Descripción: parsec     

 

CRSys Administration Manual

 

Versión 6.10 June 2012

 

Table of contents

 

Introduction


Administration Menu

 

dministration menu languages

General database tables management

Managing row contents

Special interest tables

 

Agencies management


Managing Types of clients, Commisions and Markups

Operators

Types of operators (Privilege)

 

Subsites

 

            Subsite  Administration


Managing currencies exchange rates

 

Hotels management

 

Hotels general data management

Geocodings management

What geocodes are?

What CRSys uses geocodes for

CRSys tables affected

Managing Hotel Geocodes

Locations Table

How to create a new location?

 

Hotel Contracts management


Hotel Rooms and allotment types

Hotel Markets

Early bookings

Contract text

Hotel Info

Hotel locations

Hotel contract data depending of dates

Hotel contract rates

Markups or Commissions?

Inserting or modifying a rate

Assigning a rate to a period

Rest of calendars for an allotment type

Updating the calendars of all the Allotment types by just one click


Hotels at a glance

 

Summary of Hotel contract related data

 

Services contract data (transfers, sightseeings,..)

Services calendars

 

Managing Packages

 

Inserting item details

Creating rates for packages

 

Reports and controls

 

Booking File search

Excel reports

Availability statistics

Managing external sites timeouts


Provider’s payment control

 

Providers

Payment and invoicing from providers control

Exporting accepted and balanced invoices to your accounting system

 

Agencies payment control

 

Booking Amendments

 

Purpose

How it works?

Amend checkin/checkout

Amend Prices

Amend Rooms

Amend passenger names

Cancel locally this external provider booking

 

Automatic Hotel Matching

 

Effectiveness of the automatic matching

 

City Matching


Simple Administration

 

 


Introduction       (back to summary)  

 

CRSys is the evolution of former Parsys Booking System, launched in 1997 and adapted up today to include all the features demanded by all the touroperators worldwide that uses this system for their daily work.

 

CRSys/Parsys is a system that can be fully adapted to the specific characteristics of each client. There are touroperators worldwide using our system, from large ones as Abreu or Olympia Viaggi to small ones. During these last 14 years we have included thousand of new features to respond to the demands we have got from all of them. That’s why there is no just a CRSys/Parsys system but many ones, and consequently it is not easy to write down a manual reflecting all the features.

 

CRSys/parsys can be used for incoming or outgoing touroperators or both. Paradoxically is much easier to manage a CRSys/Parsys system with hundred of thousand hotels or services coming from external providers, than a system with own contracted hotels.

 

We will try to describe the general features and also the specific ones. If you have not one of them and you are interested on getting it, please contact to Parsec team and they will inform you if it is possible to implement in your system as well as the possible cost of the implementation if any.

 

This manual has been created based on the features of CRSys administration on June 2012, but CRSys is being continuously evolving, so please contact Parsec if you find in your system features or operations that have not reflected in this version.

 

 

 

 

Administration Menu      (back to summary)

 

 

This is the general CRSys/Parsys administration menu. Almost all the administration tasks can be made from this menu. Only administrator operators are allowed to enter to this menu, that normally is located in

http://server_name/client_name/admin

 

From this menu the administrators can manage all the data related to the products in their database, as hotels, transfers, sightseeings, tours, packages or cruises, as well as manage the agencies and operators, or all the rest of tables that conduct the behaviour of the system as for example, currencies exchange rates, cities & countries, external sites connected, markups and commissions etc..

 

It allows also to get all kind of reports and statistics allowing to get a vision of the business, trends etc.. , as well as control the payments from the agencies and the payments to the suppliers, manage the onrequest pending bookings and many other features that we will describe in the next chapters.

 

Many of the buttons in this menu are selfexplanatory about their meanings. But anyway there is a general dropdown menu allowing entering directly to all the tables in the database.

 

Administration menu languages

 

Administration menu is by default in English. But it can be customised to other languages if desired. However in order to get the administration in other languages we need to have the translations of all the texts and messages of the administration in the desired language. This can be accomplished using an Excel sheet that we can provide that has all the messages and texts in English and where you must put the correct translation to the desired language. There are more than thousand messages and texts and moreover sometimes they are no easy to be translated, because you must have in mind the context where the texts appear in order to do a correct translation. 

 

Actually we have translation to Portuguese and Spanish. For example, this is the menu in Portuguese,

 

 

Unfortunately there are still many texts and messages that are not yet translated to these two languages (Spanish and Portuguese), but we will continue the translation process over the next months.

 

Just put your desired language to the administrator operator in the operators table. If the language is not yet implemented it will show English by default. Administrators usually understand English, so we recommend putting language English to all the administration operators unless they do not understand English and therefore it was strictly necessary.

 

 

 

General database tables management

 

When entering to a table through the Data Base Tables button, you will get a paginated view of each table, with a header showing the column names a fields to be filled to get filtered results.

 

Fields corresponding to columns related to other tables, and that cannot contain free text or numbers, as for instance the currency column in the cities table, show a dropdown menu with all the allowed values. For example,

 

 

To get a filtered result you can put values, or partial values, in the free text column headers, and/or select options in the dropdown column headers, and click on the “Refresh order by” button, after selecting the order you want to get it. For example, to get the cities in country Costa Rica with partial name “Peninsula”,

 

In this way you can find easily any row in any table even if the table has thousand of rows.

 

 

Managing row contents

 

To manage the content of a given row, that is to modify its column values, or delete them, you must select the row by clicking on the radio button on the first column and the click on the Modify button or the Cancel button. If you click on the Cancel button the system will ask you to confirm the row deletion. If this row deletion affects to the database integrity the system will not allow you to delete it. For example you cannot delete a country if there are cities pointing to this country.

 

By selecting a row and clicking on modify you will get,

 

Then you can modify the values of the columns and modify the database by clicking on “Modify>>” button. The system will check the integrity of the values, for example avoiding to enter characters in numerical columns, checking the correct format of date columns, etc..

 

In some tables, if there are special features related to these tables, as for example “City locations” in the case of cities table, they can appear in the bottom to facilitate the administration.

 

In the same way you can insert new rows just by clicking on the Insert button.

 

 

Special interest tables

 

CRSys/Parsys database has more than thousand tables, but only few of them are available to the administrators. The rest are normally managed by Parsec team to configurate the system according to the needs and preferences of each client.

 

Among the special interest tables that can be managed by the administrators we can cite:

 

·         Countries

·         Cities

·         Regions

·         Agencies

·         Operators

·         Correspondents

·         Currency exchange rates (exchange)

·         Markups and commissions (client_types)

·         Exclude & Exclusivity

·         Warnings

 

But the most important tables are not managed directly through the “Database Tables” but through special programs that make easy their management, that have special buttons in the main menu. For example,

 

·         Hotels: to manage all the data related to the hotels, contracts, rates, rooms, etc..

·         Services: same

·         Tours: to manage itineraries, buses, etc..

·         Cruises: to manage ships, cabins, itineraries etc..

·         Packages: to manage open or closed packages, items, etc..

·         Bookings File: one of the most important table, to get description of all the operations (bookings, modifications, cancellations) made on your system, as well as to get all kind of statistics.

·         Reports: to get copies of the reports sent automatically to the hotels, services providers etc..

