What do you know about Double room single use vs. Single room? Sounds a bit confusing, doesn’t it? In this post, we would like to explain how to enter single use prices, single room prices, what’s the difference between these two and why we have made it the way we did.
This is a common practice in hotels, they define different prices in a double room depending on whether one person or two persons are going. If one person is going, a single supplement is applied.
In our experience in tourism, we have seen hotels giving this price as either a supplement or as a price list for a single room, even though the person is actually going to be put into the double room single use. The second way is very wrong, but it does happen, we have seen quite a lot of this. So, I would like first to make the definitions clear:
- Single room – specific room type.
- Double room single use – specific price for a double room when one person is using it.
To go further, let us look at a simple example:
Example
Let’s say that your hotel tells you that the price in May is 50,00 € per person per night in a double room if two persons are going. However, if one person is going, they need to pay 25,00 € extra as the single use supplement. Easy!
What are the rules?
OK, so to define a single-use price for a double room, our system needs to obey the following rules:
- make sure that the price is adapted automatically depending on the number of passengers on a booking
- make sure that the single supplement cannot be unselected or avoided in any way
- make sure that the rooms are taken from the same allotment pool regardless of the number of passengers
If these three simple rules are followed, then the single use is correctly defined.
How NOT to do this
Do not add a new room type and make it a Single Room or, even worse, a Double Room Single Use.
Appealing as this may be, it will break all three rules. Let us look at this scenario: I would come to your website, search for accommodation for one person, and the system would tell me that I have the Double Room for 50,00 € per person per night, and the Double Room Single Use for 75,00 € per person per night. Hmmmm… which one would I take? So, that breaks rules #1 and #2. Or, if you have set the minimum number of people in the Double Room to be 2, then it would tell me that I can choose between a Double Room for 100,00 € and the Double Room Single Use for 75,00 €. And this seems OK. I can still technically get into a problem situation where I can buy the Double Room Double Use as a single person, but let us assume that I, as a client, am sane and do not want to damage myself.
However, what about rule #3? You, the agency, get e.g. 10 allotments for the Double Room. So, you need to define that you have 10 allotments. But if I as your client come and take the Double Room Single Use, it will not reduce the capacity of the Double Room automatically, as these are each its own room types and have each their own capacities. And then you would need to manually track capacities, and nobody wants to do this at the peak of the season!
So, we agree that adding a different room type is not a good idea.
Do not add an additional service.
Hmmm… here is another appealing option. After all, the hotel did send us in the contract that this is a supplement for single use, and Lemax does have possibilities of entering supplements…
Let’s take a look at the three rules again. The rules #1 and #2 say that this needs to be calculated automatically and that the client must not be able to avoid it. If you enter it in Lemax as a supplement or an additional service, it will be optional for the client, as all supplements and reductions and additional services in Lemax are optional. And the supplement for single use is most definitely not optional, as that would break rules #1 and #2.
But in the Lemax there exist mandatory additional services as well? Yes, they do. However, they are mandatory, meaning you cannot exclude them depending on how many passengers are going. So, they will always be calculated, regardless whether one person is going or two. Which, again, breaks rule #1.
So, how to actually do it?
To actually do this, we will use only one room type (to avoid breaking rule #3) and the basic service price list (to avoid breaking rules #1 and #2).
So, let us say that we have a price list as in the photo below. This is the price list for the Double room with the billing type set to “Per person per night”, just like in our example.
What we are going to do is to use the Copy row button in the far right column of the price list. Just to get the terminology straight, the price list in the photo above has one price row, and this price row consists of three price lines: Net price, Selling price, and Margin. For the purpose of this article, the margin will remain 0.
After you have clicked the Copy row button, you will have a situation like this:
Please note that now you have two identical price rows, each consisting of three price lines: the net price, the selling price and the margin.
For defining the difference between the regular price and the single-use price, we shall use the Minimum Persons column. In one of the price rows (e.g. the lower one) we shall set the Minimum Persons value for both net and selling price to 2.
If a booking with one passenger is made, the system sees that it has the price row with Min Ps set to one, and takes the price from that price row. If a booking with two passengers is made, the system sees that it has a price row with Min Ps set to two, and takes the price from that price row. So, why do we call this column the Minimum Persons column? If three persons are on a booking, the system will search for the best match, and find that the best match is the price row with Min Ps set to two.
So, what is left now is to increase prices for single use. So, in the end, your price list should look like this.
And now all three rules for the single use are followed and the single use calculation will work automatically.
