Special Season or Holiday Rates |
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Creating special rates for holidays, peak seasons, etc. is similar to defining weekend/weekday rates. You'll need to duplicate each rate that will be different for the special dates, and enter the appropriate dates for which each one applies to.
This is usually done with the Season Dates Applicable field and the Special Dates Not Applic. field. While the Special Dates Applicable field can be used in some cases, you should ignore this one for now.
As a simple case, lets say that you have a special rate for July 3rd and 4th:
1. Assuming you added the Basic Daily rate in the earlier example, selected that and click Copy Selected Rate(s). This will make a duplicate rate definition so we don't have to do everything over again. (Otherwise follow that example first and then make the changes below.)
2. Edit the new one, and change its descriptions as appropriate to indicate "July 4th rate", and of course change the Each amount.
3. In the Season Dates Applicable field, enter "7/3 to 7/4". Note that the year isn't needed since it's the same days every year. (If you have special cases like long weekends where you need to include an extra day, then you would have to include the year for those cases.)
4. Click Save.
5. Move that rate above the normal rate (Basic daily rate), so it will apply first if the reservation is on those dates. Note that it will only apply to those two days, and the regular rate will be used for the remainder of the days if the reservation is longer.
That's basically it. You can repeat as needed for other dates -- or if all holidays are the same rate, just include all of the holiday dates in the Season Dates Applicable field, separated by commas. For instance: "7/3 to 7/4, 5/28/05 to 5/30/05, 12/24" to include Memorial weekend in 2005 only, and Christmas Eve every year.
Naturally for any year-specific dates, you'll need to remember to adjust the dates every year. Be sure to leave in the old dates for awhile just in case you still have active reservations covering those dates, to prevent it from recalculating them incorrectly.
We mentioned the Special Dates Not Applic field but we didn't use it yet. Technically the right way to do it would be to also enter those same dates into the Special Dates Not Applic field in the Basic daily rate, to keep the normal rate from applying on the holidays. However if you make sure the holiday rate is above the normal rate so it will always be applied first, then you could skip this step. This reduces the maintenance needed each year, and also speeds things up a tiny bit.
Creating seasonal rates works basically the same way, simply with a larger date range. This often applies to monthly and weekly rates as well, so you would have to make seasonal copies of those rates also.
One thing to watch out for when entering seasonal dates is the end-of-year wraparound. If you don't include the year in the date range, it won't understand that "10/1 to 3/31" is supposed to wrap around the end of the year (and in fact it will think you entered it wrong, automatically changing it to "3/31 to 10/1"). So if a season wraps around the end of the year, enter it as two parts like "10/1 to 12/31, 1/1 to 3/31".
Other examples:
Add-on for Extra Adults, Children, etc
Next in sequence:
Electric Meter Rates (also Water and Gas Meters)