·         City & Hotel Matching: to indicate to the system that two cities or two hotels are in fact the same even they have slightly different names.

·         Availability Statistics: To detect what are the most frequently searched cities, the most active agencies, the time spent on the searches, etc..

·         Data Export: to export data to the backoffice accounting system of the clients.

·         OnRequest Pending: to accept or reject onrequest pending bookings, as well as to put the price in some cases.

·         Overallotment: to manage the “overallotment” feature that allows splitting the allotment of an hotel in many portions assigned to different agencies that can sum more than the real allotment, assuming the consequent risk. This is not used nowadays.

·         Multisite Administration: To manage what Parsys sites can be connected to our system to make bookings on them or to receive bookings from them.

·         Exchange rates: to control de exchange rates of the different currencies.

·         Control of payments to suppliers and from clients: to control the payments a balance of the agencies as well as to check that the invoices received from suppliers are accurate.

·         Create catalogue: to create a txt file catalogue of products and prices. (not used)

·         And finally a button to Close/Open the system

 

In the next chapters we will describe all these procedures as well as some others subsidiaries of these ones.


 

 

 

 

Agencies management      (back to summary)

 

In CRSys you can insert your agency clients with all their related data, as name, address, city, country, phone and fax, email etc.., and what is more important the markups or commissions you will apply to each one.

 

An agency must have at least one Branch office, normally the head office, or may have many branches, for example in different cities. The only relevant data of the branch offices are the name, address, city, country and phone and fax.

 

And each branch can have many operators that must be defined in the operators table.

 

We can send you an Excel sheet to you put your agencies data to be included in one go in your database at the creation time of your database. Later you can include or modify agencies, branches and operators using the Administration.

 

This is a layout of an agency record,

 

 

Many fields are not important and must be let to their default values. All the combo fields must be selected to a value. Let’s comment the mandatory fields and their meaning:

 

·         Code:  Let the system put the first free value when inserting an agency.

·         Ident or Your Age. Code: the code of this agency in your backoffice. Not mandatory but useful when exporting data to your backoffice.

·         Password: let it blank (obsolete).

·         Type of Allotment: Normally Common Allotment. Just select Private allotment if this is an important client that you want to reserve a private allotment just for them.

·         Hot. Can. Fee: Normally Yes.If you want that system does not apply cancellation penalties then you have to put No

·         Hotel, Service and Tours discount: Obsolete, let them to zero

·         Address, city, zip, country, phone, fax, contact: self explanatory

·         Email: Very important. Agencies will receive all your communications on this email box.

·         Url logo: To put a link to agency logo which is use to show in voucher and invoice

·         Country for markets: Some hotels in some countries invoices to you different costs depending of the nationality of the passengers. All the bookings made from this agency will assume nationality of this country. Put by default the same as its country.

·         Show net prices: Some agencies don’t want to receive in their screens the net price of their bookings to avoid the risk of being viewed by their clients when making the bookings. They prefer to receive just the Selling price to final consumer. This is what this field is intended to do.

·         Agency Type for hotels, services, tours, packages, car rental and cruises: VERY IMPORTANT FIELDS. Indicates what type of markup or commission will be applied to this agency. The combos point to the Client Types table. In this table we must put the markup or commission to be applied to each type of client (see next paragraph).

·         grp: not use.Let them to zero

·         Fee: To indicate if the agency has operacion fee

·         Alteration Fee: To indicate if the agency has operation fee for modify a booking.

·         ord: This value is use for system to order the agencies in the drop lists in the application.

·         Inet_address: use for special configuration. Normally you can let it empty

·         ag_owner: use for special configuration. Normally you can let it with value 0

·         site_owner: use for special configuration. Normally you can let it with value 0

·         config_code: The system allow While label. The columns indicate ini which white label is the agency. By default the agencies are in white label 0

·         Cancel_serv: with value 1 the system does not allow book travel file without hotel.

·         Show_on_request: with value NO the system does not show hotels onrequest in the availability.

·         download_per: If the agency is going to use XML Api with this columns you indicate what hotels the agency could download

·         ShowProvider: With value 1 the system shows the supplier name in availability list

·         b2c: With value YES the system shows in availabilty list a thumbnail and short description of the hotels

 


Managing Types of clients, Commisions and Markups

 

You can create as many client types as you like and put them the mnemonic name that you like.

When you create a new agency you must tell the system what type of client is.

Each client type has different markups or commissions to be applied to their bookings. These values are in the Client_types table,

 

 

The values in the columns are the percentage per 10.000 (that is percentage multiplied by 100) or children discount  to be applied to each type of product.

 

But these values will be interpreted by the system as Markups over the costs or Commissions under the recommended selling price to final clients, depending of how your system has been configured. Is your system has been configured for markups they will mean markups, otherwise they will mean commissions. Ask Parsec staff to know the configuration of your system.

 

There are two more tables that can be used to overlap the values of the Client Types table:

 

·         Client_types_date: let you putting new values to a given client type but since a given date.

·         Client_types.su_co_da: Allows you putting different values to a client_type for a given provider, country or city, or even subsite.

 

Operators

 

You can insert new operators in the operators table. Select “Operators” in the combo of “Data Base Tables” of the Administration menu.

 

Fill down the name, agency/branch, password, email (optional) and language. Put by default Active Yes. You can deactivate the operator without dropping his data by putting Active No.

 

Let the system choose the code, and put an Ident that will be the code to enter to the system.

 

The most important field in this screen is the Privilege column. It indicates what type of operator will be and what privileges he will have. Be careful when selecting this combo when modifying or inserting operators. A wrong selection can let the operator to access to private confidential data or what is worse make illegal operations.

 

The operators can enter to the reservation system or to the Administration menu (if allowed) by entering their ident and password, or the code and password depending of the configuration of your system (ask Parsec staff).

 

Types of operators (Privilege)

 

 

The most important types are:

 

·         Main Administrator: Maximum privileges. Can do almost everything. Only Parsec staff has more privileges than the Main Administrator. It is recommended to have just one (or two) Main Administrator in each database.

·       Central Administrator and Central Operator: Are your staff in your Head Office. Can have a limited access to your Administration menu.

·       Agency manager, Branch manager and Agency operator: Are the operators of your client agencies. Can have only access to the reservation system, but not to the Administration menu. Can do all the normal operations of the agencies. Agency managers can have access to all the bookings and operations made by all the operators of the agency, while Branch managers can access only to the operations

·       Hotel operator:

 

 

 

 

Subsites      (back to summary)

 

 

This is an optional priced feature. Contact Parsec if interested in contracting it.

 

 

Subsites are white labels of your reservation system. It is a way to improve your sales presenting your system “dressed” with the banners, logos and colours of your agency/touroperator clients, as if it was in fact their own reservation system.

 

Many of your clients can be real small touroperators that have their own agency clients that know just your client but not you. Then this could be a way to improve the reservations although profit margins per booking may be less.

 

If one of your clients is interested in having a subsite of your CRSys reservation system they must provide to you the logo, banner and background colour of their agency. Parsec staff will create the subsite using them.

 

A subsite has a named “config_code” that once provided by Parsec must be put in the agency record in the column “config_code”. The clients of your subsite client will be “branches” of the agency, and each “branch” or clients of the subsite will have operators. Parsec will create an HTML entry page for this subsite (using the colours and logo provided), that will be the entry page for the clients of the subsite.

