December 2022 Product Update

Packages provide you the ability to bundle services together to deliver unique and personalized value to your customers. In this release, we delivered some major updates to packages to ensure that they are easy to create and add to quotes. Discover what are packages and how to add them to quotes.

Discounts 

Previously, if a package was created without a max discount field value, the max discount on the booking would be blank. Now, the max discount on the booking will always be set to 0 if not defined in the package creation process.

Package Effective Dates

One feature we offer for packages is the ability to set a start and end date. If set, packages cannot be added to quotes outside the available date range. This allows admins to create packages with prices fixed to a calendar year or season, as one example. 

To ensure these effective dates are always enforced, we have added a check on changing booking dates via the “Change Dates” button or cloning a booking. As long as a package with an end date is a part of a booking, that booking cannot be changed to a date after the end date. On the cloning side, if a package is no longer valid for the new dates, the booking will simply be cloned without the package. 

Hotel Room Occupancy in Packages

There were major improvements to how hotel rooms work in packages. Previously, hotel rooms could only be added to packages with single occupancy. Now, we’ve enabled any occupancy type and ensured that the number of rooms is reflective of both Pax and Occupancy type and that pricing is always per person. This does require some standard rules, described below: 

• Only one hotel room component can be added to a single package. This ensures that when packages are added to Quotes, the amount of rooms generated and eventually sent to the PMS accounts for the occupancy type of the hotel room. 
• Related to the single hotel room component, when assigning Pax on a Quote package, the Pax must be a multiple of the hotel room occupancy whenever there is a hotel room in the package. (ex. If a package has a component of double occupancy hotel rooms when adding that package to a quote, the Pax on the package must be an even number)

Splitting Room Types within a Package 

We understand that the specific room type that is provided with packages is often not the room guests will stay in during the booking. Much like “run of house” rooms, packages may be built with a standard single or double room that gets split into a variety of room types based on availability closer to the booking. 

To support this, we’ve released an update to the group booking that allows you to split package guest rooms into multiple room types.

Other Package Updates 

• When creating a hotel room as a part of a package, the rate list is now filtered to rates available for the package’s property only.
• When a package containing a combo product is added to a Booking that has commissions, the commissions are now recalculated for the combo product if the package commission percentage is changed. 

Note: You may see the word “Booking” used interchangeably with “Quote.” To standardize our product, we have begun to modify labels and page layouts to ensure that Thynk is more user-friendly. One of these changes is to update MYCE Quote to Booking. This change is planned for a January 2023 release. 

Quotes contain details about bookings such as the account information, contact for the booking, guest rooms blocked, function rooms, commissions, packages, and more.  Here are some of the latest updates to help you manage your bookings more effectively and efficiently. 

Multi-Edit on Booking Products and Meeting Rooms

• When managing bookings, we have a helpful “Multi-Edit” button that allows you to modify multiple products or meeting rooms at once. We’ve improved the flow here and added additional fields for the meeting room, including the “Show Meeting Room Names” checkbox. Often, on the initial offer, meeting room names should not be shared, but once the booking is confirmed those names should be shown on the contract. This field allows you to update all rooms in one action, rather than individually clicking into meeting room records.

Multi-Property Booking Management 

In this release, we’ve added several features to better support sales teams who manage multiple properties, often across regions and currencies. These include: 

• We've updated the Market Segment field on a booking to Business Segment. Market segment cannot be filtered by property, while the business segment can. Now, when selecting a Business Segment, you can easily filter down to only show the relevant segments to the booking’s property. 
• Salesforce bases currency on a current user’s selected currency. This works fine for single-property customer, but can create complexity and anegative impact on multi-property users, who may be managing bookings for properties in a currency different from their own. We’ve adjusted the default currency on new bookings to the property’s assigned currency, rather than the user’s currency. 

• Previously, it was possible for a booking linked to a property to have prices on related records in a currency different from the currency selected on the property. This scenario is no longer possible. 

For multi-property orgs, we have improved the filtering capabilities of the request object. When a central sales team is managing inbound requests, a single request may be sent as a booking to several properties. To support this, we have: 

• Added a set of criteria to both properties and requests so that when admins for multi-property orgs set up their properties they can specify more detail 
• Then, when converting a request to a booking to send to individual properties, the sales team can filter on these criteria to come up with a smaller list of properties that match the request’s criteria 
• This is especially important when you have many properties

Dive deeper into how to convert requests into bookings.

Cloning Bookings 

Currently, the clone quote function gives two options: keep all pax or keep rooms pax. Checking these options updates the Pax on all records to the new amount, or just on the hotel records. We’ve added another checkbox related to room rates. If this is checked, rather than keeping the price equal to the original booking, they will be recalculated based on applicable room rates for the new booking dates. 

• Because room rates change over time, the value of the clone function has been available to customers who wish to update room rates, as the manual work of changing each record was more involved than simply creating a new booking. This update will have a large impact on these customers. 

Discounts

We’ve increased the digit count of percent discount fields on the booking to allow more precise discount amounts.

