Rooms, reservations and calendar sync

If you run a hotel, guesthouse or holiday rental, your assistant can take room reservations. It checks which room types are free for the caller's dates, quotes the price from your rates, collects the guest's details and books the stay. Calendar sync with Booking.com, Airbnb and VRBO keeps the same nights from being sold twice.

Reservations work on every plan.

Before you start

The pages are Reservations and Rooms & rates in the Operations part of the sidebar. They show by default when Industry under Company → Profile is set to Hotel / hospitality, and for any workspace that already has room types. If you do not see them, click Arrange this menu next to Operations and switch them on.

Step 1: Add your room types

Open Rooms & rates and click Add room type. A room type is a kind of room you rent, such as "Sea-view double". Fill in:

• Name and, optionally, Category.
• Price per night.
• How many of this room: how many identical units can be booked at the same time.
• Adults and Children: how many guests one unit sleeps. Children are on top of the adults.
• Amenities (comma-separated) and Description. The assistant reads them out when asked, for example "does it have a bath?".
• Bookable. Closed room types are not offered to callers.

To charge more in high season or on holidays, click Add rate under Seasonal rates and enter a date range and a price per night. Each night of a stay is priced on its own, so a stay that runs into high season is priced correctly. Without seasonal rates, the price per night applies all year.

Step 2: Set your house rules

On the Hotel settings tab:

Click Save settings.

Step 3: Switch on reservations for the assistant

1. Open Assistants, then the assistant, then the Abilities tab.
2. Turn on Take room reservations and save.

The tab then confirms how many room types the assistant is taking reservations for.

How the assistant books a stay

1. It asks for the check-in and check-out dates (or the arrival date and the number of nights) and how many adults and children.
2. It checks which room types are free and big enough, and offers them with the price per night and the total.
3. When the caller picks a room, it reads the summary back, gets the guest's name and, if they want a confirmation email, their email address.
4. It books the stay only after the caller says yes, then gives the reservation number and the check-in time.

A room type is free when fewer units are booked for any of those nights than How many of this room. Requested, confirmed and checked-in reservations count, including nights blocked by your other booking channels.

The guest gets a confirmation by email if they gave one, and by text if your workspace can text them. With automatic confirmation off, the text says the reservation was received and that you will confirm it shortly. They get a second message when you confirm it.

Callers can also ask about a stay they booked. The assistant finds the caller's own reservations by the number they are calling from, and can cancel one before check-in. It then mentions your cancellation policy.

The Reservations page

Reservations shows Arrivals today and Departures today at the top, then your upcoming stays. Filter by status or search by reservation number, guest or phone. Export CSV downloads the list.

Open a reservation to move it through its statuses: Confirm, Check in, Check out, No-show or Cancel reservation. A reason you give when cancelling is sent to the guest.

To add a stay by hand, click New reservation, choose the dates and guests, and click Check availability. The check counts Booking.com and Airbnb blocks too. Prices come from the room type and its seasonal rates. Reservations added by hand skip the minimum and maximum stay.

Team members with Reservations switched on under Settings → Notifications are told about new and cancelled reservations.

Calendar sync with Booking.com, Airbnb and VRBO

Calendar sync works through iCal links in both directions. Only blocked dates are exchanged. Rates, guest names and other details are not, and it is not a direct connection to those sites.

Each room type has its own calendar on the Calendar sync tab of Rooms & rates:

• Export address: a link to the nights booked in Ringhum. You paste it into Booking.com, Airbnb or VRBO so they block those nights. Guests there only see "Reserved via Ringhum", never names.
• Imported calendars: the export links from those sites. Their bookings then block the room in Ringhum and appear on the Reservations page as imported blocks.

Connect a channel

1. In Ringhum, open Rooms & rates → Calendar sync and click Copy next to the room type's Export address.
2. On the channel, open the calendar sync settings of the matching listing or room, and add a new imported calendar with that address:
   • Booking.com: in the Extranet, go to Rates & Availability → Sync calendars.
   • Airbnb: open the listing's Availability settings and look for Connect calendars (or Sync calendars).
   • VRBO: open the listing's calendar and look for the import and export calendar settings.
3. On the same channel page, copy the channel's own export link.
4. Back in Ringhum, click Edit on the room type, click Add calendar under Import calendars, give it a Label such as "Airbnb", and paste the link.
5. Click Save, then Sync now to read it straight away.

Note: The channels' menu names change from time to time. If you cannot find them, search their help pages for "sync calendars" or "iCal".

How often it updates

• Ringhum reads imported calendars every hour. Sync now reads them immediately. The card shows Last synced and how many imported blocks lie ahead, or the error if a link could not be read.
• The channels read Ringhum's export address on their own schedule, usually every few hours. A stay booked on the phone can take a while to show as blocked there.
• Most channels list one unit per calendar, so each imported booking blocks one unit of the room type. A room type with several units can have several imported calendars, one per listing.

Imported blocks are managed on the channel. When a booking is removed there, the block disappears from Ringhum at the next sync. They do not send guest messages or team notifications from Ringhum.

Important: Regenerate address creates a new export address. The old one stops working everywhere it was pasted, so paste the new one into each channel again.

Troubleshooting

The assistant says a room is full, but it looks free. Check Reservations for imported blocks on those nights, and check that How many of this room is right.

An imported calendar shows an error. Copy the export link from the channel again and replace it in the room type. The link must be a full https:// address.

A guest did not get a confirmation. The reservation needs an email address, or a phone number your workspace can text.