 

When an operator enters to the subsite your CRSys system will appear dressed with the logos and background colours of the subsite owner.

 

Some of our clients are doing a wide use of subsites, having dozens of subsites. In this example The Euro Holidays has a subsite with Config_code=2,

 

 

 Subsite  Administration

 

There is a simplified subsite administration allowing the clients of a subsite manage their agencies and operators, put their specific commissions or access to the history file of their bookings

 

 

 

 

Using this tool the clients of your subsite client can manage autonomously their agencies, operators or commissions, freeing our staff of this management.

 

 


Managing currencies exchange rates      (back to summary)

 

The Currencies table contains all the currencies your system will work with. You can insert new currencies putting their names, symbol, as well as the decimal separator and thousands separator. Do not remove currencies of this table because there can be old bookings using them.

 

The currencies exchange rates are in the table “Exchange”. There is a Main Currency that has a exchange rate of 1,00 (Eur in next example),

 

The column date is very important because it indicates when the value will start being applied. A value 0 means from the beginning of the times. So if you want that a new exchange rate be applied from a given date (for bookings with checkin after this date), you must insert a new line with this date and the new rate. Never delete lines of this table. In case of doubts about what rate has been applied to a booking done you can look to this table to check it.

 

 

 

 

 

Hotels management      (back to summary)

 

You can enter to the hotels management by clicking on the “Hotels” button on the main menu.

 

Hotel management is one of the most complex managements on the administration of the system. The complexity comes from the fact that the hoteliers use to have complex contracts offering special offers, prices, discounts or extra charges etc., which complicates the introduction of the data.

 

Paradoxically it is mucho more easy to put in the system tens of thousands of hotels of an external provider than some hundred of own contract hotels. In the case of hotels of external providers the Parsec team will load them automatically, and moreover there are no prices, nor cancellation policies, nor releases, nor any other data to be loaded, because all of them are taken online when a booking is done. So you must not take care of these external hotels loadings, just of your own contracted hotels.

 

In the case of not complex contracts Parsec offers a set of Excel sheets to be filled by you with the data of the contracts,

·         A sheet for the countries you want to include in your system, if they are not yet loaded

·         A sheet for cities, the same

·         A sheet for the hotels general data, as name, address, phone, email etc..

·         A sheet for the rooms each hotel offer.

·         A sheet for the allotments the hotels are offering to you

·         A sheet for the rates of each room/allotment

·         A sheet for the releases

 

You can ask Parsec for these Excel sheet and once fulfilled Parsec team will run a program to load all the data automatically, avoiding you to do the painful work of introducing them manually.

 

But unfortunately in the case of complex contracts not all the data can be introduced in this way. For instance in the case of complex cancellation policies, early bookings, discount by passengers and others, which unfortunately are very frequent especially in beach or touristic areas hotels.

 

Hotels general data management

 

By selecting an hotel, clicking the select radio button, and clicking on Modify you will get the previous screen showing all the general data of the hotel.

 

Following is the description of each field:

 

·         Code: is automatically assigned by the system when the hotel was inserted first time. It is not modifiable.

·         Active: if Not the hotel will be not available. You can deactivate an hotel if you detect anomalies or possible errors.

·         Ident: is the code of this hotel in your backoffice system if any. Many tables have an ident column with the same meaning in order to facilitate the identification when data is exported to the backoffice.

·         Name: name of the hotel

·         Chain: related to the chains table. It is only allowed to select one of the chains in chains table. Insert first the chain in this table if you have an hotel in a new chain.

·         Category: same as chains. There is a categories table. You can put any category name on it, but you must assign “your” categories to a normalized categories list in order to facilitate the selection from other sites.

·         Address, Zip, City, location, phone and fax. Selfexplanatory.

·         Baby_age and children_age: children under or equal to Baby_age are free. Children under or equal to children_age will be classified for reduction of price in bookings of 2Adults/1children or Family rate.

·         Url_web, Stay_pay_url and urgent_phone: deprecated. Do not fullfill.

·         Checkin_time, Checkout_time: to be printed in the vouchers, warning the passengers.

·         Correspondent: Who must be reported about the bookings. There is a table of correspondents where the the owner of the system must be also included. If the correspondent is the owner the reports will be sent automatically to the email of each hotel. Otherwise they will be sent to the email of the correspondent.

·         Language and currency: deprecated. Let the default value.

·         Single, Double, Triple, Qua: if the hotel has rooms for these uses.

·         Cruise: Cruises are inserted as hotels with rooms being the cabins. In this case must be Yes.

·         Site: The site of the system owner if it is an own contracted hotel. Otherwise the site where the hotel is coming from. In this last case the hotel data will be loaded automatically by Parsec team.

·         Remote_code: Zero if it is a contracted hotel. Otherwise loaded by Parsec team when the external loading is done.

·         Grp & ord: deprecated. Let zero value.

·         Hot_rate & net: Hotels hot rate will be allowed to enter directly to the system, using a special program described later, to put allotments and rates. Net means that the rates they will include using this program will be net prices.

·         Master: If the hotel is the same than other one, even they have no exactly the same name, what is very frequent, this will be the code of the “master” hotel (any of them). This is related to the important problem of the Hotel Matching, that can be done automatically and will be treated later in other chapter.

·         Location Code and Accuracy: Do not fulfil. They will be managed by the Hotel geocoding location that we will comment later.

 

You can insert new hotels or modify general data of existing ones in this way.

 

But there are much more data related to the location of the hotels or, for sure, the contract data of the hotels.


 

 

 

Geocodings management      (back to summary)

 

What geocodes are?

 

Geocodes or coordinates of a location on the Earth surface are the latitude and longitude of each point, normally defined in degrees with at least 6 decimals. With this precision a point can be located with a maximum error of some meters. For example the geocodes of the Eiffel Tower are Latitude=48.85813641430709  and Longitude=2.2945761680603027 . Latitude can have values from -90º (South Pole) to +90º (North Pole), and longitude values from -180º to +180º, having Longitude=0º all the locations on the Greenwich Meridian.

 

Geocodes are very useful in tourism because they can be used to:

·         Get the situation of hotels.

·         Get maps of the cities

·         Locate hotels around a given location

·         Define locations in a city to search hotels on them

·         Calculate straight distances between points

·         And many other uses that can be useful in the future.

 

CRSys is prepared to manage Geocodes of hotels, interest points, cities, locations etc, and use them to facilitate searches. All this management has been done using the API of Google Maps.

 

With Geocodes you can define polygons covering an area in order to search hotels in this area, for example you can define “Low Manhattan area” in New York and use it to find hotels in this defined area.

 

What CRSys uses geocodes for

 

It uses geocodes currently for:

·         Show hotels on map

·         Search hotels on locations

·         Search hotels in a given area in a city

·         Search hotels close to a given interest point. For example at less than 500 meters around Place Opera in Paris.

·         Add map of hotel location in vouchers

 

CRSys tables affected

 

The Crsys tables affected are Hotels, Cities, Locations. In the next months we want to include geocodes to define large touristic areas as Côte D’Azur, Costa del Sol, Riviera Maya etc..

