

Also, I have some rooms that are private queen-size bedrooms, how will one be able to book those for two adults if one is only able to book for 1 adult?

Thank you for your support

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by moscowmule.

Hi,

We probably did not receive your contact request, or for sure our colleagues would have come back to you. We cannot post links to our website in this forum, but there’s a contact form on our main website as well as a link to our Support Hub for existing or new clients that will let you open Support Tickets and monitor the status directly from your account on our website. If you are not a paid customer, then the contact forms will work just fine. Please try again so that we can provide better assistance.

If you would like to allow a group of 24 people to make one single reservation, then they will have to book 24 room units, hence 24 beds (one per person). As you’ve noticed, if you allow guests to choose more than 1 one adult per room (per bed in your case), then the system will suggest to book multiple units of an available room-type that can accommodate one guest per bed.

Each shared dorm will have to be a specific room-type in Vik Booking, where the number of total units will represent the total number of beds. Then, for shared dorms, it’s important to work on the room capacity, because guests will be booking beds, and so one unit should always accommodate one person at most (adult or child). A different configuration would not be suited for a shared dorm.

Private rooms instead should have their proper adults/children/guests capacity, and in case the rates per night will change depending on the number of guests, you can define the Occupancy Based Pricing (OBP) rules directly from the edit page of the room in Vik Booking.

In case of a mixed room-type configuration (private and shared rooms) we strongly recommend to use the “Rooms List” shortcode, so that guests can book your rooms through the “Room Details” pages, where the details page of a shared dorm will only allow one person per unit (bed), instead the details page of a private room will allow the classic selection of the number of guests per room-unit. We would not recommend using a global search form (widget or Shortcode), because you allow to book both beds in a shared room and regular rooms in private rooms.

The VikWP Team

Hey, thank you very much for your quick reply.

I am sorry for the list of questions but I am running into trouble setting the plug-in up. Can I continue writing in this thread or do you prefer for me to personally send you a mail trough the contact form?’

Regarding the “Rooms List” short code, I did not find this specific option. Where should I look for it?

So since I failed math can you confirm that the method I am using to adjust the capacity is correct?

We have Dorm A – 9 beds ; Dorm B – 5 beds ; Dorm C – 4 beds; Single Bed Room D with 2 beds ; 2 x Private Room F with a Queen Size Double bed

So I create rooms according, 9 times A with 1 unit/room/bed, 5 times B with 1 unit, C 4 times with 1 units, D with 2 times 1 unit, F 2 times 2 units?

(will then according to availability, room A the same bed/room/unit be displayed 9 times in the search? Will I have the same problem when I put my hostel on booking and airbnb?

It appears logical but weird to me, since writing this now I understand that actually, the only problem is the price when let’s say 4 friends try to book 4 beds at once for 4 nights the only factor to adjust is the price? Maybe I can suggest for you to do an update for hostel/dorm rooms?

Thank you very much in advance for your support and understanding you are being very helpful!

Hi,

Yes, we believe getting in touch with our team is a good idea because we have already provided the necessary information in this forum topic that could be useful to other clients. If you now require assistance for your specific case and configuration, we would rather help you directly through our platform, or we would end up going off-topic.

Let’s see if we can clarify your last questions on this forum, and then you can continue by contacting us through any of our websites by using the apposite contact forms.

The Shortcodes can be managed directly from the wp-admin section of Vik Booking on your website. From the page Dashboard you will see the apposite button in the top toolbar, and from that page you will be able to set up the various Shortcodes, which are fundamental for the URL routing functions during the booking process in the front-end.

By creating a new shortcode you will be asked to select the type of page you would like to generate. Among the types of page available you will find the “Rooms List” option. This will generate a page similar to the one on our official demo website, and guests will be able to browse all of your rooms and click on one they would like to book (page “Room Details”). Every “Room Details” page will display the booking form to book that exact room, and this is the best set up for a mixed configuration of rooms like yours (private and shared).

We’ve got many clients in your same situation, as well as many clients with only shared dorms or only private rooms. Vik Booking can handle any situation, and our E4jConnect Channel Manager service is also a certified partner of Hostelworld. This was just to say that all the required functions are already available, but you need to understand how to properly set up the various room-types depending on whether guests will be booking the whole room (private rooms) or beds for just one person (shared dorms).

We believe to have understood that these are your shared dorms where guests will be booking beds, not the whole dorm like how it happens for private rooms: Dorm A – 9 beds ; Dorm B – 5 beds ; Dorm C – 4 beds;
This is where the number of units and the occupancy will play a fundamental role.

• Dorm A: the total number of units should be set to 9, while the maximum guests and adults capacity should be set to 1. This is because it’s a shared dorm and your guests will be booking beds.
• Dorm B: same exact configuration as above, 5 units in total because it has got 5 beds, hence it can be booked up to 5 times on the same dates, but always by one adult per room-reservation.
• Dorm C: again the same configuration, 4 units in total, maximum adults per “room” (per “bed”) should be set to 1 (one adult per bed).
• Private Room F with a Queen Size Double bed: this is probably a private room as the name suggests. You said “2x”, which means you probably have two equal rooms of this type. The correct set up is the standard one, so total number of units should be 2 meaning that it can receive up to two reservations for the same dates, guests capacity should be equal to the correct number of adults/children that can be accommodated. You said it has a “queen-size double bed” so the maximum adults capacity should probably be set to 2.

This should clarify the correct set up for your scenario. Also, pricing per occupancy is not a problem either. For the private rooms that may accommodate either one or two adults, you can use the Occupancy Based Pricing (OBP) offsets from the edit page of the room in Vik Booking to define, for example, a discount for the single-usage of the room (often called as “solo rate” by many OTAs), or a charge for the second adult in case your base rates are defined for 1 adult.

The shared dorms instead will require a cost per bed, hence a cost per person, because every room reservation for a shared dorm will be always for just one adult.

We hope this makes sense and it clarifies your questions. As already suggested, please get in touch with our team should you have any questions or problems configuring this scenario on your own website.

Thank you,
The VikWP Team