You'll learn about the changes to the booking process and how child occupancy information is handled in your reservations.
Booking.com is an online travel agency (OTA) for reservations which has a direct connection to Guestlines' Distribution Hub.
We have several articles specific to the Booking.com channel, including:
Feature overview
Booking.com have made changes to its Reservation API and added a new feature, guest count with children around child pricing to comply with European Consumer Law.
To use this feature, you must:
Have an active Booking.com extranet account
Be connected to the Guestline Distribution Hub
Have Guestline Rezlynx PMS
Before the feature was enabled:
The Booking.com website would show standard occupancy without child-specific details.
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IMAGE or VIDEO PLACE HOLDER
After this feature is enabled:
The Booking.com website now displays detailed guest count information, including children.
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IMAGE or VIDEO PLACE HOLDER
Configuration
To configure this feature for your property, follow the steps below:
Log in to the Booking.com Extranet for the desired property.
Navigate to Property, select Policies and then select Children & Extra Beds.
Select Occupancy and Supplement Pricing.
Create a Child Occupancy policy. An example is shown below:
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Set the Child Supplement Pricing as required and save all changes.
⚠️ Important: No changes are needed to either Distribution Hub or Guestline Rezlynx to support Phase 1 of this feature.
Nevertheless, for Phase 1 of this feature, the children booked in the room will be added to the Guest Count in the reservations delivered. This means that when the reservation is delivered to Rezlynx PMS, the child count will be included in the Adults field. So, for example, if a booking was made for 2 adults and 1 child, this would deliver to the Distribution Hub as GuestCount = 3, and therefore delivered to Rezlynx PMS as Adults = 3:
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The following detail will also be included in the XML, which is the searched occupancy with the breakdown of adults and children:
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The above information will be delivered to Rezlynx PMS in the Distribution Hub
notes:
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Here’s how it will show in Rezlynx PMS: 2 Adults and 1 Child
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The reason this information is delivered in notes rather than as the occupancy of the reservation is as follows:
We receive a single reservation from Booking.com.
A single reservation from Booking.com can contain multiple rooms (room picks).
The occupancy breakdown sent by Booking.com is sent at the reservation level, rather than at the room level, which means we would not know the occupancy breakdown of each of the rooms.
This issue is what Booking.com are looking to address as part of Phase 2.
The rate that is delivered by Booking.com to the Distribution Hub will also include any child occupancy pricing, ensuring the correct rates are populated to the booking in Rezlynx PMS. Please do bear this in mind should you note a price discrepancy – the reason may be that the price also includes child pricing.