 


Managing Hotel Geocodes

 

Management of Hotel Geocodes is different depending on the hotels are “local”, that is contract hotels managed directly by the owner of the CRSys site (incoming touroperators), or “external”, that is hotels coming from other CRSys sites or other Global Providers (Tourico, Gulliiver, Miki, etc..). Geocodes of external hotels are normally provided by the each Global Provider and stored in a common CRSys database.

 

Geocodes of contract or “local” hotels must be inserted and managed by the owner of the site without any restriction. External hotels Geocodes can be viewed but cannot be modified by the owner of the site. Only Parsec staff can modify them, after detecting any error, because they affect to all the CRSys sites.

 

To see or modify Geocodes of an hotel, enter to the Administration and go to the Hotels table.

Hotels codes (first column) will appear in black if the hotel has Geocodes and they are accurate (accuracy=>8), in brown if the hotel has Geocodes but its accuracy is less than 8 and greater than 0 (it means that these coordinates can be wrong), and in red if the hotel has not Geocodes or its accuracy is less than 0 (absolutely wrong). Passing the cursor over the code you can see what is its accuracy.Let’s see how it looks,

 

 

Select one hotel and click on Modify, you will get the hotel data (as in the old CRSys release) but followed by the coordinates of the hotel if any,

In this case, as the hotel comes from Tourico, Crsys lets you see the map of the hotel location but not modify it.

 

If you click on the “Show hotel on map based on its coordinates” you will get the map of the hotel location,

 

 

This is the case of a “local” hotel.

 

If you want to modify the shown location because you think it is not accurate, you can click and drag the marker moving it the correct location, using zoom in zoom out or moving the map itself. Longitude and latitude will be automatically updated to the new values. Once the marker is on the right position click on Modify Hotel.

 

If is the field address of the hotel what is wrong, modify it and click to “Show Hotel on map based on its address”. You will get the new position in the map. Drag the marker if necessary and Modify Hotel.

 

Do not forget to update the Accuracy if needed. Put 8 if it is an accurate position.


Locations Table

 

A location is a given area in a city used to find hotels on it. A location is a polygon of points defining its boundary, and having a name. Locations are in the locations table, and there you can create new ones or modify or delete them.

 

How to create a new location?

 

In Administration go to the locations table and click Insert.  Select the city on the city combo and click on “Show map of the selected city .If you select for example Sevilla, Spain you will get,

 

 

Now you can click on the map to create the points that will be the vertexes of the location polygon area. Every time you click on the map the system will ask you “Mark this point?” and afterwards (after at least 3 points) “More Points?”. Answer yes to the first question and answer No to the second one to finish the polygon.

 

When done, do not forget to put the name of the location. The final map will be,

 

Now click on Insert>> and the location will be stored in the database. It will appear on CRSys when you search hotels in Sevilla, and you can search hotels located in this area.

 

Create as many locations in each city as you want, but avoid overlap polygons because in this case CRSys will get an ambiguity to locate the hotels.

 

If you want to see at a glance all the locations of a given city, go to Cities table, select the city and click Modify. After the general data of the city it will appear a map showing all the previously created locations. This is an example of New York City,

 

 

Passing the cursor over the marker of each location you will get the name of it.

 

To modify a location go to locations, Modify and drag the markers of the polygon vertexes to the new position you want.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hotel Contracts management      (back to summary)

 

Hotel contracts are often complex. They have a lot of date depending data as:

 

·         Allotments, depending of the type of room

·         Releases: number of days before checkin that a room can be booked

·         Rates: for different uses, single, double, triple, cuadruple, and more in case of apartment hotels, as well as discount for children.

·         Cancellation policies: penalties depending of the date of the cancellation can be a number of nights, a percentage, an amount etc..

·         Closed dates: when the hotel is closed.

·         Special offers: very varied. X days free every Y days booked, or more than Y days booked, etc..

·         Minimum or maximum stay

·         Arrival dates: in case of apartments.

 

All these data are date depending, and can therefore be different depending of the date or period.

 

Apart of these data date depending there are other characteristics of the hotel contracts as:

 

·         Rooms: different type of different physical rooms. These are “physical rooms” not uses of rooms. It means that, for example, a hotel can have a “Park view” room allowed for a minimum of 1 person (single use) and a maximum of 3 persons (triple use).

·         Allotment types: Normally there will be an allotment type associated to each different room.

·         Markets: In some countries the hotels have a different rate depending of the nationality of the passengers. It is not used in Europe, but it is used in many south American countries,.

·         Early Bookings: discounts if booked in a given period or X days before arrival.

·         Hotel Info: description texts, photographies, etc ..

·         Warnings: to be added to the vouchers.

 

To get the menu to manage all these data, select the hotel and click on “HotelDetails”.

You will get,

 

Let us start by the rooms and allotment types.


Hotel Rooms and allotment types

 

Click on “Hotel Rooms” on the screen above. You will get,

 

 

Each room has a full name, a description, an abbreviated name, type of breakfast, a maximum number of paxes, a minimum number of paxes, a max number of children with discount, and an allotment associated.

 

Before inserting a room you must enter the allotments by clicking on “Hotel Allot” and insert its allotment name,

 

Just put any number in Preference that is only used by Parsec in special cases.

 

The maximum and minimum number of paxes and children indicates what uses will be allowed for this room. For example if Minimum number of paxes is 2 and maximum 3, and max children is zero, the uses allowed will be Double and Triple. If minimum paxes is 1, maximum is 1, and max children is zero, the room can be used only for Single use.

 

Hotel Markets

 

You can define global markets which are sets of countries with a market name, and say that a given hotel uses these markets. Then the hotel will have different rates (costs) depending of the market. The system assumes that the nationality (market) of the passenger is the nationality (country) of the agency that has made the booking for him/her.

 

In the following example the system has four global markets defined, GM Europe, GM America Do Norte, GM Southamerica (except PY) and GM. Each one has countries assigned.

 

You can define as many global markets as you want, but not sharing countries. If a hotel has some markets the system will ask for rates for each one as well as rates for the default market “Rest of countries”.

 

In this case the hotel has not markets assigned.

 

Early bookings

 

By clicking in “Early Bookings” button you will get,

 

In this example you can see that this hotel has different rules of early bookings for each room.

The early bookings discount rules can be very complex. For instance, it can have a percentage discount if the booking is made X days before the arrival, or alternatively it has been made in a given period, or the booking checkin is between a given period. Also it can be dependant of the minimum stay, applied only to a given market, and if the discounts apply also to the meal plan.

There is also an optional warning that will appear when the booking was done.

 

Contract text

 

The text will appear in the voucher, warning about any extra charge or others.

For example,

 

 

 

Hotel Info

 

By clicking on this button you will get access to the screen where you can put your description of the hotel, characteristics, pictures, and many others info that will appear on the CRSys screens when needed.

 

It is possible to put many pictures, just adding new lines in the picture text area. The pictures must be pointed with an URL to the location of the picture. As sometimes you cannot have access to put pictures in your server, please contact to Parsec team in order to help you on this task.

 

 

Obviously this feature has only meaning in the case of own contract hotels. Hotels coming from external providers have the descriptions and pictures in their sites, and are got online when demanded.

 

Hotel locations

 

This feature is deprecated. Before using Geocodes to locate hotels and delimit graphically locations, as explained before, this was used to tell in what locations was located the hotel.