Individual pickup

Rather than send all reservations to the PMS with a rooming list upload, customers can now choose to upload bits of the rooming list at a time and then have reservations sent to PMS as rooms are picked up. 

Full buyouts of Shareable Resources 

For “shareable” resources such as a restaurant or large meeting room, we now support “privatizing” or having a full buyout and preventing any other reservations from being created during the time of the primary booking. 

We have also added checks to ensure that if a resource is shared and there are reservations across multiple bookings, any changes to the number of people on a booking or event are checked so as not to overbook the space.

Group Booking 

• We’ve updated the buttons on the group booking tool and added a check to ensure that changes made in the group booking are saved before leaving the page 
• We’ve ensured that any time guest rooms on the booking are modified by adding or editing packages or hotel rooms the group booking is auto-refreshed to show accurate totals 
• We’ve updated the list of available room types on the group booking to exclude any paymaster room types

Other Booking Updates 

• When bookings are cloned and the new dates reflect a daylight saving time change, we’ve ensured that the times of day are consistent with the original quote rather than reflecting the daylight savings time shift. 
• Cloned bookings now have the correct quote analytics records 
• Previously, when you used the clone tab to clone booking products that contained a reference to a booking meeting room, the meeting room lookup was copied. Now that lookup is not copied, as it could cause errors. 
• When booking dates are modified using the change date button, release dates associated with any hotel rooms on the booking are also updated and sent to the PMS. 

Two-way integrations with PMS  providers ensure that your data is always up-to-date and clean. We include integration with Oracle Opera, Mews and StayNTouch. As you share your feedback, we continue to optimize the experience and take advantage of new features that our partners are releasing on their roadmap.  Here are some of the features we have added to the Thynk platform to create a seamless experience where you can do your work in Thynk and trust that data is flowing with your other systems.

Mews Integration Updates

We’ve continued to improve our Mews integration as they make updates to their API. In this release, we’ve added new fields when pulling Resources and Products from Mews.

We’ve also made updates to the process of retrieving and sending guests to and from Mews, including logs for sending Guests to Mews 

In a long-awaited update from Mews, we now can create agent contracts via the Mews API. This means that reservations will no longer fail due to a missing contract.  Currently, when reservations are sent to Mews, if there is an Agent account in Thynk, and that account in Mews does not have an Agency Contract, then the reservation will fail. This means that users have to leave Thynk, where they have been doing all of the quote/ reservation management, and open Mews, create an Agency contract for the account, and then resend the reservations. 

• With this update, when a booking reaches stage 2 and has an agency account filled in, we will automatically check if there is an agency contract for that account and if not, it will be generated.

When the name of a booking is changed, lock in the PMS (Mews and Opera) and the name of the Paymaster (guest for Mews and PM reservation for Opera) are also updated.

PMS Accounts 

A major update for Mews customers in this release is the introduction of PMS Accounts. PMS Accounts allow customers to better manage duplicates that are created in their PMS and create a centralized view in Thynk. Discover what are PMS Accounts and how they are mapped to accounts.

In the implementation of PMS Accounts, 

1. All existing Accounts will have PMS accounts created.
2. Project managers will work with you to set matching criteria. 

We have also introduced two standard reports: 

1. Linked PMS Accounts Last Month - This report contains all of the PMS Accounts that were linked to an Account in Thynk in the last month 
2. Unlinked PMS Accounts with Revenue - This report contains PMS Accounts that do not connect to a Thynk account but have revenue. It’s critical for reporting purposes that these be manually linked. 

Other Mews Integration Updates

• We’ve added validation to ensure that when there are active reservations “Send to Mews” cannot be unchecked. 
• As the Mews API is updated to support Blocks in Mews, we are continuing to include the new fields in our integration so that we have a more complete set of PMS Block data in Thynk, including shoulder dates and cancellation fields. 
• When hotel rooms are cloned either via group booking or the clone tab on the booking, we now ensure that for Mews customers the correct Mews state is saved on the new records.
• Mews Rate Short Name has been truncated at 255 characters 

• We’ve improved the product creation process for both combo and non-combo products so that only the required fields are shown. Learn more about how to create combo products.
• We dynamically hide the Mews section based on whether the Mews Id is populated. This means that for any products pulled in via Mews, all the relevant Mews fields appear, and for any products not in Mews, the section is hidden entirely. 

Paymaster room type

• The paymaster room type is now excluded from any room type selection lists to prevent any clutter and incorrect selection of room type.

We’ve improved the way taxes are configured so that rather than just seeing tax categories with a number (1,2,3 etc.), users can now view more meaningful tax codes (ex. UK-S, UK-Z).

When Thynk was first developed, a negotiated rate would always apply to the entire year, with no exceptions for high/low for blackout dates. In reality, negotiated rates often have exclusions or dates that don’t apply. This is mainly important in the sales process when generating contracts. When showing rates for a yearly contract proposal, it’s important to highlight what blackout dates apply (if any) and what seasonal rates apply. To support this, we’ve added a new object to the Thynk package for Rate Periods.