some questions before purchase

Hello,

Thanks for your message. Vik Booking follows the OpenTravel standards, and so it supports any existing Pricing Model applied to your website, or by any OTA in case you would like to adopt our additional E4jConnect Channel Manager service to synchronize rooms/listings, availability, rates, restrictions, reservations, guest messages, reviews etc.. with channels like Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Google Hotel etc..

The pricing configuration you described is a simple representation of the so called “OBP” Model, which stands for “Occupancy Based Pricing”. Basically, you just define the basic room/listing rate for the standard/default occupancy, and then you can define the occupancy offsets. In your example, €100 will be the base listing price from April to June, and €120 will be the base listing cost from July to September. From the edit page of your room in Vik Booking you will be able to define a charge for the fifth and sixth guest occupancy of +€10 to obtain the desired cost. This pricing configuration will be applied to your own website, and eventually also to any channels connected, even by adding some alteration rules, for example to transmit to the channels rates increased by x%.

With the free version of Vik Booking you cannot set up seasonal rates or use the Pricing Calendar from the page Rates Overview. The commercial version of Vik Booking would be required in this case.

Regarding the German translation: we have many clients that use both Vik Booking and Vik Channel Manager in German, but those are not official translations. They were contributed by our clients, and from our website you can download the current German translations and upload them onto your website to change or improve them, in case some definitions are missing. We invite you to reach out to our team through our website should you have any questions related to non-official and contributed translations.

Thank you,
The VikWP Team

We forgot to mention the 5-night minimum stay. That’s a simple restriction you can define at rate-plan level, or at room-rate level. This means that on some dates of the year the minimum number of nights of stay required could change. With the commercial (Pro) version of Vik Booking you could manage the minimum and maximum stay, as well as any week-day closed to arrival or departure, by using the apposite “Restrictions” menu in Vik Booking or the page Rates Overview.

Here again the system would apply such restrictions to your website as well as to all channels connected in case you will decide to activate also the Channel Manager.

Hello Support

Thank you for your support. Where do I set the base prices to a time period? Direct in the calendar? For example 100€ from April to June.

• Is it possible to create the E-Mail body which will send to the customer after a reservation? Can I show a price breakthrough and some special points for instance for check in?

• Probably i will also buy the Channel manager. For me is not clear the price list for e4j channels subscription. You pay per month and room. Room does mean the room category? A room can consist 5 sub-units. I pay only for 1 room category?

• Where can i see the sub-units of the rooms in the availability overview?

• If a purchase the pro version, is it necessary to delete the lite version?
• If I use the cannel manager, can i see the reservation details for instance from booking.com in Vik Booking plugin too?

Thank you for your response

Meggsico

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by meggsico.

Hello,

The pricing calendar is only available in the commercial version of the plugin. You can use the page “Rates Overview” to select a range of dates and provide the exact cost you want to apply for those dates, room and rate plan. Alternatively, for those used to work with seasonal rates, it is possible to create a new “Special Price” rule to increase or decrease the rates with absolute or percent values on some dates/seasons of the year. The result would be the same, but these are functions available in the commercial version of the plugin only.

The email message for the customer is generated through a template file that supports customization. In order to add dynamic information to the email message, we suggest using the “Conditional Text Rules”, which are very useful to add contents to the email message in case some rules are compliant/verified with the reservation. For example, the email message could contain specific instructions in case a particular room is booked. There are more than 20 available conditional rules that you can easily set up to customize the contents of the email message.
It would also be possible to display a price breakdown, but this would require a complex modification of the apposite email template file. Otherwise, breakdowns are available during the booking process, and the reservation summary is always available at the booking link included in the email message for the guest.

If you have any questions related to our Channel Manager service, we invite you to reach out to our team through our website, or we would go off-topic in this forum thread. In any case, room-type inventories are counted as room units. For example, if you have a “Double Room” with 5 units in total, that would count as “5 rooms”. What counts is the total number of room units, because according to your subscription limit, you will only be able to map a number of room units up to the maximum limit you select during the subscription at E4jConnect.