But this way was not useful because of redundancies of locations, inaccuracy etc..

 

Hotel contract data depending of dates

 

Allotments, Releases, Rates, Cancellation policies, Closed dates, Special offers, Minimum or maximum stay or Arrival dates are all date depending data of the hotel contracts.

 

All of them are managed by the system using one year round “calendars” which contain in each day box the value of this item in this day.

 

A typical calendar shows like this,

 

 

This is a calendar got a 15th June 2012 (the item it corresponds to does not matter). It shows in light green the dates of 2012, and in light yellow dates of 2013. Then it is a round calendar.

The Saturdays and Sunday are shown in red, and today (15th June) must be shown in grey if it is not Saturday nor Sunday.

 

Each box contains the value of the item on this date. For example, if this calendar was corresponding to the Allotments of a room, it should mean that there are 10 rooms allotted from 15th June to 31st October 2012, and none in the rest.

 

Every night an authomatic Parsys program runs and cleans the date of yesterday in the corresponding box of ALL the calendars in ALL de Parsys databases. The reason to do this is that tomorrow, the 15th June 2012 will become 15th June 2013, and therefore the value contained in this box is not valid anymore and must be put to 0 (zero). A zero in a calendar box means that there is no value in this date (no rate, no allotment, etc..).

 

With the controls on the bottom you can modify the values in the calendar. The weekdays checkboxes allows you to apply new values just in the selected weekdays of the period, what is very useful because many items have frequently exceptional values on the weekends.

 

There are also calendars to save data about the operations done in each hotel, as number of rooms sold in each date, or unsold, or onrequest, etc..

 

You can go to the calendar screen of a contract data by selecting it in the dropdown menu and clicking the corresponding button I the header,

 

 

Some calendar screens are very easy to manage because they have just values (allotment, releases, etc.), but some others are more complex because the values refers to other items as rates, cancellation policies, special offers etc.

 

 

Hotel contract rates

 

Let us first remark that the rates, as well as releases, cancellation policies, special offers etc. are related to an Allotment Type. In some cases a physical room type can have allotments in many Allotment types. For example a hotel can give 5 rooms of type Standard in the contract at a given rates, releases etc.., and at the same time 3 rooms more of the same type Standard but offered out of the contract at different rates, releases etc. Then the set of contract data is depending of the Allotment type, not of the Room Type.

 

To access to the date depending data calendars you must first select the Allotment Type in the combo on the top left side of the screen,

 


 

Then you can select what type of calendar you want to look or manage on the calendars combo. In this case all these calendars will be those related to the Allotment type “DOBLE USO INDIVIDUAL”.

 

By selecting Rates and clicking y Calendars button you will get,

 

 

The calendar shows what rate number is assigned to every day. And on the bottom is the description of each rate. Let us comment what this description means.

First of all remark that it only shows prices for 2 paxes (Double use) and 3 Paxes (triple use). The reason is that the Standard room has  minimum paxes=2, maximum paxes=3 and maximum children with discount=0. The system will always show just the prices columns according to the limits of paxes defined in the room.

 

Also remark that there are 7 lines of prices in each rate. In this case Cost, Price, STOR, TOR, AGT and MIN. Cost are the cost (the amount of money) that the hotel will invoice to the system owner. Price is the recommended selling price that the agencies clients of the site owner should invoice to their clients. And the rest of lines are the different Client Types that the owner of the site has defined in the Client Types table. In these case he has defined 4 client types: STOR, TOR, AGT and MIN. You can define any number of client types and put arbitrary names.

 

But the important thing is that each client type is associated to a markup or commission that will be applied to calculate the net price to the agencies of this client type.

 

All this is managed in the client_types table. It can be accessed from the main menu selecting Client_types in the Database Tables combo and clicking in the button,

 

This is one of the most important table in the database because you can tell here to the system what markups or commissions must be applied. When you enter a new agency in your system you tell it what kind of client Type is it, and will apply the markup or commission accordingly.

 

In this table there are columns to put the markup or commission for Hotels, Services, discount for children, tours, cruises, supplements, meal plan and rental cars. The markups or commissions must be inserted as a percentage multiplied by 100. That is for example a 15% will be 1500, a 13% will be 1300.

 

In the case of external providers hotels, the provider send the “cost” and the system will aply “on the fly” the markup or commission to get the net price to the agency.

 

This is then a very important table, but it can be overlapped by the values in other two tables:

·         Client_types_date: same as client_types but with a new column “date”. It can be used to apply different markups since a given date. For example if we want to apply a markup of 16% to STOR client types starting next 31 October, instead of the current 14%.

·         Cli_types_su_co_da: This table allows to put exceptions by provider, country, city and date, and overlaps the values on the client_types table. For example you can tell here that booking for STOR client types with checkin after 1st Nov 2012, going to provider Transhotel and to the city Paris will have a  special markup of 8% instead of the markup for STOR in the client types table.

 

These three tables are then a powerful mechanism to apply and control all kind of markups and commissions in your system.

 

Markups or Commissions?

 

The system can be configured to work with markups or with commissions. In the first case the numbers appearing in the client_types, client_types_date and client_types_su_co_da tables are markups, and the the net price to the agency will be

Net=Cost+Cost*Markup/100.

 

If the system is configured for commissions, it will first calculate the Recommended Selling Price to the paxes (Price in these tables) applying this value as a markup over the cost, that is,

 

Price=Cost + Cost*Markup/100 (where Markup is the value in row Price on these table)

 

Then will calculate the Net Price discounting the value in the table as a commission, that is,

 

Net Price = Price – Price*Commission/100

 

It is therefore very important to put values for type Price in all these tables.

 

 

Inserting or modifying a rate

 

Select the rate to be modified and click on Modify, or simply click on Insert button,

 

 

If inserting you will get,

 

 

As you can see it shows all the client types as well as, on the left,  the values by default in the table client types.

 

These default values (14%, 17%, 17% and 24%) have been taken from the Client Types table. But you can modify them just for this rate.

 

It is only necessary to enter the Costs, that are the amount that the hotel will invoice to the site owner according to the contract. Then you can modify the left side percentages if needed, and click on “Calculate net prices applying % over costs without modifying Data Base”. The system will calculate the rates (net prices) for all the client types and all the uses, but they will not be inserted in the database until you click on “Insert” button.

 

In this way you can review the prices and amend them if necessary, for example to round them.

 

In the case that the system was configured to work with commissions instead of markups, you must first calculate de “Price” (recommended selling price to final clients), and then calculate the net prices applying these commissions to the “Price”. In this example, the percentage for Price is not meaningful (is zero) because the system is configured for markups.

 

You can add costs and calculate net prices also for meal plans on the top of the screen, as well as put costs and net prices in other currencies if needed. The conversion from a currency to others will be made using the Exchange table.

 

 

Assigning a rate to a period

 

Once a rate has been created, you can assign it to the desired periods by using its calendar.

You can have as many different rates as needed, and assign them to different perios in the calendar.

 

Former rates that will not be used anymore must be deleted in order to let the system reusing their rate codes. The system allows a maximum of 99 different rate codes.

 

 

Rest of calendars for an allotment type

 

Remember that all the calendars are related to the Allotment type selected on the Allotment combo on the top left side of the calendars screen.

