News COVID-19: Managing Customer’s Booking Inquiries

We know that as lodging and activity suppliers, resellers, and tour operators, you are receiving a high number of inquiries from guests about their bookings. Here are a few things the Inntopia Commerce system offers to help manage your guest’s requests and concerns regarding COVID-19.

Policy Updates

If you have not already, it may be prudent to review and update your cancellation policies and deposit schedules.  Depending on your configuration, some coordination may be required between suppliers and resellers.

Customer Credits

If you don’t want to adjust your deposit and cancellation policies, you can still override them by either issuing a refund or issuing a customer credit. On the System page of your CRS, you can set customer credits to automatically expire a specific number of days after the credit has been issued.

Once you’ve cancelled an itinerary, open the Customer Accounts Receivables page within the Itinerary History. In the Refunds and Adjustments section, you can either issue a credit card refund or transfer the balance to a customer account. The customer’s credit balance will be viewable from the Customer Panel and the Customer Profile within  Inntopia CRS. When the guest books a new itinerary, your agent can transfer the credit balance from the customer’s account.

If you already offer credits, review the current expiration period and revise, if necessary. We also recommend running a report on which guests currently have credits that may be expiring in the not-too-distant-future (e.g. now through September). This will give you a record of who has a credit and how much.

To track customer credits on a guest’s profile, run these reports:

• Customer Credit on Account and Gift Certificate Transactions report shows all credit transactions either issued or due to expire within a specific date range.
• Customer Credit on Account and Gift Certificate Liability report shows customer credit balance amounts and their details.

Incomplete Itineraries

You are probably discovering many itineraries in a “Pending Modification” state. To determine which ones require follow-up, regularly run the Incomplete Itineraries report.

Cancellations

You may be experiencing a high volume of cancellations. To review cancellation items by date range, use the Cancellation Review report. You can also review and manage cancellation fees in this report. If you’ve decided to waive cancellation fees, this report will identify any guests who may have been inadvertently charged.

Refunds

The Customer Credit Balances report lists any itineraries that need some sort of refund.

 Partner Services

We are all in this together and throughout this historical event, we will continue to provide world-class support. If you have any questions about these suggestions or anything else, please do not hesitate to contact us.