Worry-free Early Arrivals and Late Departures Offering
It’s easy to offer early arrival (EA) or late departure (LD) to a guest, but ensuring that the hotel can fulfill the request, guaranteed, is a whole different matter.
NOT TO WORRY, at ROOMDEX we are very aware of the hotel’s availability and ONLY offer EA and LD, if it’s guaranteed available, here is how we do that:
- ROOMDEX replaces your team’s manual operation by automatically calculating how many rooms can potentially be offered an early arrival or late departure on each day. We then apply a 50% buffer and additional inventory conditions to ensure you are able to fulfill all purchases.
- ROOMDEX calculates how many rooms total could be offered early arrival/late departure. The sum of physical rooms available in the room category – stay through = number of early arrivals and late departures available to sell from all sources.
- With the PMS integration, we know what early arrivals and late departures have already been sold from other sources. We include ALL early arrivals and late departures sold from ALL sources (front desk, reservations etc) when determining if a day has reached the maximum number of early arrivals and late departures that can be sold.
EARLY ARRIVAL & LATE DEPARTURE SETTINGS
- Times Offered: The hotel controls what time early arrival and late departures are offered and in how many time options you would like to offer to your guests.
- For example, you can set the earliest arrival time at 10AM and choose to offer guests 3 time options. If standard check-in is at 4PM and you choose to create 3 time options then ROOMDEX would sell 10AM, 12PM and 2PM all automatically and based on availability.
- Pricing: early arrivals and late departure pricing is dynamic and changes with the hotel’s pricing strategy. Pricing is set based on a percentage of the daily rate. The hotel controls up to what % of the rate the early arrival and late departure will be offered.
- For example, if setting 50% for the earliest arrival, referring to the above early arrival 3 parts example, then 10AM would be 50% of the rate, and 12PM would be 33% of the rate and 2PM would be 16% of the rate.
- Offer Purchasing Window: Reservations are reviewed between 0 to X hours before standard check-in time to determine if an early arrival will be offered to a guest. Reservations are reviewed between 0 and Y hours before standard check-out time to offer late departure. The default for X and Y are both set to 84 hours, and this setting can be customized by room type if needed.
- Guest’s offer pages are dynamic, and offers will change as your hotel inventory changes. The purchasing window setting determines the earliest time a guest could potentially see an early arrival or late departure offer on their offer page.
- The shorter the time before arrival or departure the stay extension is offered and accepted, the better the offer can be fulfilled. A longer purchasing window will lead to greater guest exposure and higher conversion rates.
- If, for some unique room categories, the hotel does not wish to offer stay extensions at all, the 72-hour window can be set to 0 hours, effectively shutting off the category from early arrivals or late departures.
- Cleaning Buffer: You can set minimal cleaning buffers per room category that will be applied when ROOMDEX calculates the maximum number of early arrivals or late departures left to sell for the room category is 3 or less. If it takes 2 hours to clean the “executive suite”, you can set the buffer at 2 hours. If ROOMDEX calculates the maximum early arrivals and late departures left to sell for that day in the “executive suite” category is 3 or less then ROOMDEX will only sell early arrivals of 1PM and onwards if your standard checkout is set at 11AM, . The default setting for all room types is a 60-minute cleaning buffer.
TO SUMMARIZE:
- Using real-time data ROOMDEX predicts the availability and room status of rooms for early arrivals and late departures accurately days in advance, ensuring what is sold can be fulfilled.
- When determining availability ROOMDEX includes all sources that may have booked early arrivals or late departures. If booked by hotel staff, we are aware.
- ROOMDEX adjusts the early arrival time available automatically with built-in inventory conditions and controls.
- In short: what hotels do today manually ie. switch off offering EA/LD manually or stop offering it at the Front Desk, ROOMDEX does automatically.