 

Some calendars will contain just numeric values indicating the value of this item in every date. For example, releases, (deadlines), minimum stay, maximum stay, or obviously the allotment calendars.

 

But the rest will contain numbers  (from 1 to 99) indicating the code of the corresponding item. This is the case of cancellation policies, Closed dates (values just Open or Close), special offers, or Arrival dates (yes or no). For example the cancellation policies calendars screen will show,

 

 

In this example the cancellation policy number 1, which means a penalty of 100% of the booking if it is cancelled 2 days or less before checkin date, and one night (the first one) if cancelled between 6 and 3 days before checkin, is applied from 18th June 2012 to 25th January 2013.

 

You can insert or modify cancellation policies and rules by using the Insert and Modify buttons.

 

The special offers calendars refer to codes of special offers previously programmed in the system and that are shown on the bottom of the calendar. There are dozens of special offers already pre-programmed (the most frequently used), but you can ask to Parsec to programme a new one if needed.

 

 

Closed date calendars show just a red box if closed, like this,

 

 

 

Updating the calendars of all the Allotment types by just one click

 

By clicking in “Update all calendars” button you can update with the values selected the calendars of ALL the allotment types. This is very useful in case of hotels with many rooms (i.e. allotment types), to update all the calendars of items that are the same in all the rooms, as closed dates ones.

 

 

 


Hotels at a glance      (back to summary)

 

If you want to have a kind of “Online Catalogue” showing at a glance calendars and values of all the hotels in a city in a given period, you can use the “Hotels at a Glance” option,

 

 

It is really difficult to show all the contract related data of a set of hotels, due to the great number of details, items and characteristics, that’s why there are some restrictions to show these data. You can choose just a city, and choose what kind of calendars and values you want to get, as well as the period (not more than 31 days). For example if you choose “Rates details” you will get a report (that can be very long) of the calendars and rates of all the rooms of all the hotels in the selected city,

 

Or by choosing the “All Allotments” button,

 

 

Here it shows allotments, releases and closed dates all together.

 

You can then print it or just use it for consulting.

 

The number of reports you can get with this option is very large and varied. Please try yourselves all the possibilities to get different reports “at a glance” and know the powerful of this tool.

 

 

 

Summary of Hotel contract related data      (back to summary)

 

 

  • External hotels coming from other providers do not need any data management because all their rates, releases, cancellation policies etc.., are got online from their sites. Tables Client-Types, Client_Types_Dates and Clien_types_su_co_da are used to calculate online the net prices to the agencies.

 

  • Just own contracted hotels need their contract data be inserted and managed in the database.

 

  • Simple non complex contracts can be filled out in some Excel sheets that Parsec can provide, and loaded automatically by Parsec staff.

 

  • But complex contracts must be inserted using the calendars screens that depend of the Allotment Type.

 

  • In this last case the rates are not calculated online as in external hotels, but they are taken from the rates calendars loaded in the database. These net prices are calculated when rates are inserted, and “frozen” to be taken directly when booking.

 

 

 


 

 

Services contract data (transfers, sightseeings,..)      (back to summary)

 

Services are all kind of “land services” as transfers, sightseeings, ticketing, rental cars, restaurants, or even “open” miscellaneous services to be freely described and booked on request.

 

All services are defined in the “Services” table, but some of them have special additional related tables to save their special characteristics. All the services in the services table are own contracted services, done by the owner of the site or by correspondents having a contract with him.

 

Yo can access to this table from the main menu, by selecting a city and clicking on the “Services” button.The management of this table is similar to the hotels one, but services are less complex than hotels.

 

A screen to insert or modify a service looks like this,

 

 

Many columns are just info to be displayed or printed in the voucher, and many others are similar to the hotels one. Let us comment some of the specific cases for services:

 

·         Service types can be defined by the site owner telling to Parsec staff to insert those values in a special table. Only transfers and sightseeings are mandatory, but you can have for example, specific sightseeings or transfers as Disneyland tickets,  special events tickets, restaurants, etc..

·         Serv_rate_type indicates if the rates will be an amount “per pax” or “per vehicle”, or type rental car. It will affect to the rates screens.

·         Num_rate_groups: This means how many scale groups for pricing will it have. For example, if the price (per pax or vehicle) is a given one for 1-3 paxes, other for 4-9 paxes and other for more than 9 paxes, as is the case of transfers using a normal vehicle, a van or a bus, then the number of groups must be 3.

·         Allot: if Yes means that this service will have allotments. If No is a free sale service.

 

 

Services calendars

 

Calendars for services are similar to the hotel calendars. But services are less complex and have fewer calendars than hotels. In fact they only have calendars for rates, releases, cancellation policies and closed dates, as well as allotments calendars if the service has allotments and is not free sale,

 

This screen shows a typical example of rates calendar of a transfer, priced by vehicle with 5 groups of rates. You can insert new rates or modify existing ones or assign to different periods as explained in the Hotels management chapter.


 

 

 

 

Managing Packages      (back to summary)

 

Packages are a set of services (hotel, land services etc..) previously defined and to be sold as a unit.

 

Packages can be fixed price or dynamic. A fixed price package has a fixed number of items that cannot be booked separately, and its price is fixed, just depending of the category of the hotels.

A dynamic package is also a predefined set of items nut its price is not fix but is calculated adding the individual price of each item.

 

Do not confuse packages with Travel Files. CRSys works with Travel Files which are a kind of bag (or chart) when the agency can put any arbitrary item, and that will be invoiced jointly to the agency.

 

Defining packages

 

From the main menu you can access to packages by clicking on “Packages” button. Packages are not related to a city, as hotels and services are, so you don’t need to select a city.

 

If you have many packages it is convenient to previously define groups of packages by just inserting their names in the Packages_gr table. This will make easy to the clients to find the package they are looking for.

 

First of all we must insert the general data of the package, the name, and general characteristics,

 

 

Fields are most of them self explanatory and similar to the hotel ones. Some important fields are, “nights” which is the number of nights of the package and will condition the structure of the package items, and “max_nights_ad”, that is the max number of additional nights that can be added at the beginning or end of the package.

 

Once the general data of the package have been inserted we can start defining their “items” and their characteristics. Let us select the new package inserted in the packages table, and click on “Package Items”. If the package was already created and their items already inserted it will show something like this,

 

Items types can be:

 

·         Fix: the item is always included in the package and has no alternative

·         Optional: the item can be excluded when the package is booked but in case of fixed price packages this will not change the global price.

·         Alternative: in this item can be many alternatives, for example is possible to select different sightseeings as per election of the client, or different hotels of different category. In this last case the price of the fixed price packages can be different according to the category selected.

 

Item classes can be Hotel, Transfer, Sightseeing, Cruise, Escorted tour by bus, or even Flights or Other (with a free text description). If class is transfer it must be indicated if it is a Transfer IN or OUT.

 

Start Day is the relative day within the package stay when the item starts, and Nights are the number of nights of the item, normally 1 fro transfers and sightseeings, but any number for hotels, cruises or escorted tours.

 

It is also convenient to put the city where the item will be done, and a short description of the item.

 

Inserting item details

 

Once all the items have been inserted we must start the last step to fully define the package which is to enter the item details.