Listings with room-type inventories (i.e. “hotel rooms”) are those room records that have more than one unit available. This is useful because you will only have to manage the rates and restrictions once for all units, and from the edit page of your room-type in Vik Booking you can use the “Distinctive Features” to give a number or a name to each sub-unit. Once your room-type will have some “Distinctive Features” set up, the page Availability Overview will display the availability at sub-unit level by clicking on the apposite arrow.

The Lite version will never be deleted, because the updates for Vik Booking will always be officially delivered by WordPress. By purchasing the Pro version you will get a License Key for your domain, and you will be able to upgrade to the commercial version of the plugin without losing any data. As we suggested, in order to not go off-topic, it is better if you can contact us through our website for any pre-sale questions. Thank you.

Regarding the OTA reservations like Booking.com: all your channel reservations will be centralized in Vik Booking of course. You will see them as coming from a precise channel with the related logo. Also, we provide true Channel Manager services with the various OTAs based on real-time API connections. E4jConnect is the only Channel Manager provider to be available for WordPress. The rest of the plugins provide poor iCal connections, and you are not going to find them in your Booking.com Extranet account. Only eligible and certified connectivity partners will be listed on the various OTAs, just like our service E4jConnect, which is listed among the Premier Partners of Booking.com. We also work with many other OTAs that you can see listed on our website (Airbnb, Expedia, Vrbo, Google Hotel, Agoda, Feratel, Hostelworld, Despegar etc..).

We hope this clarifies some of your questions. For any other commercial request we invite you to reach out to our dedicated team through our website.

Thank you,
The VikWP Team

Hello Support

I will buy the VIKbooking plugin and the channel manager. But i have on more questions.

I have a apartment (1- 5 persons) with different price formation over the year which depends on the seasons and amount of persons.

       season 1       season 2
1 P.     100            80
2 P.     100            80
3 P.     100            90
4 P.     100            100
5 P.     120            110

Is this possible in VikBooking?

Thy for your great support.

Greetings, Meggs

Hello Support

I think I found it out on your website. it should work with Prices per Occupancy in menu “special prices”. Is this correct?

Can i transmit this kind of pricing to each channel for instance booking.com?

Thx for your response.

Meggs

Hello Meggs,

Thanks for sharing the information. Ideally, the Occupancy Based Pricing (OBP) model is based on offsets, which indicate a discount or a charge depending on the exact number of adults. For example, your listings price can be based on the minimum guests occupancy, and you could define a fixed or percent charge for 3 adults, for 4, 5 etc..

Such occupancy offsets are supposed to be defined at room-rate level, which means that they are not really supposed to change from one season to another. In your example instead, in the “season 1” you require a charge only for 5 guests, while from 1 to 4 you apply the same price. Instead, in the “season 2” you are altering the occupancy offsets multiple times.

For your website with Vik Booking this is not a problem, because the Occupancy Offsets can be overridden at date-level thanks to the Special Prices. However, you should be aware of the fact that some channels connected with Vik Channel Manager may not support different occupancy pricing rules depending on the season/dates, because these are defined at room-level as stated above.

More precisely, channels like Booking.com and Expedia may support different occupancy pricing rules on the various dates of the year, but Airbnb, for example, would not support such rules. You should be aware of the fact that any booking channel has its own requirements and characteristics. There is no existing Channel Manager software that could by-pass the policies applied by the OTAs, and so our suggestion is to always keep in mind what are the OpenTravel Standards, and for the OBP model you are supposed to alter only the room/listing price on the various dates of the year, but the pricing difference between the number of guests is not supposed to change from one season to another. The choice is up to you, as we said, this would be fully supported in Vik Booking for your website, but some channels may not be able to apply the same pricing information defined for your website.

The VikWP Team

Hi VIKWP Team

Thank you very much for your great support. I will buy two channels Feratel and booking.com.

Does Feratel support different occupancy pricing rules on the various dates of the year?

Thank you for your response.

Greetings, Meggs

Hi Meggs,

Yes, we can confirm also Feratel would support different occupancy based pricing rules on different dates of the year. That’s because they adopt the OpenTravel Alliance model with the request type “OTA_HotelRateAmountNotifRQ”. That’s how they can receive the occupancy pricing information for each date.

Anyway, what we previously stated about this pricing model not being so standard is still valid.

The VikWP Team