May 2023 Product Update

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

Guest Rooms 

• When guest rooms are a part of your booking package, updates made to start and end time on the booking package item will be reflected on the guest room start time and  end time. 
• When a guest room is created on a booking with a day number, that guest room will be for one night only, with the start date for day number designated.
• When adding guest rooms to a booking, you have the option to select a rate plan. This list filters to any rates that are not tagged as "Not in Myce." We have changed this filter so that it only prevents adding new guest rooms with flagged rates, but has no impact on previously added guest rooms that were added with a rate that has since been flagged as "Not in Myce."
  - The idea behind the "Not in MYCE" checkbox is that admins can flag any rates that are pulled from the PMS that should not be available options on bookings.

Function Spaces

• Security for Sharable Function Spaces has been updated to ensure only admin users have access to create and edit function space.
• When there are multiple function spaces with similar names, the list of available spaces when using the Change Function Space button can make it challenging to select the correct space. To help you with this, new scrollbars have been added and results are now ordered by the Last Viewed Date (descending).
• When a booking is at status Closed-Won and there is a confirmed booking event assigned to a function space, that function space should still be available for additional events within the same booking. Previously, a message was shown saying “An event has been confirmed and overbooking is not allowed.” This is no longer shown when trying to add an event in the same booking. 

Products

• If standard start and end times are not defined by your admin on a booking product, we have ensured that the default times used are compatible with all time zones.
• The ‘Hide on Offer' option used to hide products on customer facing documents has been extended to all data related to the booking (guest rooms, products, and events).
• The Product ‘Is Active’ checkbox has been relocated and is now available by default regardless if you are integrated with Mews.
• The List Price field has been updated to appear in the header of the product screen.

Packages

• We understand that for properties who do business in multiple languages, it's helpful to have the package descriptions translated in up to 3 languages. We now have a Description Language 1, 2, and 3. 
• During onboarding, you can work with the Thynk team to configure your labels for those languages (ex. French, English, Dutch).
• We resolved an issue with packaged events. In situations when the Booking Package Item record is updated, all the values on the Booking Event were previously overwritten by the defaults on the Booking Package Item. Now only Start Time, End Time, Setup, Type and Function are overwritten, but only if they haven't been changed manually. If they have been modified, the values will not be overwritten. A scenario in which the bug may have caused issues was when updating Expected Guests on Booking and Expected Guests on the Booking equals the Expected Guests on the Booking Package. 

Rooming List

• We've listened to your feedback on the date formatting in the excel rooming list upload. Now, when the rooming list is generated on a booking, the file will open in excel with dates formatted in a way that the upload will accept.
  1. The timestamp 00:00 is not included anymore in the generated date.
  2. Dates are prefixed with a quote. This prevents Excel from interpreting value as a date, causing technical challenges. As a customer you don't have to remove this quote. If you do remove this quote however, the upload will still work.

•  When you upload a rooming list, errors are generated if the import fails that give you information on how to correct the file. We have now ensured that these are deleted when you upload a new file so that you only see errors if they are still not corrected.
• Before this release rooming list functionality could only be used by exporting the Rooming List Excel, making changes in the Excel and then uploading the Excel again. This was even the case for minor changes, like fixing a typo in an e-mail address. We received the feedback that this could be a cumbersome process. Now changes can be made directly on the Rooming List records and you can trust the system to process this change in the same way as an Excel upload would have. So in the case of the e-mail change, that e-mail will also be updated on the Guest record.

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Sales Admin

• We have now added the Forecast Item tabs to the package so that sales admins can create property and sales manager goals and forecasts for a defined date range. Read more here.
• Rate Periods will now appear by default as a tab for faster access and configuration.

Requests (Inquiries) 

For customers who use requests (or inquiries), we have added a closed status that matches the standard booking closed status as well as a "Lost Reason" if the business is lost. You can read more about converting requests to bookings here.