 

Select one item in the items screen of the desired package and click on “Item details”. You will get the item details of this item. If inserting a new detail in an item type Alternative or Fix you will get,

 

 

The combos of categories, cities and hotels will show all the allowed categories of hotels, all the cities and their hotels. You can choose what category, city and hotel will be assigned to this item. By clicking on the checkbox “Alternate Hotel” it will allow you to put an alternate item detail to be used if the first one is not available for any reason. Do not confuse this alternate item detail with the alternative item details. In this case it is not responsibility of the client or agency to decide what detail want to use, but it will be decide automatically by the system in the case that the main one was not available (for example if closed dates or other reasons).

 

If a package has many Hotel items in many cities, the category of the different alternative hotels in every city must be the same., that is if in the first item are 3 alternative hotels of category 3*, 4*, and 5*, there must be alternative hotels of the same categories in the rest of the cities.

 


Creating rates for packages

 

The creation of rates for packages is similar to the rates creation of services. They have calendars just for rates, releases, cancellation policies and closed dates,

 

As you can see there are calendars and rates for each type of category of hotel in the alternative hotel items. That is, the same package can have a price for 3* hotels and different for 4* and 5* hotels. It is at time of booking when the client will select what category of package wants to book.


 

 

 

Reports and controls      (back to summary)

 

CRSys/Parsys provides numerous programs and tools to get statistics, reports and a view to the state of the business, as well as control the payments from clients and to suppliers:

 

·         Booking File search: a program to view the history of all the operations made in the system, filter by any kind of data, and get reports.

·         System Availability statistics: to get info about the searches made in the system (not operations), filtered by agencies, cities etc.., and get trends about the interest of your clients.

·         Control of payments to suppliers and from your clients: Controlling the payments and balance of your agencies, and checking that the invoices from your suppliers are accurate.

·         Automatic reports to hotels and providers: A copy of the reports already sent automatically by the system

 

 

Booking File search

 

The Booking File is a log file or table that contains all the operations (bookings, modifications, cancellations, on request confirmations or rejects. Is an accumulative file, and none entry is never erased or modified, but (as in accounting) modifications or cancellations creates new entries without changing the old operations.

 

You can access from the main menu by clicking on “Bookings File”. You will get by default the list (paginated) of the operations made today. “Today” will be interpreted by the system using the timezone selected in the combo, that is “GMT” or other worldwide timezone corresponding to the headquarters of the owner of the site. Ask Parsec to include your timezone if not in the combo.

 

It will show all the operations, coloured in rose if they are “dead” operations, or in white if they are “alive” operations.

 

 

 


You can choose the period that can be: Today, Yesterday, Month ago, Year ago, or a period between to dates.

 

The results can be shown as a detailed list or, by clicking on “Book Map”, just as a chart showing totals every day.

 

Also you can filter by Travel File number, Lead Pax name or partial, city (by code), agency (by code), hotel or service (by code), operator (by code), type of operation, or external provider, or a mix of all of them. For example you can search cancellations made in the last year to external provider Hotelbeds,

 

 

For each operation it will show all the details regarding the operation,

 

 

A red arrow under the Travel File number means that this is an operation going to an external provider. You can get the name of the provider and the reference number by clicking on the arrow.

 

By passing the cursor over the lead pax name you will get the full rooming list, or passing over the rooms you will get the detailed type of rooms and uses.

 

Also by clicking over the Travel File number you can get access to the full Travel File to modify, cancel or amend, as we will explain later.

 

 

Excel reports

 

By clicking on the buttons  you can get various reports in Excel format to be processed afterwards to get statistics of sales or data mining. The format of these Excel reports can be configured according to the needs of the site.

 

Following are some examples,

 


Statistics,

 

Rooming lists report,

 

 

Ask Parsec to implement special reports in your system.

 

 

 

Availability statistics

 

The availability transaction, i.e. the search of hotels or services in a city, is one of the most costly transactions in terms of server processor time and resources. It is interesting to know how many searches have been made and what are the preferred destinations.

 

A lot of availability transactions on a city in a given period means that many people are interested in this destination. If the number of bookings is not so high in this city in this period this means that our prices are not competitive. Many people search but do not find.

 

In order to know who is accessing to our system and what are their interested cities the system offers an “Availability Statistics” in the main menu,

 

 

The upper box can be used to get statistics of availability transactions, filtered by city, or agency, or provider, or daytime, or even number of hotels processed. For example, following is a result of statistics by city, showing the number of availability transactions in every city, the average time spent, and the average time spent by hotel found.

 

Or by external sites providers,

 

 

 

 

Managing external sites timeouts

 

If your CRSys system is connected to other provider external sites it sends in parallel availability requests to all the sites connected every time that an agency searches hotels in a city.

 

The response time in your system will be then the higher response time of all the external sites. In order to avoid long response times when an external site has a long response time, CRSys has a table with the maximum time allowed before discarding this external site.

 

There is a global timeout for all the cases that normally is put to 40 seconds but it is possible to put different timeouts for specific cities or providers. For example you can tell the system to wait more time if the availability is in Paris, because there are a lot of hotels in this city and is normal to have there higher response times.

 

All this can be managed with the bottom box in the availability statistics,

 

 


 

 

 

Provider’s payment control      (back to summary)

 

A new feature implemented in CRSys administration will allow controlling the invoices coming from your providers, checking that they correspond to bookings made on your system and assuring that the amount corresponds to the costs of these bookings.

 

Providers

 

Your providers can be:

·       Hotels (direct contract hotels)

·       Correspondents that are hotel chains, services providers (transfers, sightseeings…) or any other company providing services that can be included in your bookings.

·       External providers, as any other CRSys site, or any global provider you can use in your system (Gulliver, Tourico, etc..)

 

Normally you will receive periodically invoices coming from your providers, and you must be sure that all of them are accurate, corresponding to bookings made in your system and matching the costs that are stored in your CRSys database.

 

Many times these invoices gather several bookings and it is difficult to find and match the corresponding bookings before accepting them.

 

This is then the aim of this new feature, make this work easier and control that the payments will be correct.

 

The new option “Control of payments to suppliers” in the main menu goes to the new feature to control the invoicing from your providers.

 

Payment and invoicing from providers control

 

You must select first the type of provider (Hotels, Correspondents or External providers). Selecting the type the screen will show the list of the selected type having bookings not yet assigned to any previous invoice.

 

You must select then the Hotel, or the correspondent (chain, services provider etc.., that must be defined in your correspondents table), or external provider.

 

Let’s select for example External Providers,

 

The system will show all the external providers that you have defined in your system to make bookings over their sites and having at least a booking not yet assigned to any invoice.

 

Then you can (for this provider) ask for:

·         Invoices not yet accepted

·         Invoices that don’t match the total amount to the amount of their bookings in your system.

·         Invoices already accepted

·         Bookings in your system whose invoices have not yet arrived.

 

At the beginning you will have no invoices of any kind,

Suppose you receive an invoice from Olympia Europe, number N-07884/02, dated 11th December 2010, by an amount of 1.379,80 Eur, corresponding to two bookings, Hotel Westbury Kesignton and Hotel Campanile for some given dates and passengers.

 

You must search these bookings clicking on “Not arrived invoices” and you will get,

 

With the whole list of bookings made in Olympia site, and not yet invoiced by Olympia.

 

You must put the invoice number, the invoice date and the amount, and search and select the bookings in the list.

