Per person pricing not triggered by Children.

  • Hi,

    We’re now up and running (thanks to your support team after a few questions).

    We have a suite that’s bookable (mainly as a 2 person booking) with a king sized bed. There’s a door off this room into a another room with twin beds. So total occupancy is up to 4 for the unit.

    We charge a set room fee for 2 adult occupancy then add a further fee if the other room is used by anyone, it could be another 1 or 2 adults or another 1 or 2 children. If we have had one adult coning with 2 children,the total occupancy is 3 and the other room is used but it doesn’t trigger the extra charge. I can set this to add the fee if a 3rd or 4th adult books, but not if the person who takes the total party over 2 is a child.

    I can’t see a way to allow this in the current configuration of VikWp. Can we? How?

    If not, as we don’t do “child prices” I don’t mind changing all instances of the Label “Adults” to “guests” in the language files in the back end, setting the room occupancy to 4 adults and 0 children. Would this work? If so, which specific instances of “Adults” do I need to change in .po file?

    Thanks. Simon

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Thread Starter SimonFinch

    (@simonfinch)

    At the moment this suite is not on booking.com. We may want to do this. Would the method of changing “Adults” to “Guests” outlined above cause a problem with booknig.com or other Channels?

    Plugin Author e4jvikwp

    (@e4jvikwp)

    Hi Simon,

    Thanks for the detailed message. It is good that you mentioned your connection with Booking.com through Vik Channel Manager, because indeed, treating adults and children to “guests” would impact on Booking.com and any other OTAs connected through our Channel Manager service e4jConnect.

    The point is that there is no OpenTravel standard pricing model that regulates the prices per children. Any existing pricing model related to the “occupancy”, often called “OBP” for Occupancy Based Pricing, never includes children. The OBP model is only related to adults, and this applies for Vik Booking, as well as for any OTA like Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb etc..

    The modification you suggested to consider both adults and children as guests would work fine for your website, but not for Booking.com. In this case, it would be sufficient to disable the selection of the children from the Configuration page in Vik Booking, and then by overriding the labels “Adult” and “Adults” to just “Guests” would make it easy for your clients to select the total number of people. In this case, the regular occupancy pricing in Vik Booking would be applied in the way you want it, because those “guests” would actually be “adults” subjected to your pricing offsets defined in the edit page of each room in Vik Booking.

    Ideally, children should be charged only depending on their age, and this is supported in Vik Booking of course, as well as by some OTAs, where Booking.com is included. This means that if you defined an Option/Extra in Vik Booking for the children, by specifying the various age intervals and related costs per night, the same information would be transmitted to Booking.com by Vik Channel Manager as soon as you launch the “Bulk Action – Rates Upload”.

    However, by opting for this recommended solution, your current occupancy rules would be applied only for adults, and not to children. I’m not sure if setting up the child fees per age interval would help you obtain the desired pricing, but if you decided to disable the children and treat both adults and children as “guests” (adults), Booking.com may not be able to apply the proper pricing in case you will receive a reservation for 2 adults and 2 children. In this case, Booking.com would not charge the children unless you opt for the recommended solution, which consists of charging the children depending on their age.

    The choice is up to you, and in case you preferred to not charge the children for their age, we suggest to not change anything in the PO/MO translation files, you can just use any free WordPress plugin to override an existing Gettext translation to another value. As I said above, it would be sufficient for you to override the labels “Adult” and “Adults” respectively to “Guest” and “Guests” so that the booking form on your website will no longer mention “Adults” but rather “Guests”. Of course the selection of the children must be disabled from the Configuration page of Vik Booking so that your global occupancy offsets would be applied correctly.

    We hope this helps!

    The VikWP Team

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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