Virtual Rooms. (Derived Rooms)
Private villas and small hotels with an average capacity of up to 10 bedrooms, usually prefer to rent out the full property rather than individual rooms. It’s much better to host one big group, instead of daily check-ins and check-outs. There is many factors influencing your sales strategy – low season is the main concern. That’s when villas start selling on room basis rather than the whole villa.
It sounds simple to use Whole Villa option in Channel Manager Agenda, but if you are looking from the technical side – if you rent out at least one room from the property you can’t rent a whole villa for this period. If you are dealing with different distributions channels, you have to keep an eye on your reservation tab.
If you rent out one room on Booking.com, then you have to stop sales of the whole villa on AirBnb, and vice versa. Everything becomes easier with a new feature of Effective Tours called Virtual Rooms!
Virtual Room – is a room which has nothing physical under it; Virtual Room depends from one or several physical rooms.
Let me break it down step-by-step:
1. We have a 5 bedroom villa.
2. During the off-season we want to rent out each bedroom separately.
3. We have to enter this 5 bedrooms as a separate physical rooms inside the Effective Tours Rooms Configuration.
4. Add one more room , and call it for example “All Villa”. At this step it’s absolutely the same, as adding a normal (physical) room.
5. Proceed to Room Configuration and click Add Room on the right top side.
6. Give the room a name and tick the “Is Virtual” check box
7. Select the “Dependent Rooms” – basically all rooms what are inside the particular villa
As a result we will get a new Room called All Villa , which depends from other 5 rooms as you can see on the screenshot.
From now, we can sell All Villa and Rooms independently!
For example on AirBnb, you can offer the whole villa, but on Booking and Agoda you can sell property by rooms. If you will get a new booking, for one night, for one room, then the whole villa booking will be blocked for this one night. However your property will be still bookable on the remaining rooms, so 4 other rooms will be still available.
Same way, if you sell a whole villa for 1 night, then all 5 rooms, will be marked as sold out, and you will never have a double booking again.
ATTENTION!!! Please always remember that you can’t sell in one distribution channel Normal and Virtual rooms. In a worst case scenario you will OVERBOOK your property. It’s very important to understand this point. IF somebody decides to book the whole villa and at the same time somebody else books 1 exta bedroom, it means that you will have overbooking for one room.
As you can see, with Effective Tours, you can create very complicated configurations, without any headache for you. Feel free to ask us, in case if you feel any difficulties with configuration, we are always here to help.