 

 

As you select any new booking, the field Remaining Amount will show the balance, subtracting the amount of the selected booking from the total amount. If the invoice is accurate the Remaining amount will be zero when all the bookings were selected. In this case you can click on “Assign bookings to this invoice”, and the invoice will be stored as accepted.

 

But many times the incoming invoices are not accurate and the total amount can be different from the costs you have in your database. In this case your can assign and store this invoice but it will remain as not accepted with a non zero balance, until you clarify this situation with your provider.

 

For example, in the same case as before, if the booking in the invoice were different,

 

 

 

You can assign these bookings to this invoice, but the invoice will be stored as NOT ACCEPTED because its amount does not match your total costs. The system will warn you about this problem before storing it.

 

This last invoice will appear in “Unbalanced invoices” or also in “Invoices not accepted”,

 

 

You can then talk to your provider and occasionally you can accept this invoice even though its amount does not match your costs. In this case you can add comments to explain what the solution has been.

 

By clicking in “Accept this invoice” you will convert the invoice in accepted, but it will remain Unbalanced,

 

 

 

Exporting accepted and balanced invoices to your accounting system

 

The ideal situation is to have all the supplier invoices balanced and accepted. All these invoices can then be exported to your accounting system in order to do the payments. The export option depends obviously of what accounting system you are using, and the export module must be programmed accordingly.

 

 

 

Agencies payment control      (back to summary)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Booking Amendments       (back to summary)

 

A new option “Amend booking” has been implemented just for administrators in Parsys/CRSys level 6.0 or higher. Entering from the administration and displaying a Travel File a new button “Amend” will appear close to the “Modify” and “Cancel” buttons.

 

Purpose

 

The aim of this new option is to modify the data of a booking directly over the same movement in the local database, without creating a new movement or without modifying it in the external provider’s database in the case of external bookings.

 

This is useful in the case of outgoing Parsys/CRSys systems connected to external global providers. Sometimes, due to different reasons, a booking made through a Parsys/CRSys site on an external global provider (as Tourico, GTA, Kuoni, etc..) has been modified using the direct interface of this provider, and must then be modified accordingly in the Parsys/CRSys database. But this modification cannot be done using the normal “Modify” option because it tries to go to the external provider again and can get an error.

 

In these cases most of you send emails to Parsec in order our staff do these non-standard modifications. But it could be more useful that the administrators can do these kinds of modifications by themselves, especially if they are urgent. That’s why we have implemented this option. 

 

How it works?

 

From the administration go to Bookings File, and find the booking, click on the TF number and select Modify/cancel option. You will get the Travel File with all its bookings. In each booking you will get close to the Modify and Cancel buttons a new Amend button, that will appear only to administrator operators.

 

 


By clicking in “Amend” button you will get,

 

 

Amend checkin/checkout

 

By selecting this option you will get,

 

 

You can modify the checkin and checkout dates and also the prices (cost, net, price to client) if needed.

 

Amend Prices

 

By selecting this option you will get,

 

 

Amend Rooms

 

This option is not yet fully implemented. Please contact Parsec staff in case you need to modify the type or number of rooms.

 

Amend passenger names

 

By selecting this option you will get,

 

 

Cancel locally this external provider booking

 

This option is intended to do a local cancellation of the booking without going to cancel it in the external provider. It is useful when the booking has been directly cancelled in the external provider using its direct interface, and you want to cancel it in your Parsys/CRSys database.

 

 

Caveat

 

The Amend operation must be used with caution, being always sure that these amendments have been accordingly done in the external provider database.

Otherwise you can get dangerous problems as No Shows, Hotel refusals, etc..


 

 

 

 

 

 

Automatic Hotel Matching      (back to summary)

 

The automatic hotel matching is a process done by Parsec upon on request of each client, in order to detect and match those hotels in the databases that coming from different providers have slightly different names, addresses and/or telephone numbers, but being in fact the same hotels.

 

Very often the names, addresses and phones do not match for a same hotel depending of the provider. More than an exception this is the rule in the 90% of the cases.

 

In the case of CRSys sites using many global providers it is very normal to have more than 250.000 hotels in the databases, what makes very difficult or even impossible to do a manual matching. We calculate that more than 190.000 hotels in a database of 250.000 hotels, are “repeated” hotels.

 

This fact causes that when somebody ask for availability in a given city, specially in large ones, the system will show too many repeated hotels with different prices and slightly different names, confusing the agencies.

 

The best way to show the availability result is often to show just the best price in the case of the same hotels, and this cannot be done without a global matching of the hotels.

 

Another problem that the automatic hotel matching can solve is the different hotel locations in the case of “repeated” hotels. A provider can locate a hotel in a given city, but others can locate the same hotel in a different one, for example in the case of large cities with many suburbs, or in the case of airports. In this case the automatic hotel matching detects that “the same” hotel is located in these two different cities and allows you to decide if one of them is wrongly located or, what is more frequent, that these two cities are in fact the same or one is a suburb of the main one. 

 

To do an automatic hotel matching in your CRSys database please ask Parsec staff.

 

You can check the results of the automatic hotel matching in you database by clicking in the “Hotel Matching” button of your CRSys Administration menu. This will show you the results of the automatic matching in a given city, as they will be when the process was executed by Parsec.

 

All the following examples have been taken using this option.

 

Effectiveness of the automatic matching

 

This is a good example of the effectiveness of the automatic hotel matching. There are 13 hotels “Marylebone” in London. However these hotels are inserted with very different names, addresses and phone numbers, as you can see below.

 

The automatic matching detects those hotels which “are the same” applying a complex algorithm that compares names, addresses and phones, and in this case it finds those hotels that must be matched to each one. Some of them are automatically matched “as the same” with a High accuracy, others are also matched with accuracy Medium, and others are not matched automatically because the algorithm detects that the accuracy is Low. The program lets you to decide if the Low accuracy are in fact the same or not. If you decide that they are the same hotel you can match them manually by clicking in the Match checkbox. And vice versa, you can Unmatch hotels if you think that they have been erroneously matched.          

 

 

 

 

 

 

City Matching      (back to summary)

 

The automatic matching program compares the hotels in each city with ALL THE HOTELS IN THE SAME COUNTRY, not only with the hotels in the same city. This is because many providers locate the hotels in different “cities” due to the confusion of the limits or the names of the cities.

 

This is an advantage to detect what cities are in fact the same or what cities are suburbs or surroundings of a main city. This is the City Matching.

 

By clicking in the “City Matching” button and selecting a main city you will get all the cities sharing hotels that have been matched by the Hotel matching program. For example,

 

Moreover, the program shows the distance and time “by driving” to the main city, and by clicking on Show you can get what hotels are shared between a city and its main city,

 

You can decide that a given city is “the same” as the main city by selecting the main city in its combo of “City same as”, and in this case the program will “move” all the hotels to the main city and mark the old city as inactive. Or decide that a given city is a “surrounding” of the main city, and in this case their hotels will appear as available when searching in the main city “and surroundings” (tell Parsec staff to activate this feature if interested).


 

 

 

 

 

Simple Administration      (back to summary)

 

A simplified administration is available upon request. It allows managing agencies, operators, markups or commissions and currency exchanges, which are the most important chapters to control your business.

 

This must be used in conjunction with the full administration.