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Labels & Data Updates

• We continue to update messaging to remove references to MYCE Quote. For bookings, there is validation to ensure that stages are not skipped. The message to alert you of this rule will now read "Booking status can only be set to canceled if the Booking status was previously ‘Won.’”.
• When the number of  Guest Rooms is above the number of Guests of the Booking, the error message has been updated to: “Guest room count cannot be higher than the total guests on the booking. To add more rooms, please increase the guest count on the booking.”.
• When using the change function space button, labels have been updated to "Function Space."
• The label "Unit" has been renamed to "Quantity" on the following:
  - Package Item
  - Booking Package Item
  - Booking Product
• The Change Resource button has been relabeled to “Change Function Space”.
• The active checkbox on an Account is now marked as deprecated. To see the current status of an account, you should reference the Status field.  The default value of Status is Active.
• The following changes have been made to the Booking:
  1. New default values have been added to the Field Locale field for Documents:
  - en_IE
  - fr_FR
  - nl_NL
  - de_DE
  2. The Close Status field has been renamed to Close Reason.
  3. A new field called Expanded Status has been added, which concatenates Close Reason to Status if the booking is closed

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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.

Stayntouch

In this release, we are excited to announce an upgraded one way integration of Stayntouch to Thynk.  This upgrade will allow us to advance our partnership with Stayntouch and accelerate enhancements with their latest API capabilities.

Mews

The PMS Block status is now sent to Mews to ensure that Thynk and Mews remain synchronized and avoid discrepancies. Previously, the block status was automatically set by Mews to Confirmed but going forward the status that is assigned to the block in Thynk will be sent to ensure accuracy.

A new "Open in Mews" button has been added to the PMS Account screen that will open the associated account in Mews. 

• This button will be available for other PMS connections in future releases.

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For customers connected to Mews, there is a checkbox "Send to Mews" that creates reservations in Mews. The only time this checkbox can be used is when the PMS Block has a "Confirmed" status. We've added additional validation to ensure that the process to create reservations is triggered only when the PMS block status is confirmed. If you try to check the box when the status is Optional, Inquired, Released or Canceled, you will see the message "“The PMS Block must be confirmed in order to send Reservations to the PMS.”

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When something goes wrong, it’s important for the system to give you clear and sufficient information so you know what action to take next.  We have delivered configuration in this latest release to allow descriptive error messages to be displayed in these scenarios instead of the standard "We hit a snag."

For additional troubleshooting, you can reach out to our support team to increase  the error detail for certain user profiles.

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Your data is your most valuable asset.  We want to bring its value to life for you and make it easier for you to gain powerful insights with our solution.  To make this a reality, we have new reports and dashboards included in this latest release.  

You can find the latest reports in a new folder called Thynk Reports on the Reports tab.  Here are the details of the latest reports and how you can leverage them:

Open Inquiries

• Displays a list of new and in progress inquiries to allow for tracking of incoming requests and to ensure they are being moved through the sales pipeline. The Open Inquiry report can be used to follow up on inquiries and ensure prospects are receiving timely responses.

Contact Listing

• Displays a list of contacts from a particular area or source.  The Contact Listing report can be used to create lists for things like email blasts, to look for individuals to visit on a sales trip, or to send invitations to customer events.

Event Listing

• Displays a list of events for a specified date range.  You can view the details about the events scheduled for a particular time period for planning and forecasting.  This report can also be used to post today's event information in the lobby for guests.  Operations staff can use this report to review a list of events with no function space assigned due to room conflicts and reassign these to an available function room.

Activity Report

• Displays how many activities each member of your sales team has completed or plans to complete during a specified date range.  This report can be used across your team to help gain insight into team activity as well as influence desired behavior around customer engagement.  There is benefit for many users to view this report regularly as:
  - A sales manager to plan or to see if they are meeting their activity goals. 
  - A director to evaluate their team performance against their activity goals. 
  - A team manager to share completed activities in their month-end reports.

You can now find the latest dashboards in a new tab called Thynk Dashboards.  If you don’t see this new tab, please reach out to our support team to help you configure this amazing new feature!  Here are the details of the latest dashboards and how you can leverage them:

Account Production

• This dashboard can be viewed for a specific account or across all of your accounts based on filter criteria to get information about actual vs. forecasted production and compare against negotiated rate contracts. This will help your team have the necessary data prior to renegotiation going into the next contractual period with your customers.  You can also analyze the breakdown of account production by agency.

Agent Production

• This dashboard can be viewed for a specific agency or across all of your agencies based on filter criteria to get information about actual vs. forecasted production and compare against negotiated rate contracts. This will help your team have the necessary data prior to renegotiation going into the next contractual period with your customers.  You can also analyze the breakdown of account production by account.

Guestroom Control Log

• The GRC Log allows you to quickly reference which groups are in-house during a specified date range as well as how many rooms have been blocked for each night of their stay.  By extending the date range, you can use this report to track business for future months and retrieve a summarized view that can be leveraged in weekly sales meetings.